Over the past three days I've been attending the Higher conference, which is the annual Churches of Christ NSW Youth Ministry event for training and refreshing youth group leaders and youth pastors.
I have in fact no desire, compulsion (or ability) to be a youth pastor. My 2 years as a youth worker has shown me that it is not my gifting that I should never again entertain the idea :)
So why was I there you ask? No? I'll tell you anyway. I went to learn.
I consider learning as one of the most valuable activities you can apply yourself to. In this case I wanted to learn more about Youth Ministry in general and how best to support any such ministry that may one day be under my responsibility as the leader of a church.
In the past I've had some disagreements with people about the best way a certain ministry should or shouldn't be run. It's a sad thing to say, but sometimes the leadership of a church doesn't have a clue about what a particular ministry needs by way of support and can impose unfair boundaries or unreachable goals because they simple don't get it.
I don't want to be one of those people who simple speak from ignorance or from my own self-importance or my own gut feel on how I think something should run, and I also don't want the wool pulled over my eyes when someone says that to be successful, ministry X needs Y.
When I was first appointed an Elder in my church one of the first things I did was to contact several of ministry leaders and ask "So what do you do and why?" It wasn't for critique of their practices (although an outside set of eyes is often good for that sort of thing), but an exercise that helped me to gain a holistic view of the church I was asked to help lead.
There was a lot of great learning to be had at the conference and a lot that can be applied outside youth ministry. I particularly liked this idea.
One youth pastor with a rather large youth group in the opening minutes of the night gets everybody to ask three questions of the person beside them. The first two don't matter, they are icebreakers the third question is "Is this your first time here tonight?" He then asks if anyone has a new person next to them and sends someone over with a drink bottle full of lollies, a letter home to the parents about what the youth group is about and a voucher (valid for two weeks) to have a free can of drink or chocolate the next time they come.
It's a great welcome idea, but in a youth group of 500 kids it also makes it easy to spot the new ones (their the ones holding the bottle) and get beside them and tell them about Jesus.
You could easily modify something similar in your church services, and I think it's an exciting idea :)