If you work in a non-profit, then you need volunteers.  Lots of them.

But not just any ol volunteer.  You need lots of good ones.  Cuz a bad volunteer can cause as much pain in your life as a bad hire.  Maybe it’s worse because we somehow tend to tolerate more cuz you don’t have a paycheck to hang over their head.  I was talking with some former students of mine, who are now youth pastors in their own churches tonight and it reminded me of one of my most recent learnings about volunteers and saving ourselves a ton of headache because they just don’t “get it”.

WE MUST RALLY AROUND VALUES, NOT BEHAVIORS.

Most youth ministries I know of ask people to commit to a set of behaviors to be on their volunteer team.  Here’s a sample set:

• go to our adult church services on Sundays
• adhere to some moral standard
• support the vision and doctrine statement of the church
• come to our student ministry mid week.
• lead a small group
• prepare for a small group before you lead it
• show up for our leader meetings “x” number of times a year
• pray for us.
• be consistent
• etc…. 

The second set, may result in some of the first set.  But I’ll stack hands on vision every day a thousand times over before I stack hands on rules and regulations.  I don’t want to manipulate behavior, I want to lead into mission.

And if I need to correct a volunteer or have a hard convo about a behavior… I want to discuss the values that are the root issue, not the circumstance that is the current subject.

We ended our “FLIRT” series on sexuality and dating and such last weekend. We called it “Talk to me about Flirting” cuz it was a “4 couple panel” made up of one engaged couple and three married couples: the youngest of which had returned from their honeymoon the day before and the oldest of which was 8 months into this gig.  They responded to some predetermined questions to get us started and then to some written by students on cards.

The result was some very fresh eyes for students on the end game of the dating world and some powerful stories on hope and regret and healing too.  The most interesting part I asked them about was why they all chose not to live together before getting married, even the one couple where one of them had been previously married and even the couples where “virginity” was no longer still being “saved”.  All chose to not go the common route and all experience significant pressure towards that from friends especially.  This choice is super rare today and they had such powerful words to share and in ways I never could have said them myself.  Honestly, it was one of my favorite mornings in a long time.

It also gave me another chance to remind our students of my four fold process and I wanted to encourage them to find truth in.  It’s my “how to think vs. what to think” filter of sorts for finding or discerning the will of God in their life.  I’ve been processing it for a while and have landed on 4 B’s as my memory tool.  This week was all about the third B.

I laugh every time I share them because I have a friend who sends me e-mails to “BBBB”, which he says stands for Big Bad Brian Berry.  So I hear his voice in my head every time I share them, but here they are, with some cautions I tell students as well:

BIBLE: what does the Bible say about this issue or choice? 

• caution: be careful with this question.  Cuz if you’re looking for what the Bible says about texting, oral sex, abortion, sex before marriage, the internet, or any number of other topics, if you simply “search for those words” in some online Bible, you’ll find them not in there. Therefore, you could say the Bible has nothing to say about those issues.  But you’d be wrong.  Asking what does the Bible say about an issue is deeper than this. 

BRAIN:  does this make logical sense?  Do I have to do mental gymnastics to endorse this? 

• caution: sometimes God calls us to do that which makes very little reasonable sense. 

BELIEVERS: what do some people you respect, especially those in the faith who are older and wiser and farther down the life experience road than you….. what do those people say about this issue or choice? 

• caution: be leery of getting your opinion validated by your peers.  

BEEN THERE: what does experience tell you?  

• caution: there are only two ways to learn stuff in life: the hard way and from those who learned it the hard way.  the wise go to school on other’s people’s mistakes as much as their own.  Be a learner of experiences, both good and bad. Both yours and observed in others. 

Last Saturday we hosted a training day for parents at JCC.  It was the best one we’ve done yet by pretty much all accounts.  In case you missed it (or showed up at like 10am) or maybe you’d like to do one in your own church, here’s the grand summary of it all in one post.

We tried to help parents understand the impact we can have on their child as a church in terms of time.   We asked them imagine if we get them an hour on Sunday for 9 months out of the year, for 29 years.  We broke this down into tons of different illustrations.  The most powerful of which was a rope.  If you take the statistics on this slide and break it down into a rope representing time.  The rope of their life you bring on stage will be 60 feet long and the amount of time you can color in to represent time spent in our church building will be 5.5 inches long!!!  

As a youth pastor, my image of doing ministry is a little more crass.  I often feel like the hour on Sunday is spent dumping spiritual chlorine in a pool at nascar pit crew fuel speeds. The problem is, the pool of a student’s life is lined with relationships and a culture that are peeing in it, and until the student starts kicking some pissers off the side of the pool, this is a largely pointless endeavor.  An hour on Sunday is only as powerful as it is impacting the massively larger quantity of hours that are spent outside this space.   

Hey blog readers!

Today is WORLD WATER DAY.  Let’s truly make the overflow start flowing!

SO, I NEED YOUR HELP.   Myself and 100+ other bloggers from around the world are joining hands to raise $10,000 to make the world a cleaner and brighter place.  How?  By each of us raising $100.  To do this, I’m giving $20 to the adventure project today to do my part. Then I’m asking at least 9 of you to join me.

There are thousands of places to invest in world water day today.  Here’s why I’m asking you to join this organization.

#1. I am like 2 degrees removed from their cofounder and I have lots of friends that know her personally.  I can vouch that this organization is legit in what they promise.  You can read about their vision here.  You can check out cofounder Jody Landers’ personal blog here if you want.

#2. I love what their doing and how they’re trying to truly fix the situation.  They aren’t digging new wells, they’re TRAINING AND EMPLOYING LOCAL indigenous men and women in India to FIX DEAD wells!  Read the details below:

1/3 of all wells built in the last 20 years are BROKEN due to faulty hand pumps.

Over 4,000 children die every day from lack of clean drinking water and mine just runs happily down my sink, very very clean I might add. 

When you help adventure project, they help the locals repair broken wells. The well mechanics business in North India trains and equips men AND WOMEN to repair their region’s water wells. Instead of drilling more wells, we’re using our charitable gifts for something revolutionary – to train and employ handpump mechanics. The mechanics earn an income, bringing themselves out of poverty, and they save lives – turning water back on for thousands of people each year.  This is HUGE ground breaking opportunity for us to partner with them.

LETS DO THIS THING!  This blog gets about 100 readers a day.  Surely 9 of us can do this. Just say so in the comments and then give them your $20. 

Write in the comments, “I’m in” and then GO HERE NOW AND click the DONATE button anywhere on the page and GIVE YOUR $20.

If you work with students, I can’t recommend highly enough the value of gathering parents together for training.  They are the most influential force in a students life.  Virtually every study ever done continues to prove this again and again.  Like this one will prove the point nicely.  As a result, training parents is one of the very best investments I can make into what is “normal” for the lives of students.

Our annual event was last Saturday in our JCC Parenting Summit that actually tries to connect with not just parents of teens, but of all ages in order to get a running start at what can be very trying teen years for many. You can read about session one here.  Our essential bottom line was… we as parents all need to be on the same page and to rally around our mission, “inviting a generation to understand, own, and live out a life changing faith in Jesus.”

Our second session was all about what stands between us and success in this goal as parents. The question we posed is, “What is the biggest hurdle we have in raising children into young adults who are passionate about following Jesus with their lives?”  I invited Mark Oestreicher to turn a rock over and reveal the problem of extended adolescence.  A big reason we are having trouble raising adults in this culture is cuz someone keeps moving the finish line. To this end, Marko passionately challenged parents that not only have the teen years begun to become a lifestyle instead of a lifestage, but that both the life stage and the lifestyle are creations of our American culture at large.  For the vast majority of our human history, there were two stages: child and adult.  Check out this chart that shows how this hiccup between childhood and adolescence has been changing over time as puberty ages drop and pressures to become an adult extend.

But, the good news is, “IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.”  But if that’s true and with adolescence extending indefinitely in our culture, how do we as adults make a difference?

We challenged parents that one of the key contributors to extended adolescence is the distancing and separation of adults from the lives of kids.  So an answer for us comes in this value:

CORE VALUE #2. I am my kids greatest influence.  

We cannot minimize this fact or dismiss it.  We must begin to leverage our influence against this rising tide. We need it to be normative that as a parent at Journey, we stack hands on a common mission and that we all meet weekly in one-on-one contexts with our kids.  If absentee adults are contributing to the extension of adolescence and parents are the single greatest indicator of a kids health in the future, then we need healthy parents meeting weekly with their kids.

Seriously!  Could you imagine how RADICALLY OUR YOUTH MINISTRY CONTEXT WOULD CHANGE if every student in my ministry was meeting one on one with their own parent once a week? WOW, what a difference that would make!!

Here’s a brief video we made of several of our staff’s kids and the influence meeting one-on-one with them makes.

I’m really praying this takes hold in our church and that we spark a revolution in Adult to Child connection points.