Can the shepherd's field be the shortest path? Image via Wikipedia

By Dave Rhodes

I’m sure that you have heard it said that, “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” But we don’t believe it – at least not really. We may adhere to it mathematically and recognize the truth geographically, but we don’t believe it with our hearts spiritually. No, we are all pretty sure that the best path to opportunity – and therefore to freedom – is the crooked trail of rebellion. In other words, we believe the fallacy of freedom.

To be honest, it’s not completely our fault. This is the ancient lie that has been passed down to us through the generations. It’s the lie that Adam and Eve fell into, and one that every young leader contends with. We are people who believe, deep down in the recesses of our hearts, that the pathway to freedom is rebellion and that obedience is a barrier to opportunity. And so we spend our lives moving from point A to point B on the crooked path, all the while convincing ourselves that the winding way is a shortcut.

This tendency is why I (and, let me suggest, we) need someone to remind us of a different way. In this regard, I have found it incredibly helpful that the Spirit of God continues to draw me back to the story of David. That’s because David’s story continues to demonstrate to me how my ambition and God’s best are realized together, not in opposition to each other.

I know you know the story, but if you don’t mind, humor me and let me tell it again. Maybe it will remind you too of two related truths that every young leader needs to hear over and over again:

Obedience, not rebellion, leads to opportunity.

Faithfulness paves the straightest path to freedom.

In I Samuel 16, David’s life took a radical shift. For David, it was another normal, ordinary day of tending sheep – until the prophet Samuel picked this unlikely lad to be the next leader of Israel. David was anointed as king. The vision of his destiny and future are suddenly in sight. You would think in this moment that David’s life would grow immediately and become unmistakably more interesting. Surely he would be rushed into the best schools and the best training program and become connected to all the best leaders. Surely he would sit at the best tables, taste the best food, and tour the best sights of the kingdom.

But he didn’t. Instead, David returned to the shepherd’s field and tended sheep. The future king was told he was too young to go to battle. His only brush with what felt even a tinge like leadership was an errand run his dad sent him on to take cheese and crackers to his brothers out fighting (but really watching) the war.

The narrative hinges on David’s response. This errand was a menial task. It came after a series of boring, repetitious, redundant days with dumb animals. Yet, David was obedient throughout. He was faithful, trusting that God would finish what he had started. But in this obedience, David learned in the shepherd’s field the kinds of lessons that he would need once God brought him to the battlefield.

We know the end of the story: David obeyed, and his obedience presented him the opportunity he had been waiting for his entire life. His faithfulness in the end brought him to freedom.

Along the way, David must have been to mistrust God’s heart. I’m sure he imagined that the quickest pathway to the kingdom wasn’t through the shepherd’s field. If he was like you and me, I’m sure he was tempted to take the vision God had given him into his own hands. Still, somehow, David remained true to God and trusted God’s heart.

His story reminds me of a truth that I have often told to others — only because I have needed to be reminded of it so often myself. Sometimes the road to life at first looks like death, and sometimes the road to death at first looks like life. I cannot recognize the road to life on my own. But I must embrace the road that at first looks like death because it is the shortest route to abundant life.

The road of faithfulness leads to freedom. The path of obedience leads to opportunity. So let’s stop our petty rebellions and trust God’s heart, even if obedience seems mundane or boring at times. Let’s spend our lives embracing the life that David embraced and trust God to open up opportunities as we trust his heart in obedience.

Dallas Willard said it best when he talked about how the obedient life is the abundant life in The Divine Conspiracy. He wrote, “Kingdom obedience is kingdom abundance. They are not two separate things.” (p. 312)

I hope this post has reminded and encouraged you to trust God with your obedience and to live faithfully in your pursuit of life. If we will, I’m convinced, the life we will embrace is not just faithful or obedient but it is also the pathway to freedom and opportunity. And when it does, freedom will no longer be a fallacy but a reality.

This month, we’re featuring Dave Rhodes’ Live/Evil illustration. In this video, which is a part of The Domino Effect video teaching series that Wayfarer published a few years back, Dave explains what happened when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

As he teaches us that we weren’t set up to be messed up, but we messed up what God set up, Dave looks at life from both sides of the glass.

I remember sitting in the corner of one of the largest and most successful youth conferences in the U.K. a few years ago watching great worship with 13,000 young people dancing, singing, waving their arms around, and passionately giving their lives over to Jesus. I love these crazy times watching young people get thoroughly over-excited about Jesus. To my surprise, though, on this occasion I buried my head in my hands and said to myself, “But how do we make it last?”

I had been bringing young people to this particular conference for years, and had left every summer expecting to see the stats change and the great revival start to take shape. I mean, they really seemed to mean it this year.

The problem was that the stats didn’t lie. Every Sunday fewer and fewer young people would connect to church; fewer and fewer would choose to live for him. The youth generation was continuing its slide into being the missing generation of the church.

So what happens to that raw enthusiasm? What happens to all that passion? What happens to that vision of reaching the nation? What happens to all those plans to stick with Jesus whatever it costs? What on earth happens?

I’ve been a youth pastor for more than 10 years now and have watched how very easy it is to get young people excited … and how very hard it is to make that excitement stick. Jesus seemed to have an idea that this might be a problem. After all, he spent a surprisingly high percentage of his time investing in 12 young men knowing full well that one of them wouldn’t make it anyway!

This shows us that Jesus didn’t make conference junkies — he made disciples.

Discipleship isn’t just a buzzword for Christian youth workers to get excited about. It’s a guarantee of heartache, letdown, mistakes, struggles, perseverance, and blood, sweat, and tears! To be a disciple simply means to be an apprentice or a learner. We need to help our young people be learners who actually change based on the great experiences they have with God.

It’s no use thinking that this will be done in the classroom. Young people need us to engage in their lives as we discuss and help them see how they can grow in and connect with all that Jesus is doing in their lives. I learned early on that, for young people to see breakthrough and change that matched the passion, it took years, not moments. It took small, not big. It took a heart, not a program.

Years, not moments

It takes a moment to make a decision for Jesus, yet it takes a whole lifetime to work this decision out. We hate the idea of not seeing something happen in a moment, yet Jesus knew that a significant amount of what he invested in his disciples wouldn’t be seen until years after his death.

As we look to create a culture within youth ministry which sees young people as disciples rather than as cannon fodder for events, we have to be prepared for it to take a long time. The young people I had in my first youth group 10 years ago are all still my friends today. In fact, as I sat here writing this blog, I received a Facebook message from a young person who walked away from Jesus. I haven’t seen her in more than five years, but now she’s asking to meet up to chat about how she is getting on. As you can see, it really can take a long time!

Small, not big

Almost all youth workers have built into their psyche the idea that bigger is better. However if we are to follow Jesus’ way of doing things, then we actually need to make things small! We’re often keen on events, but we usually severely lack in process.

The best way to disciple people is in the smallest form. In our youth ministry, we’ve built three ways in which discipleship can happen. We run missional communities of youth which creates families for the young people in which their life rubs off on one another. We also have 2-to-4 groups where young people meet to discuss and debate how they can move forward in their walk with Jesus. We’ve found that the smallest unit of social space really is the best unit for personal change. The other magic ingredient which we use is huddles. In a huddle, five to 12 young people gather together in a training environment where they intentionally share what God is doing, how they are leading, and how they are following.

When I talk about big, not small, I don’t mean that we don’t seek to reach a whole city or a nation but rather that we need to try and work structures to help discipleship happen in the small even when we get big. I think this mix of family, training, and one-on-one sharing of life is what has enabled us to keep great discipleship at the heart of our youth ministry as it has grown so vastly in the last few years.

Heart, not program

As I finish, I want to make sure to say that no program, event, or structure will bring a discipleship culture to your youth ministry. It starts with a heart that is truly engaged in seeing lives transformed by God power rather than auditoriums which are filled with people getting excited. Programs and conferences are good, but we discipleship is much better.

After all, discipleship is what was at Jesus’ heart. So it should be at our hearts too.

Click here to find out more about Rich’s ministry in Sheffield, England, and how you can connect with him.

The teaching series will include:

• Teaching notes
• Series video
• Background slides
• Small Group discussion guides
• Small Group leader guides
• + a few more extras

The series will work for high school students, junior high school students, young adults, and even full church settings. We encourage you to check it out once it’s released. We’ll let you know when it’s available.

We introduced Ga-Ga at Wayfarer Camp 2011, and it was an overwhelming hit among girls and guys alike. I have seen it played in a variety of settings and boundaries, but for the sake of clarity, we’ll explain it the way we played.

Preparation: We built the arena, which is the field of play. The arena is a six-sided hexagon made of plywood. Each side was 3 feet tall by 8 feet wide. We hinged all 6 sides together to form the hexagon.

Participation: Between four and 20 students, depending on the size of the arena. We found that 10-20 students was the ideal number for the arena size listed above.

Objective: To eliminate other players by hitting them with the ball.

Start: All players enter the arena. The referee tosses the ball in the air. When the ball bounces, players shout “ga” on the first bounce and “ga” on the second bounce. The second bounce serves as the “whistle” that starts the game.

Finish: Play until all but one player is eliminated. The last player standing is the winner.

We live in a world that loves its causes – whether you’re having a tea party or occupying something.

The longing for a cause is especially pronounced among the millennial generation – those under 30. This generation is constantly pushing for social justice. If you don’t believe it, hang around some millenials and see how long it takes you to spot a pair of Toms.

The passion for causes in this generation is a great opportunity for those of us who lead students and young adults. It’s natural to help Christ followers funnel the desire to have a cause into a missional lifestyle. Obviously, leading millennials toward Kingdom mission is a great thing to do.

But it is not enough – and therein lies the challenge of leading a cause-driven generation. The challenge arises because it’s possible to have a cause without having a clue.

This happens in the church when we separate mission from discipleship. Mike Breen of 3DM writes about the why it’s a problem to have a missional cause without having a clue.

“Mission is under the umbrella of discipleship. It is one of the many things that Jesus taught his disciples to do well. But it wasn’t done in a vacuum. It didn’t happen outside of knowing Jesus and being shaped by that relationship in which a constant refinement of their character happened alongside of their continued skill development (which included mission).”

After reading this, you may be patting yourself on the back, because you are a leader with a clue. If that’s the case, celebrate it – but make sure that you haven’t lost all causes in the process.

Let’s use a matrix to help us better understand what happens when you have a cause or a clue but not both.

Obviously, if you have no cause and no clue, then you have a huge problem. But we also need to consider the problems that come when you have either a cause or a clue but not both. Let’s use Mike Breen’s descriptions (from the upcoming book Multiplying Missional Leaders) to explain what happens in each quadrant.

Cause but no clue: High mission/low discipleship church cultures have issues with Biblical literacy, theological reflection and deficiencies in character and creed that, in the end, sabotage the very mission they’re about. Critics are rightly concerned that these kinds of churches are a hair’s breath away from heresy, with people largely not experiencing the depth and transformation of heart and mind into which Jesus invites us.

Clue but no cause: High discipleship/low mission church cultures lack the adventurous spirit and heart of compassion and Kingdom compulsion that so stirred the Father into action that he sent his only Son to a world he so loved. Their transformation isn’t leading to the place God is taking them. Critics are rightly concerned that these kinds of churches will turn into Christian ghettos, creating people who lob truth bombs and create an “us vs. them” mentality.

A cause and a clue: A true discipling culture (as Jesus envisioned it) must have both discipleship and mission. It cannot live in either ditch. It’s not either/or; it’s both/and. We should never choose between depth and breadth; instead, we must embrace the tension of having and shaping both discipleship and mission in our communities and in our leaders.

This year, as we lead, let’s seek to become leaders who disciple followers to have both a cause and a clue.

As we do, we will see a generation’s love of a cause leveraged for mission as they get a clue by following the King.

For more on the tension between having a cause and having a clue, check out the upcoming Multiplying Missional Leaders book by Mike Breen and Doug Paul. 3DM will release Multiplying Missional Leaders later this spring. You can go here to find out how to be on the list when the book is released.

Thanks for joining us on the all-new Wayfarer Blog. I want to begin with an observation: Being a youth minister today is difficult. Now I know what many of you are thinking – this is not exactly profound. But being a youth minister is difficult – and not for the reasons you might think.

I bring this up because it is time NOW for us to start doing something about it.

I make the observation that being a youth minister today is difficult based not on a glance but on thousands of different conversations I have had in hundreds of places. As a traveling speaker and writer, I’ve had an ongoing conversation about this difficulty for 15 years. It has bubbled to the surface over and over as I spend time with youth and college ministers over dinner or on drives to and from the airport. It’s a privilege to listen to youth ministers express this difficulty and to sometimes speak into the lives of these often unsung heroes.

Now it’s time to open this conversation to everyone.

Being a youth minister is difficult not because the teenagers or college students of today are a difficult combination of out of control hormones and low attention spans. It’s not difficult because of ever-changing and ever-more complicated sport or club schedules. It’s not difficult because of parental expectations. Rather, being a youth minister is difficult because of the subtle unspoken pressures that have come to define what a youth minister is supposed to do. And one of these pressures is to make sure the senior pastor keeps his job.

Let me explain…

It is no secret that the Western church is in a state of decline – even as we try is to hide from this ever-present reality. But with recent statistics suggesting that just 4% of the millennial generation (those under 30) is in church each Sunday, it’s getting harder and harder to hide.

In the wake of this decline, we as ministers have spent a lot of time and effort saving face. We do this in terms of the statistics used to measure ministry success: baptisms and bottoms. Get people to come to the building for an event, and get them to make a decision. Count both baptisms and bottoms, and whatever you do, make sure this year’s number is bigger than last year’s. It makes no difference whether lives actually change (OK, that might be a bit of an overstatement) or that they might be counted in the number of the church just down the street next week. In this mentality, it makes little difference whether you even know who the bottom belongs are if it is his or her 53^rd baptism. As long as you as a minister get a registration card at the beginning and a decision card at the end, you win.

Pastors serve these unspoken pressures. Conversion is the name of the game, and pastors know that statistics show that most people are “converted” before the age of 18. So if a senior pastor wants numbers of baptisms and bottoms, he hires a youth minister who knows how to get kids in the building and how to get them to sign a decision card.

The youth minister had better work quickly – because everyone’s job security depends on it.

As a traveling speaker and “evangelist,” I know this is the case because I sense this unspoken but ever-present pressure whenever we begin talking about the “invitation.” It’s as though the whole event hinges on how those five minutes (or in some cases, two hours) go.

More than once I have felt as though my job as the traveling speaker was to save the youth minister’s job and, by doing so, to ultimately save the senior pastor’s job. Somehow, everyone’s job security hangs on whether a 15-year-old kid walks an aisle or signs a card. (That includes mine, because I only get invited back to speak if that kid does.) And God forbid something go wrong with the music during this time and mess everything up.

It’s a vicious cycle for me, a traveling speaker. It’s a vicious cycle for youth pastors. But it’s also one for senior pastors. Everyone is caught in it.

Don’t get me wrong. Most of these ministers have the best of intentions. They really want to see life change. That’s why most they got into ministry in the first place. But because we have equated life change with conversion, we have painted ourselves into a corner.

I believe this pressure is part of the reason why the average stay for youth minister at a church is between 18-36 months. Even if a youth minister can add bottoms and baptisms for a season, continuing to pull it off is unsustainable. It’s better to leave early and often than to come up with a new bag of tricks. (This is certainly a topic we will be addressing on this blog in the future.)

Of course I believe that people coming to faith is important. But more important than conversion is what Jesus has always called us to do – making disciples. You see, Jesus’ invitation was to discipleship, not conversion. He knew that disciples would make disciples who would makes disciples…and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger! Making disciples is hard work. The results are slower at first, but in the end they change the world.

I hope some youth pastors and senior pastors might read this post and say out loud what has for too long been silent – that we want to give our lives to making disciples and not running ministries. I hope some churches might take ministers who long for this up on their offer. I hope expectations change and that we get back to changing the world by making disciples.

It can start with YOU. That’s why we are devoting the future of the Wayfarer blog to the conversation of making disciples and changing expectations.

Why don’t you join us and offer your voice to the conversation? Leave a comment on this post or connect with us on Facebook or Twitter to let us know what you think. (These will link you to 3DM; Wayfarer is the youth/young adult arm of 3DM.)

Lastly, if you’d like to know whenever we post new blogs, you can subscribe by hitting the “Follow” button on the top right-hand side of our blog.

As part of this mission, we are remaking the Wayfarer Blog. Over the coming weeks and months, we will provide fresh and innovative content for youth minister and college ministers. We will raise provocative questions, provide valuable resources, and create a discussion that we want you to be a part of. Our contributors will include: Dave Rhodes, Chris Brooks, Jo Saxton, Robert Neely, Blake Berg, David Reichley, and more. Click here to read about the contributors you will find on the blog.

You can join the conversation by commenting on any post, and by liking/following Wayfarer (Facebook/Twitter) and 3DM (Facebook/Twitter). And if you’d like to know when we post new blogs, hit the “Follow” button on the top right-hand side of our blog.

We can’t wait to see where our collective conversation about youth and young adult ministry goes.

Dave Rhodes has written his first book called Redefining Normal: An Open Invitation for Ordinary People Wanting to Become Extraordinary Disciples. This 230-page book spells out many of the things Dave has learned, experienced, and thought about over his entire life and his first decade of ministry at Wayfarer.

We want you to check out Redefining Normal. So go to the Redefining Normal microsite. There, you’ll find a ton of content, including book excerpts, Dave’s bio, and a Twitter feed of what people are saying about #RedefiningNormal.

That page is also where you can order Redefining Normal. We invite you to check it out and to let us know what you think!

This summer, our camp theme was Kairos: It’s about time. And as of yesterday, Kairos is available in Room 1228. In the Kairos series, students will take a time out to evaluate everything by focusing on the only thing; they will let a time bomb go off so that they can be more by becoming less; they will avoid a time warp as they do more by doing less; and they will lean into a time change as they stop falling back and start springing forward.

It’s a great series, and we’re excited to share it through Room 1228. Check it out!