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 :)

I've had cause in recent months to ponder inactivity. Not inactivity due to laziness, nor inactivity due to invalidity but rather the paralyzing inactivity that comes from seeking perfection in what we do.

I have a *cough* friend *cough* who is a perfectionist that falls into bouts of procrastination because of the compounding nature of time and tasks. For example, say we have a job to do but we want to do it properly so we wait until we have enough time to give it's due attention. A week or so later the task is still there but it will now take 3 days instead of 1 to complete because we didn't start on it earlier. Now we need to find 3 days in our busy schedule and on it goes. (Housework is a prime example of this.)

Sometimes our quest for perfection gets in the way of getting the job done and this compounds the original task and can potentially send us into a reactive depression which colors our view of all the other little things that need doing. I am certainly not an advocate of "close enough is good enough" but I believe that we need to take a step back and examine our motives in how we perform our ministry.

Just before I started my training for ministry (around 10 years ago) I had a conversation with someone who helped to confirm my calling. This great godly man who later mentored me had fallen into what I like to call the Cult of Perfectionism. He contended that what God truly seeks are "men of excellence" (excuse the gender bias) who will take God's Word out into the world.

This sounds great on paper, I resonated deeply with this phrase "men of excellence" and made it somewhat of a personal goal to do everything I can to the level of excellence. Perhaps it was pride that resonated with the statement but what I didn't realize at the time is the enormous pressure that it puts me under to succeed.

When we hold church leaders up to the unerring standard of "excellence" we are doing them a great disservice. Granted that leaders live in the fish bowl and Scripture says that leaders will be held to a higher standard but if we don't give leaders room to fail in the small things how are they to learn in the big things?

My first taste of ministry was in youth work, a wonderful place to start. It teaches you patience, endurance and above all gives you a place to fail gracefully. I learnt more about ministry by failing here than succeeding elsewhere. What I mean by failure in this context is that I didn't always get things right, didn't always say the right things, lead by example at all times but those teens would always respect you in your repentance and admitting you were wrong.

I put it to us all that our churches need to change our culture from one of excellence to grace, especially in the case of the new leader. Let us support them through their faltering steps into ministry and reap the harvest of a ministry in balance, not one under pressure and paralyzed by perfectionism.