How Youth Pastors Make Me A Better Communicator

2 comments | Mar 29, 02:42 PM | best-of-earl | by Earl Creps

My sojourn through the land of youth ministry has been a complete surprise, given the fact that I have never spent a single second working with students. Somehow, through the good graces of friends in this ministry, I have found myself speaking at their conferences.

During a recent trip to the Target ’07 Youth Pastor’s event in Rockford, Illinois I discovered something about youth workers: they are making me a better communicator in several ways.

1. From Expert Fellow to Fellow Seeker: I open these talks by declaring my own ignorance, leaving me with two choices. One is to pretend to be one of them and try to show enough video clips to bluff my way through. The other is to simply confess my almost total inexperience of the subject. The silence that follows that announcement is sometimes deafening.

But the benefits are huge. There is so much less to remember when you don’t know anything. Moreover, forsaking the “expert” role offers a form of relaxation in public speaking that most of us feel very seldom. I owe these youth pastors a huge debt: they have clarified for me that my role is to join them in a common pursuit of God, rather than to “weaponize” them with new ministry methods.

Ironically, the pursuit of God together actually seems to lead to better methods anyway.

2. From Reading Notes to Reading Them: I developed a completely new presentation for the Illinois event called, “Four Faces of Youth Ministry.” I was excited to present the talk in a dark, amphitheater-shaped room. Normally, I love this kind of environment, but this night, waves of screaming (from a basketball game down the hall) rolled through the room while the lighting almost completely blinded me. The organizers, who do a superb job with this event, had no control over either factor. The talk was going OK (at least to me) but I felt uneasy.

Later I realized that, while I could still see my notes, I could not sense the subtleties of the audience’s response. I was flying blind, with almost no ability to detect their reaction. The temptation is to drone through your notes at this point. But the benefit of this situation for me was to highlight just how much I depend on reacting to their reaction in the moment.

Sometimes a cough can give you the temperature of the whole room. I didn’t realize this until the ability was taken from me. That faculty is the difference between talking at people and talking with them.

3. From Taking Precautions to Taking Chances: Somehow, when I’m around youth pastors I start feeling like doing things differently. They stir up innovation in me. So at Target I asked those present to text questions to me during the talk, and committed to stopping a couple times during the presentation to respond to their inquiries in real time.

About 60 texts arrived. Most had to do with reaching “have” and “have not” students in the same ministry. Other issues revolved around growing healthy students without legalism. I stopped twice to respond to about 5 questions each time. The downside of this technique was that the talk was much too long. The upside (for me) was the chance to let the audience shape the talk in real time.

The parts of the talk that followed these text-answering segments were clearly influenced by the issues injected by the texters. Shortly after the conference I made sure to respond to all the texts, whether the question was used in the talk or not. In one case, I even had a chance to apologize to a person I had needlessly offended, and, in the process discovered a change I needed to make in the presentation.

The idea of using texts is certainly not new. But it is still new to me. The attraction is not the novelty, but the ability to experiment with bringing the center of talk closer to the center of the audience’s issues.

Thanks, youth pastors. You’re changing my life.
This blog originally appeared in “Monday Morning Insight”: http://mondaymorninginsight.com/index.php/site/comments/how_youth_pastors_are_making_me_a_better_communicator/