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    humility and facial hair
josh pease
I don’t know why they hired me. I was an over-confident, 23-year-old college grad with a pretty impressive resume, well impressive for someone going into journalism or political science. The “they” was a growing church in Texas that was running over 2,000 people on Sundays that needed an associate student pastor.
I had next-to-no experience in student ministry, but less than a month after I graduated from college, I found myself sitting in my own office, with my own nameplate, collecting a very generous salary. I should have been overwhelmed with gratitude. I should have been humbled by the church’s faith in me.
Nope.
However, I did get in an argument . . . with the senior pastor . . . over one of my radical, “change everything” ideas . . . in front of the entire staff . . . at my very first staff retreat.
Hi, my name’s Josh, and I’m an idiot.
***
It’s tough being a 20-something in youth ministry! In our jobs, everyone from parents to volunteers to fellow staff members think we don’t know what we’re doing. This is why so many of us grow goatees—we’re hoping our ability to grow facial hair is viewed as a sign of spiritual and leadership maturity.
Trust me, I know all about this. I’m a 26-year-old who looks like he’s 18. More than once people have thought I was attending the student ministry rather than leading it. And all this has forced me to realize that humility is probably THE most important character trait for a young youth pastor to develop. Let me explain.
Most people think those of us in our 20s have know-it-all, arrogant attitudes. (BUT WHAT DO THEY KNOW!! Wait a minute.) To be fair, they may have a point. We’re fresh out of college. We have a thousand ideas to implement and a dozen philosophies we’ve figured out (by reading other peoples’ books). And we simply can’t understand why the old farts don’t realize that our ideas would, in all probability, create the perfect church. This is why when our passions get thrown back in our face—when a parent disrespects us, when a volunteer won’t listen to us, when a staff member ignores us—we decide it’s time to prove ourselves. After all, the vision is too important to let someone else sabotage it, right?
We fight back, thus affirming what those around us are already thinking, that people “our age” are too arrogant to listen. The corpses of hundreds of young youth pastors litter the foyers and conference rooms of churches across America, casualties of this age-gap animosity.
So if you find yourself in the heat of this battle, or if you can see the torches and pitchforks coming into the staff meeting, here are some helpful tips I’ve learned from my own ill-advised battles:
• I’m not as smart as I think I am. True intelligence is not found in overestimating my abilities. I DON’T always know what I’m doing. To quote Confucius: “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” In other words, occasionally admitting I don’t have all the answers can go a LONG way.
• Other people are smarter than I give them credit for. Looking back on that argument with my senior pastor, I can see he was actually right. (I know, I know, it hurts me to say it). Because he had been at that church for 15 years, the senior pastor knew my concept was completely incompatible with that church’s culture. He actually saved me a lot of wasted time, energy, and heartache. Once I considered that he might actually know what he was talking about, I learned a ton from him.
• I can’t create change if I’m alienating those around me. There is no better way to go it alone in ministry than to be arrogant. It doesn’t matter if I have the most ingenious plan for student ministry ever to grace the evangelical church. It doesn’t matter if God, Moses, and Doug Fields crafted said plan in a brainstorming session and revealed it solely to me. It’ll never become a reality if no one can stand being around me. Being stubborn will only amplify the stubbornness in the people around you.
• There is nothing God-honoring about arrogance. As a matter of fact, the Bible says quite clearly that God “resists the proud.” And this is really the heart of the matter, right? A healthy youth ministry is a product of God’s blessing on people, not programs. If we are seriously in it for the kingdom and not ourselves, then it might be a good idea to take the Beatitudes seriously.
The truth is that the church needs our passion, freshness, and vision. But their receptivity to our gifts hinges largely on our humility. It is single-handedly the best way to influence those we work with . . . even better than growing a goatee.
...
http://www.simplyyouthministry.com/community-articles-from-the-field.html
josh pease
I don’t know why they hired me. I was an over-confident, 23-year-old college grad with a pretty impressive resume, well impressive for someone going into journalism or political science. The “they” was a growing church in Texas that was running over 2,000 people on Sundays that needed an associate student pastor.
I had next-to-no experience in student ministry, but less than a month after I graduated from college, I found myself sitting in my own office, with my own nameplate, collecting a very generous salary. I should have been overwhelmed with gratitude. I should have been humbled by the church’s faith in me.
Nope.
However, I did get in an argument . . . with the senior pastor . . . over one of my radical, “change everything” ideas . . . in front of the entire staff . . . at my very first staff retreat.
Hi, my name’s Josh, and I’m an idiot.
***
It’s tough being a 20-something in youth ministry! In our jobs, everyone from parents to volunteers to fellow staff members think we don’t know what we’re doing. This is why so many of us grow goatees—we’re hoping our ability to grow facial hair is viewed as a sign of spiritual and leadership maturity.
Trust me, I know all about this. I’m a 26-year-old who looks like he’s 18. More than once people have thought I was attending the student ministry rather than leading it. And all this has forced me to realize that humility is probably THE most important character trait for a young youth pastor to develop. Let me explain.
Most people think those of us in our 20s have know-it-all, arrogant attitudes. (BUT WHAT DO THEY KNOW!! Wait a minute.) To be fair, they may have a point. We’re fresh out of college. We have a thousand ideas to implement and a dozen philosophies we’ve figured out (by reading other peoples’ books). And we simply can’t understand why the old farts don’t realize that our ideas would, in all probability, create the perfect church. This is why when our passions get thrown back in our face—when a parent disrespects us, when a volunteer won’t listen to us, when a staff member ignores us—we decide it’s time to prove ourselves. After all, the vision is too important to let someone else sabotage it, right?
We fight back, thus affirming what those around us are already thinking, that people “our age” are too arrogant to listen. The corpses of hundreds of young youth pastors litter the foyers and conference rooms of churches across America, casualties of this age-gap animosity.
So if you find yourself in the heat of this battle, or if you can see the torches and pitchforks coming into the staff meeting, here are some helpful tips I’ve learned from my own ill-advised battles:
• I’m not as smart as I think I am. True intelligence is not found in overestimating my abilities. I DON’T always know what I’m doing. To quote Confucius: “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” In other words, occasionally admitting I don’t have all the answers can go a LONG way.
• Other people are smarter than I give them credit for. Looking back on that argument with my senior pastor, I can see he was actually right. (I know, I know, it hurts me to say it). Because he had been at that church for 15 years, the senior pastor knew my concept was completely incompatible with that church’s culture. He actually saved me a lot of wasted time, energy, and heartache. Once I considered that he might actually know what he was talking about, I learned a ton from him.
• I can’t create change if I’m alienating those around me. There is no better way to go it alone in ministry than to be arrogant. It doesn’t matter if I have the most ingenious plan for student ministry ever to grace the evangelical church. It doesn’t matter if God, Moses, and Doug Fields crafted said plan in a brainstorming session and revealed it solely to me. It’ll never become a reality if no one can stand being around me. Being stubborn will only amplify the stubbornness in the people around you.
• There is nothing God-honoring about arrogance. As a matter of fact, the Bible says quite clearly that God “resists the proud.” And this is really the heart of the matter, right? A healthy youth ministry is a product of God’s blessing on people, not programs. If we are seriously in it for the kingdom and not ourselves, then it might be a good idea to take the Beatitudes seriously.
The truth is that the church needs our passion, freshness, and vision. But their receptivity to our gifts hinges largely on our humility. It is single-handedly the best way to influence those we work with . . . even better than growing a goatee.
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