What Do Youth Ministers Do During the Week?

What do Youth Ministers do?

I know this is a common question people have… “What do youth ministers do?”

I think the perceived answer is that we just hang out with students on Wednesday night, show up to a few sport events, and then we spend the rest of our time searching youtube and stalking people on facebook.

The crazy thing is that as a youth minister I often feel completely swamped, and then when someone asks me what I do during the week I start to trip over my words because I really don’t know what to tell them… which makes me feel like maybe I do just waste time.

The problem is that with ministry there really isn’t a consistent schedule, so what you do can’t be defined in 9 to 5 terms.

The following is a look at what youth ministers do:

Sunday mornings I get to church at about 7:00am. This gives me an hour and 15 minutes to spend time in prayer for the day, clean up the Sunday school and organize it (students never pick up after themselves), print off the Youth News, and go over the Sunday school lesson one last time.

At 8:15am I go to the early service which starts at 8:25am. This gives me 10 minutes to shake hands and say hello to people. None of these people are my youth (because they don’t come to the early service), but I love knowing the whole church, not just those related to my ministry, so this is a cherished time.

From 8:25am until about 12:15pm I am in a service, helping out with logistics, or helping out with youth Sunday school.

After church its lunch time! When we only had one Sunday school, and the majority of the youth went to the 11am service we used to go out to lunch as a big group, but that doesn’t happen so much anymore. But Sunday lunch is a great time for fellowship. It is never quick because of the crowds and long waits… so you can either take it as it is and enjoy it, or get frustrated. I like to enjoy the conversation with others.

After lunch I normally get back to the church around 3:30pm. From 4pm – 6pm we are either preparing for meetings, in meetings, or preparing for family fusion. Then from 6pm – 7pm we have discipleship classes, family fusion, or some form of small groups.

Throughout the week I spend time in the office doing random things that include, but are not limited to: responding to emails, making phone calls, writing notes to youth, planning trips and taking care of the front end work to make those happen, evaluating different aspects of the ministry and thinking through how we can improve on them, studying current youth ministry trends, assisting other staff members, doing random projects assigned by Jason (my pastor), finding and turning in receipts, creating a “Youth News”, working on Sunday school material, and other random odd jobs. These take up about 9 hours of my week.

So we’re at about 18 hours of work… what else do Youth Ministers do?

If I was only in the office 9 hours a week I would probably get fired… so I am in the office more than that, but I intentionally schedule time to do things that aren’t really “office work.”

The main time I get to teach/preach/talk (whatever you want to call it) is on Wednesday nights. Contrary to popular belief, I do not have an incredibly sticky memory where I can pull everything I learned from seminary off the top of my head and teach it to students in a way that makes since to them. It takes time to prepare a message. I would love to have a full day to work on my Wednesday night message, but I normally get about 6 hours (3 hours on Tuesday and 3 hours on Wednesday mornings at the coffee shop).

“6 hours?! Does it even take that long?! And you wish you had more time?!”

Think back to speech class in high school or a communications class you took in college. Remember how much time it took for you to prepare a 5 – 7 minute speech? You had to research the topic you were talking about, think about a good introduction to hook people’s attention, have good transition points, appeal to logic, appeal to emotions, and then have a strong conclusion. You had to think through how to get people to visualize what you were talking about, illustrate points, and then practice it to get more comfortable. I promise you that 6 hours flies by!

On top of preparing the message for Wednesday nights I have to get things in order for the actual youth service. This includes preparing worship in song, setting up the music equipment, practicing with the band, straightening up the room, setting up for an ice-breaker, getting informational handouts ready, and etc. I am able to give about 3 hours to this stuff. Then the actual Wednesday night program goes from 5:30pm to 7:30pm.

So now we are at 29 hours. We’ve covered Sundays, Wednesdays, and office time… what else do youth ministers do?

Meetings… these take up some time too. We meet as a whole staff on Tuesdays from 11am – 1:30pm. This includes a staff devotional, leadership equipping, and getting all of our ducks in a row for the week, month, and beyond. Then I have a separate meeting with my other boss (Ralph, the minister of education) and Kristin (the children’s director) once a week to make sure that we’re on the same page and that our ministries continue to complement each other. Then on Wednesdays from 1:30pm – 2:30pm we have a “creative meeting” where we go through all three worship services on Sunday and make sure they all flow smoothly and that they do not take up more than an hour and 15 minutes.

Meetings take up about 4 to 5 hours of the week.

On top of office meetings there are other key times to meet with people. I do hospital visits once a week, I meet with other youth ministers (either in person or on the phone) to encourage each other, bounce ideas off of, and build and maintain relationships. I visit prospective members who have visited the church. And then I try to meet with parents of my youth or youth leaders throughout the week too. These types of meetings take up about 4 hours of a normal week.

So we are at 37 to 38 hours of a work week now… “What about hanging out with youth? I thought that was all you do? Do you do that at all?”

On Wednesdays I get breakfast with high schoolers from 7am – 8am, and on Thursdays I get breakfast with middle schoolers from 7:30am – 8am and then I the middle schoolers to school in the awesome church van which takes up about another 30 minutes. Those times are regular, but there are other random times that I hang out with youth as well… like at football games, basketball games, baseball games, throwing the Frisbee or football, grabbing coffee, playing basketball, working out, eating food, and whatever else I can do to meet them where they are at. Unfortunatley I only get to hang out with youth for about 5 hours of the week, but I’ll take what I can get.

So the normal work week of a youth minister is probably around 42 to 43 hours of work if you try to put it to paper.

So why in the world do we get burned out, why do we feel like we work non-stop?

On top of the normal work week there are always things going on at the church. We have weekend retreats, summer camps, mission trips, service projects, community events, and other random things throughout the whole year. While Fridays and Saturdays would ideally be days off there always seems to be something to attend on a Friday night and/or on Saturdays. Take a camp for example: Youth ministers work a full Sunday, then they are on the job for 24 hours a day until the next Saturday, and then they are back to it on Sunday. Once Monday rolls around they don’t get that Friday and Saturday (which we supposed to be days off) back… unless they use vacation time (which is 10 days a year). I guess what I’m trying to say is that we tend to fall into doing stuff on Fridays and Saturdays and we never really get to rest up and re-fuel.

I can attest to being burnt out from ministry… I wish it was as beautiful and perfect as people might think from the outside looking in… I’m sure everyone wishes they could work at the church because it’s a breeze… but it is more time consuming than you might think.

After a year and a half I got completely burnt out and fell into depression… this led me to seeking out counseling to keep my sanity. So I now meet with a counselor once a week. I didn’t factor this into my work week, but I think I could because it is extremely beneficial and helps me to do my job better, and to do my job with more joy. So if you factor in the drive into Atlanta in morning traffic, the meeting, and the drive back, you could add another 3 hours to my work week.

I guess I can’t speak for all youth ministers, but hopefully this gives you a general idea of what we do during the week… It’s not all raindrops turning into lemon drops.