That’s not to say that the transformation host role isn’t a big deal, a high calling and a massive responsibility. Ultimately, it’s about bringing the hope that we have received from the presence of Jesus into partnership with the God who is already active and working in the lives of teenagers. The tiny youth work organisation I co-lead is a partnership between me and another guy, named Adam. We’ve grown a smidge in the last couple years, and have other people working with us now, but early on, when it was just the two of us, the partnership was amoeba-like: constantly shape-shifting and morphing.
The vast majority of our work in those early days wasn’t very obviously parceled out to Adam’s skillset or mine. I’d start something, he would improve it and we’d both promote it. Or he would pitch me a brilliant idea, and I’d flesh it out on paper and beta-test it before we’d have a meeting to decide who was going to carry which aspects of the workload. We found co-working, in the same space, to be essential (often on shared Google documents even when we were three feet from each other).
As youth workers, our partnership with God in the hope-filled restoration of teenagers’ lives looks similar. Certainly, there are some things that only God can do, and God has made you wonderfully unique in experience, personality and strengths - so you are best suited for some portions of the work. But most of the action leading toward a new life isn’t God working in one corner and you working in another: most of it is a bumping-into-each-other active partnership.
God brings a seed of vision, and you exercise the discipline to notice it ; God brings power and you bring sweat
Theologian Karl Barth called this interaction ‘correspondence’; the idea that all of our actions, including what some would call obedience, are in response to God’s actions on our behalf. God brings a seed of vision (for your ministry or a particular teenager), and you exercise the discipline to notice it. God invites you to put words to it then pokes at your heart to help you sand down rough edges and refine it. God brings power and you bring sweat. God brings roadblocks and surprisingly open doors, and you beta-test, experimenting with the working out of it.
This shouldn’t imply that the give-and-take between you and God is worked out exclusively in a prayer closet or time of meditation; it’s a process most often worked out in action: your choices, behaviours, language and attempts at living with hope interact with a gracious, giving, invitational God.
In the midst of that active partnership, your ministry hope grows and grows. Your desires get clarified, your anticipation develops, and you find yourself cherishing the whole process. In fact, you just might find that cherishing the partnership becomes the life-giving and sustaining fuel for daily ministry efforts, more than expectations of arrival at some description of ministry success.
This is why people who have, by all external measurements, a life of struggle, can still be our most shining examples of a life of hope. It’s not that they’ve resigned themselves to illness, financial challenges, relational disappointment, or in a youth ministry setting, to plugging away without indications of impact. It’s that they’ve come to prioritise a partnership with God in the midst of struggle over a resolved place of pain-free arrival.
With all that in mind, here are three things to stop, with their corresponding start recommendations:
Stop measuring your youth work success based on markers that are only about end results. Instead, start focusing on the process, the journey of transformation taking place in the lives of teenagers.
Stop attempting to control the outcomes, including the spiritual growth, and even behaviours, of teenagers. Instead, start releasing control and showing up, open-handedly, to play your role as a transformation host.
Stop assuming you are responsible for spiritual transformation (or lack of) in the lives of teenagers. Instead, respond to God’s gracious and hope-filled invitation to partner in the work God is already actively accomplishing.
