YAMIA is the youth and student ministries arm of the Anglican Mission in the Americas.

Interview with Mark Yaconelli

CHRIS: Now what is the book that you're writing? Are you allowed to say?

MARK: This book's called "Down Time." I've been asked for years to write a book, and have just never wanted to do it, on praying with teenagers. That was my original research 10 or 12 years ago. I had 100 kids I was working with and I had them keep journals and it was part of my Masters thesis. I was originally going to write and do research on that, and what I ended up realizing was that the most important thing that helps kids pray is adults who are praying people. That's when I changed everything and had this project that was really all about trying to create communities of living adults, praying adults, and then helping them learn to be in relationship with young people. What I found out was that kids learn how to pray in very organic and natural ways when they're around adults who value the life of prayer.

So, I've written these other books that are about the adults and it felt like it was time to finally write about "okay, so what do you do with teenagers." I'm playing off of this little theme of "holy leisure" that is referenced often in older monastic texts. The idea was that to have a soul, or to have a spiritual life, there is a certain amount of leisure that's required. This is really the beginning of academic life too. Part of the etymology of the word "scholar," is leisure. You need time to sit around, walk around, to daydream, for ideas to sink in, for your souls to rise up to the surface, for you to begin to apprehend what's going on in the world. So we live in a multitasking society. Our kids are more fragmented, have less human relationships, they're attention is fractured in ways that maybe have never happened to human beings before, and so I'm wondering, "how can these young people develop a soul or a spiritual life when they don't have any down time." I'm trying to get some different ways or exercises that I've done with kids. It's supposed to be a book on prayer exercises. I don't know if the publisher is going to like it because I really don't want to narrow it to prayer. I want to talk about how we create a different kind of culture in youth ministry that feels different, that feels at the feet of God. Anyways, that's another long answer.

CHRIS: That's good stuff and I appreciate that. And as I hear you, what jumps out at me is a great quote from Mother Teresa. The beginning of it says "the fruit of silence is prayer." That's the key. Prayer is just one part of the life of the soul, sure it's the oxygen but...

Can you tell us who you are, and what you do, and as briefly as you can, what you have been doing these last 10 years or so?

MARK: Well, I don't know how to answer who I am, but what I'm doing, is I'm at the tale end of a 10 year research project called the "youth ministry and spirituality project," and I'm on the end of a 4 year grant to write books based on the research I did in the youth ministry and spirituality projects. I have 2 that are out and 2 more to go. So I've basically been on a writing sabbatical for four years. I'm living in southern Oregon 20 minutes from where I grew up, where my mother and father and my wife's family live, and I'm right now volunteering in a United Church of Christ congregation that is seeking to develop an outreach to university students here at a secular public university. So, I'm volunteering with them, and we're setting up a prayer service and some other things to reach out to university kids. Those are the kinds of things... and I spend a lot of time mostly parenting my two sons who are 9 and 11 and my little daughter who is 3. We home-schooled them so I'm involved in a lot of that stuff too.

CHRIS: Now tell us as far as the loneliness thing, the question I have is, in your research if I understand it correctly, you've had a lot of discussions with pastors across all denominations. What would you say are the biggest things that pastors are facing, that you've noticed? The biggest struggles - what are the things that have tended to come across to you that have made your heart just break?

MARK: There's a number of ways you might describe this, but one way I might say it is that there's not a clear sense of what their call is. In that way I mean - I think the call that pastors are responding to when they go to seminary, when they go into churches, is a call to be a spiritual guide or a spiritual leader. That call is a call from God - what the world, and I don't blame them for this, but what people in churches or in the secular world expect is a call for people to be an administrator or an organizational leader. So what happens is that part of what a pastor needs to do is come into a church and say "here's the call, I'm here to help all of us make room for Jesus and his mission of love and find a way we're going to participate in that." What happens is the congregation says "what about the budget, what about outreach to families, what about programs you're doing for children, what about building maintenance." And so pastors end up responding to the expectations of others, and they don't communicate what it is they're really supposed to do.

So let me give you an example: A friend of mine who did not grow up in the church became a Christian in his mid-thirties, and had no sentimental feelings about the church. He went to seminary, got his first pastorate up in Minnesota, his name is Daniel. He came in and found all these jobs that people wanted him to do were really about institutional maintenance. Getting committees organized, getting classes set up, programs set up, fundraising set up, that kind of thing. And he basically sat down with everybody and said "maybe there's a misunderstanding here, but this is what I'm called to do: I've spent my life searching for God, seeking to know how God works in our lives, learning how God is alive in the scriptures, and I'm going to help us do that, so somebody else needs to do these other tasks. What I'm going to do is be here every morning for morning prayer, I'm going to be here every night for people who want to come and pray. I'm available any hour if you want to talk about your life with God. I'm going to run worship, I'm going to lead some mission events, but I'm not going to do these institutional jobs." Now I thought he was going to be fired, but he wasn't. What he was trying to claim and communicate was his call. The pastors who burn out in my experience, are pastors who have a spiritual life and the call that God has given them is something that they hide, that they're embarrassed of. They see that people don't understand what that is, and so instead they run around trying to please the institutional expectations that people have of them and it ends up killing their soul and burning them out.

CHRIS: It's funny you say that Mark, because when I first got the call, when God revealed himself to me, and I began to fall in love with him, that was my initial thing, was "what do you want me to do, when I have this desire to be a pastor and to share this with people? As soon as I got into the church, I wasn't raised in one, and as soon as I got involved in it and saw the life of the pastor, it was abhorring to me, at least in my little slice of the pie. What I saw was a manager, being caught up in all these things. I went to seminary and they told me that this great Christian man who was big in formation said that the first three things to go in a pastor's life are diet, exercise and devotional life, and I just thought, man, how sad! And if diet and exercise, that's because they don't have any down time.

Now stepping into youth ministry, can you share briefly your story with youth ministry and what happened with you. From what I remember you were brought to a crisis point. Then I would like to switch from the senior pastor question to the same with youth pastors.

MARK: My father was one of the founders of the modern approach to youth ministry. He started youth specialties and wrote books on youth ministry and taught on it. I had grown up around this so I felt well prepared and trained. I knew the youth ministry culture and most of the techniques - finding key kids in high schools, and building small groups and all these different techniques that were talked about in the late 70's and early 80's. And I had this incredibly well stocked research library that my dad gave me, and so I went into a church that had just built a million dollar youth facility before they had a youth ministry, and I went in there as the new young hot youth minister who would make this work. After 2 years I really had no results. I had not grown a youth ministry with lots of kids, and that put me into a spiritual crisis where I felt like "well God's not blessing this ministry and kids aren't showing up and I'm a failure." It was a crisis that needed to happen because my image of God was the same God you see in American business. That God wants proven results, wants unending hard work - that God is always saying jump a little higher, jump a little higher, jump a little higher. And it is not a God you would really want to be around. He is always disappointed and angry with us and slightly disgusted with who we are. This is the God I was trying to serve and I think the kids could sense it, that it was not a God they would like to be around either. So it was really a crisis of the way I was living, of the God that I had created in my own mind and was serving, and really a crisis of the kind of techniques and the business model that was in that church and most churches that is really about efficiency and productivity, that I was trying to serve. So all of that came into a crash, and the gift of that crash was that God was no longer an idea or this task master. I uncovered that there was this reality of grace and this reality of love that somehow released me from my own demons, my own idol making, and my own hyper-active approach to ministry that wouldn't have been any different from any corporate salesman.

CHRIS: What would you say in your dealings with all of these hundreds of youth pastors across denominations? What are the biggest struggles for them, what are they dealing with?

MARK: Well youth pastors are lower on the totem pole in terms of the hierarchy of the church and the status. So they often are caught in the culture that the senior pastors and the church have created. Actually, the senior pastors are caught in it too, and that culture is the culture of America. It is a business approach that is about efficiency and getting things produced and getting things done fast and quick. So you're usually caught in that and your kids are too, trying to be as efficient as they can, doing their homework while text messaging - if you can do that all at once, you're rewarded as a capable, successful person. There's a certain American pleasure in doing many things at once. So you come into that as a youth minister and as you said, what disappears is a sense of God's rest and peace, or a sense of the Sabbath, that Sabbath way of being that God offers us to renew us and focus us and heal us. So all kinds of open spaces, times for rest and prayer and devotion, time for your family, all that begins to disappear, friendships begin to disappear, which are so necessary, we have to have other people who know us in our shadow side as well as our gift side.

So friendships begin to disappear, as you said health and exercise begin to disappear, and we can't do it very much longer. So youth ministers don't tend to last very long in youth ministry, mostly because its hard, its lonely, its isolating, you get very low affirmation from others, you have people saying to you things like "when are you going to move on and go to seminary and become a pastor, or do something else." People don't expect you to stay very long. The way to confront that and survive, is you have to watch the rhythms and methods of Jesus. We don't pay attention enough to how Jesus is living in his ministry. What you realize is that Jesus has this enormous sense of trust. I would have been very anxious if I was with Jesus during those biblical times and knew that he was creating a whole other religion. I would have thought we had to get things written down, we've got to get people trained and set up a national network of different regional supervisors. Especially if Jesus told me we only had three years, yet Jesus is very patient, there's a lot he's not saying, he's taking a lot of opportunities to go off by himself and be in prayer. There's a real sense of trust that this is going to happen, that God's way of life, that the gospel is being spread, even when the people around him seem incompetent and seem to misunderstand the whole thing.

So I tell youth ministers a few things you've got to do. One is that you have to have a sense of Sabbath. You have to take time to pray and take a walk around the community, nap with God, read things that really feed you in your spiritual life. You have to have that be a part of your life, because that's how God reminds you again and again that you're not the center of the universe or the ministry. The second thing it that you have to have friends - soul friends. There's this whole rise in the field of spiritual direction, where people are trained and often paid to listen to your life with God, and really it's a tragedy. We used to just have friends, or people in your church community who were responsible and who you trusted to share the depth of the struggle that is going on in you. Someone who knew your name, and that you were the beloved of God, but also knew the sin and shadow in each of us. You've got to have real friends somewhere, often outside the place where you work. Those are a couple things that I think help people survive in ministry.

CHRIS: Mark, what would you say to rectors or churches who are looking for a youth pastor?

MARK: ...What is it that God wants in this youth ministry? Why does Jesus want kids in this church? What is that vision? That's one step. In youth ministers you're looking for someone first of all, who knows how to tend their life in the spirit. Youth ministers have to use educational tools but they're not educators. They have to use counseling tools but they're not counselors, they have to do recreation and programming but they're not program directors. They're central gift is that they are seeking as best they can to allow God to move within themselves and in others. And so they have to be people who know how to tend the spirit and spend time in the spirit of God, have a prayer life, have spiritual directors. I would ask a youth director how they're tending their own life, or what they need to tend their life in this job. Second, they have to enjoy young people. Maybe the greatest gift of a youth minister is that while other people feel awkward around teenagers or anxious, youth ministers are around teenagers and find them beautiful in all their quirky energies and nervousness and awkwardness and excitement. Youth directors just like them and like being around them. That's obvious when you're with them. It's loving God and loving young people. That's what you're looking for.

CHRIS: You know the sad thing is, Mark, a few years back I was one of these guys who was flown around the country and interviewed for youth jobs, and some big churches wanted to talk to me, so I went around, and not one of them, not one asked me about my spiritual life.

Now I'm with you, we are really trying to do this. We just did our national summit. You've got a team of guys volunteering from around the Anglican mission who love kids, and the whole first day ... our mission is to fulfill the great commission and the great commandment, because you can only take ... discipleship is caught more than it is taught.

MARK: Part of it is that when you meet with committees and they don't ask you about your spiritual life, a couple things are going on. These people don't know anything about that or feel they have permission to talk about that, or they're not educated in that way. We often choose people to be leaders in the church who are successful in the business world, they're running businesses or they're good at finances - things that we need help with in churches because that's not our calling - and so they ask about things like that: how're you going to manage this, track kids, what programs will you set up. So sometimes our role, like senior pastors, is to explain your calling and what you do. So sometimes a youth minister in a meeting like that might find that people are very grateful when you answer the questions they're not asking but wish they were. "Here's what I do as a spiritual guide: I trust that God is somehow at work in this community and in your kids. I'm going to be listening for that. I'm going to do that through prayer and through talking to kids, through being in worship with you. My job is to listen for how God is at work here, and then try to give it voice and find actions that communicate what God is doing here, and to find ways to help kids notice and name this presence of God in our community, and that's what I do." So you have to find some language to explain this. Sometimes they'll say we never knew that, that sounds great, or they might ask how you are with budgets...

People on committees who are hiring don't often know to ask that question.

When this research project ended, we had pastors and youth ministers who kept journals, and the #1 word we heard was "this project gave me permission to be a spiritual leader." That was such a strange word. There's a call that each of us in the ministry has, but we don't always feel like the people around us have actually given us permission to follow that call. It's always getting sidetracked in program management or institutional jobs, so it's kind of this deep secret. So when I lead workshops or retreats, I sometimes feel like all I need to do is go up and say "you know that call that used to bother you as you laid in bed at night, or you know when you're reading a devotional book on Sundays and tears come into your eyes and you think, "God, this is what I wanted to do, I wanted to fall in love with God and help others do it, but I'm not doing it." Well I feel like sometimes we need to tell people "whatever that call is, just go and do that." And maybe it will cause suffering and be awkward and uncomfortable, and people won't know what you're doing or why you're doing it - but follow the call that God is giving you. For some sad reason, most people in the Church don't feel like they can, most ministers and pastors. Then with the rise of spirituality and spirituality books and retreats, there is a greater awareness of different forms of spiritual disciplines and retreat centers. My experience is that pastors get excited about this but they separate and compartmentalize it away from their life in the Church. So they take retreats or pray or see a spiritual director, but then when they go back to the Church, they just live the corporate business model, and they don't know how to bridge the two, and they don't feel like they have permission to do these things that nurture them personally, to bring them back and live from the center in the Church.

CHRIS: Thank you for saying that. I think you're totally right. It's not like on one day you can do the great commandment and on the next day do the great commission.

MARK: That's the new thing that I've noticed, is that I'll meet with people and they'll say "I love all this stuff, I have a spiritual director, I go on retreats every month, I take a full day to pray." Then I go observe these pastors in their ministry and you see none of that. They're just doing a regular business model, and it's a tragedy because they don't know how to bridge or share what's giving them life to their congregants or to young people. So they withhold it because it feels odd or strange, or again, people would think it was weird if they had silent prayer for 2 minutes in a youth meeting, even if that is what they were doing personally. So that's the work and art of ministry - bridging those two things that feed the soul. Bringing them out into the world and sharing them with people, and not being embarrassed by it even though sometimes it is awkward.

CHRIS: Let's get right to the reality of youth pastors right now. You're a youth pastor, part time or full time, or maybe as a volunteer, and you've been doing it for awhile, and this is the first time you're really hearing this. What is your advice to them?

MARK: Let it wait for another day. Just worry about what's right here, right now. Whatever the word or excitement or call is, just follow that. Allow God to show you how things are going to be reformed and remade. That's the first thing. I wish we were on the phone with 10 other people in youth ministry because I know there are others who might have a strong word or better word. If we don't run ahead of God or ahead of grace, and just do the next thing God has - to have this conversation or cancel this program, or to take this morning and actually read the Bible not for a new insight for teaching, but just for myself. Whatever the next thing is that God is asking, just do that. As we just take the very next step that God is asking, larger things do change, but it's always very small, simple, and possible things that God is asking of us.

CHRIS: Two things that come to mind is the scripture "keep in the spirit and you will not satisfy the desires of the sin nature," and then Mother Teresa who says "God has not called us to great things but only to little things."

MARK: That's it, that's true wisdom, and that's true with kids too. We have these huge expectations, we want kids to come in and really sing these songs well, and pay attention to these things we're trying to teach them, and then respond with some kind of action. Often, what is missed is just greeting them at the door. If we can just focus on the very first thing which is when they walk in the door, for me to look at them and listen to them and be grateful for their presence, and see them as people who were created in the image of God. If I can just greet them well, and then from there, listen as we're talking, and then from there, sing well, and just be present to the very things that we're doing. Often that becomes an enormous gift, whether or not our lesson plans happen the way we expected them to.

Involved in Youth Ministry for over 10 years, Rev Chris Zoephel has worked with junior highers, senior highers and those who act like these folks both as a paid staff member and as a volunteer in churches and para church organizations. These days most of his time is spent chasing his son around, keeping his office somewhat organized and trying to point others toward Christ. Currently Chris is on staff at Immanuel Anglican Church in Destin, FL as the Pastor of Discipleship (which includes being a youth pastor). Chris also serves as Director of YAMIA for the Anglican Mission in the Americas.