Beyond Stuck: The Magic of the Monthly Strategic

It's meeting time.  You're volunteer leaders have gathered for that meeting you hope will finally focus them, galvanize them with a single vision.  After dinner, you launch into your well-honed presentation.  But three minutes into your opening, a hand shoots up.

"I understand what you're saying about vision," a veteran leaders offers.  "But until we deal with this clique problem, it won't matter what our vision is."   Another leader chimes in, and before long, everyone is interjecting anecdotes, opinions, recommendations.  

By the time your sidetracked meeting ends, your team is anything but focused.  After spending the evening mired in the clique problem, your leaders walk out the door more convinced than ever that your ministry is in trouble.   

Chronic youth ministry problems, like "cliques," must be addressed.  But youth leadership meetings don't have to be petrie dishes for cultivating anxiety.  Chronic youth ministry challenges are much too important (and much too complex) to be squeezed, uninvited, into an already packed meeting when hand-wringing is often at its highest and solution-focused thinking at its lowest.  

We have stumbled onto a process that we have repeatedly accessed to overcome the most gnarly, systemic problems we have faced in our ministry.  We have come to call this process "The Monthly Strategic."

The Monthly Strategic meeting addresses only the large, long-term challenges.  Monthly Strategics bring together the kind of single-minded, synergistic focus found only on teams that regularly "practice" together.  And that practice takes place best in a kind of meeting that most youth ministries never have.   Here's how these different kind of meetings work:

1)    Monthly Strategics Focus on One Issue at a Time:  Most youth leadership meetings have so many topics to cover, so many logistics to coordinate that focus is nearly impossible.  The unspoken agenda becomes, "talk about" as many issues as possible, as quickly as possible.  But trying to solve large, strategic problems during hurried, multi-issue meetings almost guarantees knee-jerk solutions that create more problems than they solve.  

2)    Monthly Strategics Happen Regularly:  Without regularity in our strategic meetings, there is little opportunity to maintain the accountability that provides the momentum for ongoing collaboration and initiative.  An isolated "visioning" meeting or "brainstorming" meeting simply will not have the power to break the power of deeply embedded problems.     

3)    Monthly Strategics Are as Long as They Need to Be: Churches with floundering youth programs embrace the illusion that undesirable patterns can and should be solved quickly.  By contrast, churches with thriving youth ministries have learned to overcome chronic obstacles by teams committing to invest as much time as is necessary to address first the one problem that will have the most significant long-term consequences.  These churches pray, dream, try, fail, evaluate, try again, fail again, and pray some more.  

This month, why not try something new in your youth ministry-a meeting long enough and focused enough to make a difference in how your ministry will look a generation from now?

Mark DeVries is the founder and president of Youth Ministry Architects (www.ymarchitects.com), dedicated to building sustainable youth ministries...one church at a time.  Now in his 22nd  year as youth pastor in Nashville, Tennessee, he leads strategic meetings for his youth team monthly.