From Sampler to Sower

I was talking with a friend of mine recently, about his challenges in getting a new youth ministry off the ground.  He knew what to do, it was just that there were obstacles at every turn.  It reminded me of how hard starting out can really be.  And it got me thinking about how we started out here.

When I first moved to Middletown, over six years ago now, I took things slow.  We moved in the first of October and I immediately started at the church.  However, we did not hold our first youth service until three months later, when school started back up in January after Christmas vacation.  And we didn’t launch our grand opening promoting the service to the general public until March.  During those first several months, I focused on building a core volunteer team and laying the ground work for the youth service we would eventually call Water’s Edge.  Our praise team met weekly to practice.  Our leadership council began planning and preparing.  But we didn’t have any youth services other than our weekly Sunday School classes on Sunday morning.  What I understood then was that for a youth ministry to succeed, it had to have a backbone.

What is a “backbone” program?

According to Todd Capin’s Youthworker Journal article from 1998, now available online from Youth Specialities website, a backbone meeting is “the ministry time around which all other youth group ministries and meetings revolve and function.”  He goes on to give this sound advice: “In fact, until a student ministry has established a backbone, all other facets to the group should be put on hold (or at least pared back) until a solid, regular, backbone meeting is established.”  (more…)

So, you’ve mastered the art of harnessing the power of friendliness and because of word of mouth and word of mouse, new teens are checking out your youth ministry.  Now that they’re here, how do you make sure they “stick?”

The answer, in a word, is hospitality.  Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary defines it as “the cordial and generous reception and entertainment of guests or strangers socially or commercially.”  My favorite definition however comes from Washington Irving who said “There is an emanation from the heart in genuine hospitality which cannot be described, but is immediately felt and puts the stranger at once at his ease.” (from his story “Christmas Eve” in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.)

I like that a lot.  Genuine hospitality is hard to define and when you try to do so you end up with a cold fish of a phrase like “the cordial and generous reception and entertainment of guests or strangers socially or commercially.”  (No offense, George, Charles and Noah.)  But while hospitality is hard to define, it’s easy to recognize.  Some places, some people, simply have a way of putting a guest at ease which is immediately felt by all.

But more than something that we do, hospitable is something that we are.  Danny Meyer, author of Setting the Table puts it this way:

“Hospitality is present when something happens for you.  It is absent when something happens to you.  These two simple concepts—for and to—express it all.”

As long as we equate hospitality with all the things we do to our visitors, we miss the point.   Instead we must be hospitable for them, and most of that hospitality takes place long before they ever visit.  If I were writing the dictionary, I’d define hospitality as “the way we show others that we had them in mind before they ever came be our guest.”  Maybe it’s the Wesleyan in me, but hospitality is prevenient.

So how do we become a hospitable youth group?

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