Working with your leadership & not against them

I had just started a ministry. I had been there less than a month. We used to host students after school on a couple of days during the week. While in our youth area we played a bit of music to set a vibe for our students to hang out and do homework. I used to let the students pick the music, with one major rule, “nothing explicit.” They picked both Christian styled music and popular secular music. Our Senior Pastor walked in and greeted the kids and me, told a bad dad joke and said his good byes. That’s what I expected from him.

Later that day I was closing up shop and headed home when our Senior Pastor invited me into his office “to chat.” He was about 10 or 12 years older than me, so not that much older, which will be relevant momentarily. He proceeded to say, “When I was doing ministry to young people, I never played secular music, nor let it be played at our events, etc.” He wasn’t explicitly telling that I could’t do that, but passive aggressively was trying to force my hand. I paused for a moment and thought, “what do I do?” I’m new, do I spend relational cache on this? Do I set a boundary with him and draw out a larger conversation? or do I just comply and agree to not play secular music around the students again. The problem was he was trying to “influence” me using passive aggressive tactics, instead of trying to address the situation head on. He was calculating the same things I was calculating, does he push me too hard and loose some relational cache or does he just outlaw secular music all together? I found this out later, I’ll show you what caused me to be able to know what he was thinking.

Not being passive aggressive I took the former route instead of the latter. In this case my boss took my push back and questioning of him as a boundary marker. He knew that I knew how to do youth ministry and could balance things properly. That could have gone badly, I could have had a black mark on my record with this pastor for a long time. Instead it won me respect, but that isn’t always the case and I realize the chance I took in that moment.

I learned a long time ago that if you want your ministry to be a certain way, then you had to be clear about those expectations with your students, your parents AND your supervisors. If you weren’t then you would find yourself heading a ministry that wasn’t something you wanted. That may mean you have to have discussions with your leadership regularly for them to understand what you are trying to do and how it dovetails with the overall vision of the church, and it is well worth it. You will also find out that when you do what I did and set some real boundaries with your supervisor, while sharing your vision for the student ministry, you will find common ground and keep micromanaging at arms length.

The goal to working with supervisors is not to let them micromanage your ministry for you, they don’t know your vision and may struggle to understand youth culture and your students. However they bring with them wisdom, resources, and the vision for the entire church. That means instead of letting them micromanage you, you set good boundaries with your supervisors while asking them for any advice, guidance or wisdom they can give you as you pastor the students and families in your ministry. What you might find out is that they have great ideas that translate well to students, all you have to do is see those ideas through the lens of modern youth culture. In other words, how you disciple kids in the 21st century is different from discipling them in the 20th century. When you see what they are trying to do, you can translate it for your students, creating a symbiotic relationship for you and your church.

Take some time with your supervisors like you do with other leaders. It builds the team and gives you relational cache when you need to do something hard. Invite your Senior Pastor or supervisor (or both if they aren’t the same person) out to lunch or a cup of coffee and talk about life. You are both pastors, he’s just just dealing with bigger kids that you are. There will be a lot that will connect you, spend time getting to know each other and it will go far. This goes the same with lay supervisors like elders or deacons, they want to care for you and your family, so give them a context to help you out.

Working with supervisors instead of for them is a much better way to do ministry. When you work “for” a supervisor, they micromanage you because they are not sure what you are doing or where you are going. You just become a person who is willing to hang out with “the kids.” In other words you are a high paid babysitter. That is not what you became a pastor to do, you became a pastor to disciple students and lead them spiritually. That means your relationship with your supervisors should look similar to the goal of your ministry. You aren’t going to disciple your supervisor but you should be working “with” them as fellow disciples who are trying to disciples people. That’s what it looks like to work “with” your supervisor instead of “for” your supervisor.

You may be asking, “how did it go with the senior pastor you set boundaries with?” What I did was explain to him that I let them play some of their favorite music, secular or Christian, because I like secular music too and my goal is to make a relational connect with them in hopes of being able to disciple them. This to me was the equivalent of Jesus sending out the disciples to preach the good news. When I shared the opportunity to connect with the students over music, I was sharing my peace with them. If they returned that peace, then they could very well be a person of peace for me to disciple. He saw my vision and knew it dovetailed with the greater vision for the church. He saw the vision so well, that a month later I saw him coming out of a movie theater with a person he was trying to disciple, they had just gone to see a “secular movie,” which was giving him relational cache to disciple this person. Not all your time with supervisors will turn out this way, but when you spend time developing a relationship so you work “with” them instead of “for” them it will go a long way. If we can be of any help coaching you through these opportunities let us know stew@nucleuscoaching.net