Jim Hancock - How to Volunteer Like a Pro: An Amateurs Guide for Working with Teenagers

After two decades as a professional youth worker, I quit my job in the church and rejoined the ranks of volunteer youth workersand I loved it!

Walking into a room full of kids I didnt know and doing the honest work of building relationships from scratchwithout a business card or position to justify my presencelaunched one of the most invigorating and satisfying chapters of my life as a youth worker.

The transition from professional to volunteer gave me reasons to review everything I thought about youth work and everything I did as a youth worker. Everything.

I came to understand things as a volunteer I might never have learned as a youth ministry professional. Could I have learned those things without the years I spent as a paid youth worker? I dont know. Im not sure it matters.

The important thing is sharing the wealth and hoping what Ive learned will help you volunteer like a pro.

Sowade in and let me know what you think.

jh

Leucadia, California

j.hancock.web@mac.com

T his is an amateurs guide to working with teenagers. Anyone who assumes the word amateur means incompetent, unskilled, and inexperienced hasnt been paying attention

The word amateur comes to English via the French, who got it from Italians, who took Latin in high school. The root word is amator thats lover in English. Amateurs do what they do because they love it. Amateurs are responsible for Wikipedia, Linux, and Firefox; amateurs conduct search-and-rescue operations and knock down structural fires in small towns; Olympic-class athletesmost of themare amateurs.

Thats the sense in which I think of volunteer youth workers as amateurs, and in that sense the title amateur youth worker is in no way second-class.

If you give up your day off to take kids someplace they think is coolif you sacrifice weekends or vacation days to be at camp with kidsif you hang out with adolescents after youve finished your day job instead of going home to relax or do your laundry, then youre an amateur in youth ministry, and we thank you.

At the end of the day, amateurism may be the only good and sustainable motive for volunteering in youth ministry. (All the other motives seem either bad or unsustainablemore on that later.)

I often hear amateur youth workers say, Oh, Im just a volunteer.

Nonsense. The word just doesnt belong in the same sentence with the word volunteer. Saying Im just a volunteer misses the point entirely. Its like saying, The Walt Disney Company is a Mickey Mouse operationand not in a good way. I became an amateur youth worker after I gave up my job as a youth ministry professional. And I guarantee my performance as an amateur met or exceeded what I offered as a professional.

Volunteer youth workers express Gods compassion for kids in a way no one else does. Just about every adult who relates to kids does so at least partly because he or she also gets something from the transaction. Im not saying thats inherently bad. What Im saying is: if professional schoolteachers, guidance counselors, coaches, music directors, tutors, drama teachers, and youth workers are nobleand they almost always arethen volunteer youth workers who do it for love are saintly. Anyone who says otherwise is not paying attention.

T heres more than one reason to work with kids and, frankly, some reasons are better than others. In fact, some reasons are no good at all:

• There are adults who gravitate toward younger people because theyre uncomfortable with their own peers.
• There are adults who want to be in control and find adolescents easierif only because so many kids crave attention from adults.
• There are adults who long to atone for the sins of their own youth and want to rescue kids before its too late.
• Sad but true, there are adults who are drawn to kids for sexual reasons. (Not all of these are stereotypical pedophilessome are individuals whose arrested personality development is fixated on adolescent physical ideals and relational patterns.)
• Some adults are guilted into volunteering as youth workers.

None of these is on the list of good reasons to engage in student ministries. The Good List looks something like this:

• Adults who want to help kids grow the way they were helped back in the day (not in the precise manner they were helped but in the fact that an adult was present to help).
• Adults with firsthand knowledge of the challenges kids faceeducators, medical and mental health professionals, officers of the court, parents, college students, and young men and women who regard adolescents with empathy and compassion.
• Individuals who pay attention to the dynamics of culture and society with generous insight and appropriate sympathy for adolescent experiences and passages.
• People who sense a call from God (and have their sense of calling ratified by Gods people) to serve kids and their families.

Its one thing to pitch in from time to time (and thank God a lot of people do). Its another thing to enter the community of folks we call youth workersthe people whose service in Gods kingdom is defined by compassionate engagement in the world of kids.

When someone asks, Why do you work with adolescents? or, Why do you want to work with adolescents? what do you tell them? (And if your answer is somehow less than completely true to your real reasons, why is that?)

I think the first day as a volunteer is the hardest.

After two decades of professional youth work, the first time I walked into a senior high youth group without a business card, without a title, without a clear idea of what I would be doing there, I felt awkward and excited and on edge. I knew the youth pastor and a couple of other leaders. I didnt know any kids. I surveyed the room. I approached a group of boys who fell silent as I came near. I said hello and tried to strike up a conversation. They gave me their names and schools. Their eyes shifted uncomfortably. Okay, nice to meet you, I said and moved along to try again.