One of the most important factors in succeeding with young adults is to do so with purpose. There are lots of ways to succeed on accident, but that’s not helpful in creating a movement into the next generation. Churches that approach Millennials with the vision that it’s one of the most important things they can do are churches that find more success.
A typical approach to creating a ministry to young adults or college students often begins with someone suggesting, “why don’t we just order some pizza and announce in the church bulletin that any young adult interested in helping figure this out is welcome to come for lunch after worship.” That doesn’t feel very purposeful.
The problem of intentionality is often the first hurdle churches need to overcome. Quality ministry to the next generation isn’t built overnight and it’s road is lined with wrong turns and dead ends, but unless we challenge ourselves to think about how we are structuring and resourcing it on purpose, our young adult ministry will meet once every 6 months, after worship for pizza. I think we all want more out of this.
We don’t succeed by shooting our arrows and then drawing a target around it. We clearly identify what we are going after and draw our tactics towards the goals. In my work with Ministry Architects, we do this by thinking in terms of “rules of thumb” when it comes to creating sustainability in children’s or youth ministry.
Things like:
o How much money are we spending, per kid, in our youth ministry?
o How many staff members are we deploying for this group?
o How many volunteers are we deploying on a weekly basis?
o How big is the worshipping size of our church?
All of these factors not only help us prescribe sustainability, but they also help us describe expectations in a healthy way. When we know what we are aiming at and draw achievable goals, everyone succeeds.
Working with college students and young adults need the same sort of systematic and realistic approach to ensure measurable success. In our work with churches and ministries around the country we’ve found a few “rules of thumb” that help us develop a sustainable ministry that will last into the future as well as one major consideration in defining the trajectory of ministry with Millennials.
Finances
When we examine youth ministry we found a fairly constant factor of $1,000-$1,500 per kid per week was a pretty good basis for understanding the size of a healthy youth ministry. When it comes to working with college students and young adults, the finances get a little fuzzier. There is a good working average of about $750-$1,000 per young person across many churches but that number can be augmented vastly depending on how it is spent. Most churches spend that budget in staffing, which we’ll discuss later. Because this demographic is so focused on relationships, there most often isn’t a need to create a budget with high amounts of program dollars. However, the more you invest in the right people, even if those people don’t cost very much, the farther your dollars will go in creating impact with young adults.
Finances aren’t as hard-and-fast a rule as some of the other sustainability factors but there is one key piece to budgeting around this ministry – if you spend it, they will come. If you are focused on seeing improved impact with Millennials, the more you spend money on that task, the more reach you’ll find yourself having.
We are especially starting to find this to be true of ministries trying to reach 50 or more young adults and college students on a weekly basis. You might be able to “under spend” this rule and still reach 30-50 young adults on a weekly basis while on the low end, or under of the scale. But 50 seems to be a critical mass hurdle for many ministries. You might find the ability to draw an attendance of 50 for an event or program, but that number will eventually slip back down into the 30s unless there is an infrastructure designed to carry more than 50. In order to create sustainable ministry from 50-100 in attendance per week, it’s typical to “overspend” the attendance ratio and work past the top end of the scale. Once reaching past the 100 mark on a regular basis, the number seems to right-size itself again and starts costing less per person to run the ministry.
Staffing
Staffing is more of a fundamental rule of thumb when creating successful ministry to young adults. As one of the Young Adult Pastors we interviewed said about his ministry, “one of the reasons this thing works is because they are paying me to do it.” Having focused hours directed at reaching this demographic is very important. It’s worth thinking about how your church can pay attention to that word, focused hours. We’ve found that churches that staff this ministry by tacking it on to the hours for a youth director, a worship leader, or even an associate pastor have a limited return on their investment.
Working with Millennials is such a relational task, that whoever is leading the charge at your church needs to have the bandwidth to meet for coffee, go out after 9pm for a hangout as a group and flex their schedule around the changing lives of these young adults. That’s much harder to do if your point leader already has another full-time job… especially at the church.
This doesn't always need to be a paid position; smaller churches may have a dedicated volunteer who runs a small group of college students and be very effective.
We’ve found that for every 1 full-time staff member (or it’s equivalent) a church’s ministry can reach about 100 Millennials through weekly worship, through programs or events or through relational connections.
Now there are some cautions about this number and I should add a qualifier. For every 1 full-time equivalent of the rightstaff member. The right leader makes a huge difference in seeing this ratio succeed, and I’ll talk about that later.
This ratio might work itself out in a few different ways. You might have a full-time Director running a weekly program along with making relational connections to get to about 100 on a given week.
You might have a volunteer that spends about 15 hours a week running one small group and connecting relationally with around 20-25 Millennials.
The key is to have a dedicated and consistent presence aimed at reaching these Millennials and to resource them appropriately as their ministry succeeds. “Staffing for growth” is an important factor with Millennials, especially early on when a program or ministry is growing. Think intentionally about staying ahead of the curve by adding staffing support. When a program is reaching 75 on a weekly basis, think about adding a part-time worship leader. When your staff member is seeing 20 young people in their small group, think about paying them for a half-time position. Think ahead about sustaining the growth that your ministry is seeing.
The Right Leader
As I mentioned above, having the right leader charged with reaching Millennials is important to see the 1:100 ratio thrive. To be honest, that ratio is not always easy. Many ministries find themselves at 1:50 or 1:75 and wonder why they aren’t getting the full reach out of their leader and it’s often because we didn’t take the time to find the right mix of gifts and abilities. Don’t be mistaken – we love whatever volunteer that steps to the plate to help lead the charge, but that doesn’t mean we should let just anyone drive the bus. Any leader of a ministry to the Millennial generation should have a good mix of, relational ability, team-building experience, coaching ability and, culturally relevant to the millennial generation.
Millennials have such a high need for relationships, that the point leader needs to instinctively speak this language. Young people are looking for friends, looking for places of connection and looking for meaningful relationships. If you put a leader in place that is focused more on getting tasks done or making sure all the questions in a Bible study get asked, you’ll find yourself struggling to meet a good staff-to-attendance ratio. It’s very easy to hire a staff person to run a ministry to Millennials and find yourself with a small group or two of about 25-30 people. There’s nothing wrong with a ministry that looks like that, but a relationally skilled leader would also be having coffee appointments and lunch meetings with another 20 people, thinking of creating gatherings at their home for another 40 people and making phone connections with another 10. Find someone who is wired for relationships to lead this ministry.
You also need to find someone who capable of building teams. A good relational leader can, and will, grow a ministry to the size that their relational tank can handle. But a good team-builder can build a ministry that goes beyond their own personal relational abilities.
Whether that means developing a core group of small group leaders, or a worship team, the right leader will multiply themselves into other volunteers and create a relational culture around everything they are doing.
While they are developing teams of leaders, the point-person will need to have some skill at coaching. Young adults are busy making a lot of mistakes in their lives. It’s the first time they are learning to do things like, manage their own lives, making major purchases, making romantic decisions and they are often doing these things away from support systems they had growing up. The role of a leader in a ministry to Millennials will always involve some level of mentorship and coaching, it’s worth the time to find someone who can do this with some level of success.
Lastly, the right leader will be culturally relevant to Millennials. Now that’s not to say they need to be the same age, or belong to the same circle as the Millennials we are trying to reach. Yet, as a general rule, the more a leader can create common ground with Millennials, the more their likely to instinctively help meet the unique needs they are bringing to the table.
They don’t have to be hip, or cool, or even popular. But whoever you select to help lead the charge for Millennials should be relevant enough to this generation that connection and communication with them comes easily and naturally.
Fishing Ponds
Finally, there’s an important factor that churches often fail to intentionally consider when drafting a ministry to Millennials and it has to do with local fishing ponds. Where are the places one could find Millennials in your community? Are you in a setting where a lot of young professionals are finding work? Are you near large areas of apartment buildings? Are their local colleges or universities within close proximity? Answering these types of questions will help you determine the size of your fishing pond.
If you are in a suburban environment where every other home is owned by couples with young children and there is a playground or elementary school on every corner, you should expect that a ministry to Millennials in your community would remain very small. Certainly there will be some of these people in your community, but your ability to market to, communicate with and draw in many of them will be difficult.
Evaluating your own church congregation as a fishing pond is an important factor here as well. Do all of your high school graduates go other places for college or work after graduation? If so, your millennial ministry might take vastly different shapes in the summer time, or on Christmas break than they do during the school year.
A good rule of thumb is to consider the need for at least one main fishing pond in order to have a thriving ministry to Millennials and the size of this pond will affect the size of your ministry. If you have multiple ponds, then it’s also worth considering the multiple needs your ministry might try to meet. If you have a small fishing pond of some members of your congregation that are young and isolated from each other, then your ministry might be as simple as equipping a volunteer to give Millennials opportunities to build friendships and engage in ministry together.
Each of these factors is measurable in someway, whether it’s adding up your total financial investment or doing behavioral interviews with candidates for leading your ministry. Taking the time to develop a coherent understanding of your current investment in millennial ministry, your expectations for it’s success and your ability to invest in it for the future are important to defining success.
In most churches, you won’t succeed in reaching Millennials by just paying attention to one of these factors. There is a balance and interaction between all of them as they are interconnected. But churches who pay attention to all of them and set their expectations accordingly find themselves further ahead in engaging the next generation.
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