Q & A: Andy Burns

 JC: You set up Café Leadership recently: why did you decide to do that and what it is?

AB: I established Café Leadership as a response to my own journey. I’d been a frontline youth worker working for East to West and then transitioned to being a manager of teams, to then becoming the CEO. My only frame of reference for being a good line manager is whether everyone seemed to be happy, so I didn’t know if I was effective. And then you start to lead a charity and, through God’s grace, we were successful. On a team morning you sit there with 15 employees, that’s 15 mortgages, and suddenly I’m the CEO of a small business: that teenager who stood up at Spring Harvest and said I want to change the world for Jesus, is doing that through leading an organisation with 15 people’s mortgages on the line. There was a sense of feeling really exposed and out of my depth. A lot of leaders go through ‘imposter syndrome’: the feeling that you could get found out at any moment.

So Café Leadership was a concept that came through connecting with peers who were in similar ministries and asking: does anybody else feel out of their depth? Does anybody else feel like an imposter? As a group of CEOs of charities, or leaders of ministries, we got together in London in a coffee shop, hence Café Leadership, and we’d chat over where we were at with our organisations.

We now have gatherings in London and in Manchester: a whole day around a certain theme such as how to effectively manage volunteers, setting strategy and vision or change management. So we spend a day with an expert. We do coaching and mentoring particularly either life coaching for individuals, or coaching around decisionmaking for the organisation. I’m also doing training days specifically for charities and for organisations and doing some training and development for leadership and middle leaders within secondary schools.  

JC: How do you reflect on the way that leadership and management is done in Christian youth work at the moment? What are the things that we tend to do well and what are the things that we struggle with?

AB: Because we’re all highly relational individuals we don’t particularly like being called to account, so we don’t always hold our teams to the highest standards. We don’t manage expectations very well and so to work for a Christian organisation, invariably people around you think it’s going to be lovely and all we’re going to do is pray all the time but you need to say, ‘Yes, we’re a Christian organisation, yes we do pray together, but I will hold you to account on this.’ And actually that’s grounded in great theology because I’m holding you to stewardship of this mission that says that sometimes your practice is not worshiping God, sometimes your practice is not blessing those who we’ve been called to serve. Where we do thrive is the ability to create a sense of community around a common purpose.

JC: It seems that we don’t train youth workers in leadership skills - why do you think that is?

AB: We’re nervous of the word leader because we don’t want to put people on pedestals: we get nervous about somebody saying they’re the leader. Unless we grapple with what it really means to be a leader and what it means  to influence and bring about change then the first time we make one step and it doesn’t feel comfortable, we start to drop back and there could be a lack of commitment to the the line of travel that God had us on. It doesn’t mean that you’re not responsive to how seasons are but we do need to learn how to lead and to call people up into what God has for us: there has to be something about a leader that compels somebody to trust and to follow them. If you compare leadership to painting, it’s not necessarily the picture that’s painted that compels people, it’s the confidence they have in you as the painter.

The Church can shy away from the idea of leadership, but we have to enable that narrative to take us to a higher level and not dumb our role down. In the last few years at East to West we changed job titles so that everybody had the word lead in their title: you are the lead worker in that school, lead on it. So you have the ability to shape it, you have the ability to influence it, you have the ability to move it forward. We’re all called to lead, some of us may have CEO in our title which might mean we have overall responsibility to enable all to grow and thrive. The thing that I learnt over the years was to create a nurturing environment, so that people could lead themselves, their calling, their ministry. Or as St Paul puts it: to enable teams to live the life worthy of the calling they have received... and to hold them to it.

JC: You recently did some research into youth ministry and workers. What were some of the findings?

AB: There’s a whole lot of urban myths out there: that youth workers are only ever around for a year and a half or three years, and yet the research data that we got back was anything but negative.

We spoke to 100 Christians who work with young people. Forty per cent said they’d already been in their current job for at least six years which blows the one-and-a-half to two year thing out of the water. Seventy per cent of them said they would like to remain in their current placement for at least another ten years and 80 per cent said they would like to remain in youth ministry for the rest of their life. The things they talked about that would help them stay longer were contracts being able to be adjusted: so if a youth worker gets married, they might not want to be out five nights a week. Or looking at salary, if they’re bringing up a family in an expensive area, they want people to stop thinking that humility is based on them being poor. They aren’t asking to be millionaires; they just want to take the pressure of money off. The other part was a really strong desire for personal growth. So if you want to keep your exceptional youth worker for another ten years, one of the things you can do is to give them exceptional training or give them management opportunities. The final bit was effective management. What the youth workers were saying is that effective management looks like trusting me enough to give me the space to express how I’ve been created before God. Does the church or does the charity genuinely value me as the individual? Am I cared for?

Another area we looked at was calling. In the past 20 years we’ve had the professionalisation of Christian youth work. Yet despite this, ninety-nine per cent said that calling was either the defining or a significant part of the reason why they were in youth work, which is an incredible encouragement in that within the context of the youth work being professionalised, faith conviction was seen as the prime reason why they got into it.

The other interesting thing in the survey was that around 66 per cent of those surveyed said they’d gone through a significant life-shaping event: a significant bereavement, self-doubt, low self-esteem, depression, significant bullying at school or something like that. Twenty five per cent of them were saying that they’d been diagnosed with a learning difficulty. Within that, half of them said that this particular life experience or their learning difficulty had been a significant driver into youth work. So when you have a calling and life experience, combine them together, it’s a profound driver to want to engage. We have to manage that wisely for the sake of the youth worker, we don’t want them to overexpose or put them in a vulnerable place, but equally we don’t want to say keep your troubles at home, just get on with your job, because the majority of them will say - over 85 per cent - that their experiences make them a more effective youth worker.

The next thing we want to look at is burnout, and what causes it. One guy I know says it’s never workload that leads to burnout, but people not being authentic – they do things outside of who they were meant to be.