I’ve just written some thoughts in response to an article that GYD shared about perceptions of a break in the ministry pipeline. In conversation with them, they talked about being involved in conversations about recruitment and there was an indication that they were also talking about the pipeline of youth workers into the church. So I wanted to pick up on the two areas where we might be seeing evidence of such a break.
First, there is the youth worker/youth pastor pipeline. I apologize, I really hate the term but it’s the one we are currently using. So I’ll stick with it a bit longer. When I was talking to keep people, this is one of the specific things that came up.
One observation that came through was that churches had built up some reserves during COVID due to not spending on other things and also that they were finding it hard to draw people back into the traditional midweek ministries after. So, the view, as shared with me, was that churches were then thinking they could solve this by employing youth workers. However, there haven’t been the people coming through. Given that jobs tend to be on fixed finding, lowe paid and that there isn’t so much certainty on what to do with youth workers (their target audience for discipleship are not available for most of the week due to school, homework etc and a youth worker still needs other church people to rope in) it is perhaps unsurprising that this is the case.
I am not personally convinced that this particular pipeline breaking or drying up is in and of itself an issue. I’m not convinced that paid youth and children’s workers are the best help to the church in the vast majority of cases. I realise that this might be hard to hear if that’s your gifting but I don’t think our job is to provide full time roles for all gifts and ministries. On the same way that I would not employ a youth pastor, I wouldn’t employ a music/worship pastor or a healing pastor. Nor would I employ a pastor for the elderly. It’s not that we don’t value those gifts or ministries. It’s just that I think there are other ways to honour them in local churches. That’s also not to say that there isn’t a place for paid expertise in some of those areas. A church like All Souls Langham Place that has developed a musical reputation far beyond Sunday worship no doubt benefits from musical specialists on staff, large University churches benefit from having student workers and similarly a large church or a group of churches might benefit from having someone to oversee children’s work.
The other pipeline has become seen as the main pipeline into ministry for conservative Evangelicalism and yet, it’s a pipeline that simply does not connect with the majority of churches. Indeed, it is also a very recent (within my adult lifetime), approach.
I’ve talked about it so often. It starts either at summer camps of the Iwerne kind or possibly for many at University. They are discipled in student churches and potential ministers are then identified and invited onto ministry training schemes, where they are given tasks from chair stacking to youth work and sent a day a week on a ministry training course, a kind of foundation level for theological training. It’s those people who are expected to go on to theological college and from there into assistant pastor/curate riled in large churches before either being promoted to a senior pastor role or sent to plant churches.
There was a glut (if we are sticking with pipeline language) of this during the late noughties This also means that it is perhaps difficult to say if the pipeline is drying up or reverting from a peak to the norm.
However, for most of us. That pipeline doesn’t affect us. That was not our pathway into ministry and it isn’t the means by which we have found workers. And the reality is that outside of that pipeline the story has long been the case, if it’s difficult for churches in some contexts to find pastors, that had always been so. Yet, generally speaking, we manage it.
Now, on a side note, I admit that it does irk me a little when I hear those involved with the established training institutions (including those offering online approaches). You see, about ten years ago, when they were comfortable with their steady flow of students, a few if us started trying to talk about Gospel training needs for urban contexts and that the type of people we needed to train didn’t fit their models aimed at graduates
Yet, we found little to zero interest. The general response was that they could see no market and were busy with full programmes. We were often asked of course if we had people ready to train. And our response was usually that if they meant did we have a cohort ready for an old school programme then no. However, we were thinking about the long term and how we started to work with people right from the early stages. There was no uptake and urban people have gone off to to their own things.
Now, my own route in was simply this. I wasn’t hand picked for a programme at any point. Rather from a very young age, I was in churches where I was discipled and learned to use the gifts God had given me. When you take that approach, there is never a “pipeline shortage” because you have whole churches full of people who are being trained and equipped for service in the church.
Faithroots 