4. In youth ministry, our goal is to glorify God. This is true of all of life actually and our specific calling to work with students is no different. I find that this raises an important question. By what standard do we evaluate our work? How do we know if we are doing it right? For many, pragmatism is the standard for evaluating ministry. The thinking is that if something works or gets results it must be the right or the best or the most God honoring way of doing things. We need to keep in mind though that we are imperfect beings, sinners by nature who mess up things all the time and God uses our imperfect offerings anyway. He works in student’s lives often despite our feeble attempts (and sometimes failures) at ministry! Does that mean he does not want us to pursue a better way? Does it justify a lazy or sloppy approach to ministry? If our goal is to glorify God, the real question when evaluating ministry is whether or not we are doing the most God glorifying thing that we can. So, we need to seek out what God wants for our ministries and keep in mind that God’s ways may seem odd to us at times. The world’s definition of success is not the same as God’s (despite what the prosperity gospel preachers say).
Where I believe we get caught up in the “but it works” approach to ministry is in defending the way we have always done things or what worked with us as teens. I had great vibes singing Kum Ba Ya as a kid but does that mean I need to get my youth group singing like that? I used to put together the wildest, crazy, most fun events in order to reach students and could easily attract a crowd. Was that God glorifying ministry? I have heard some lame speakers present the gospel and people responded. Was that excellence or did God just use it anyway? The answers here are consistently unclear because whether something ‘works’ is not a strong standard to use.
So what is a better standard for evaluating ministry? Glorifying God and being faithful to his word. That’s how I see it and I know that makes many uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable because it demands that I work to a higher standard and evaluate things with a very tough criteria. It means I see myself falling short many many times. I don’t like to look at myself and see failure, but actually that drives me to God faster than if I think I personally accomplished something wonderful for the kingdom because ‘we got results’. Glorifying God as a standard to measure our ministries is not going to give us a clear checklist either though in the sense of knowing that we either did or did not. When we measure by this standard, the answer is not usually simple. In other words, we finish a weekend retreat and ask ourselves – how did we glorify God? We will always see a mixed answer because of our nature… but asking this question will push us towards excellence according to God’s standard.
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