Worship Leaders Wanted – The Hardest Find in Church Ministry

Teaching pastors are a dime a dozen.  Youth ministers are everywhere.  Children’s ministry leaders are sought after all the time.  But where are the worship pastors?

Where are the music ministers?  Where are the creative-types that lead us each and every Sunday to the throne of grace?  Where are coming from?  Where have they gone?   The answer: no one knows.

As an interim pastor and frequent guest speaker in churches, I serve alongside all sorts of worship leaders.  Very few are full-time staff members; most are part-time, cross-vocational servant-leaders pulling two or three jobs to forge a living.  In smaller churches, you mostly have faithful volunteers with little or no musical training but who have a desire to serve God.

I love them all.  I love their heart.  I love their willingness to get up there and lead people who often look like marble statues with frowny faces :(.  I love when they partner with me as the teacher/preacher to make the entire service meaningful.

But their kind are going extinct.  They are dying away.  And the younger generation are not moving up to fill their spots.  It seems that the younger generation could care less.

Why is this happening?  Let me suggest a few possible reasons.

First, in our day and time theology is king and the teaching/preaching ministry of the church has become exalted as the highest order of church-based ministry.  While there is no doubt theology is critical in our culture with rampant pluralism, relativistic secularization, and a large segment of our population who are biblically illiterate, but does that mean the preaching and teaching ministry must command the majority of our worship time?  I would offer that most of our deeply held theological roots come not from sermons, but from songs.  (I’ve written on when pastors were the hymn writers.)

Another reason is perceived value.  As pastor/theologians view their role as the most essential for church health and spiritual growth, other ministry platforms are viewed as less valuable or subsequently inferior.  I wouldn’t say they are viewed as insufficient, but their value is not essential.   The common notion among many preaching pastors today is that as long as the teaching/preaching ministry is good, strong and biblically faithful, then other sectors of ministry will, by proxy, succeed.  I am not sure I agree with that conclusion.

A third reason is that it hard to find someone who believes God has called them into worship ministry.  You might discover someone with talent in vocal or instrumental music, or in songwriting, or even in leading people in corporate worship, but the last thing they are considering is using these talents for the Lord through local church ministry.  I teach hundreds of young adults preparing for future ministry and rarely do I have any student who believes God has called them to lead worship as their vocation.

Rewind back 25 years.  In those days, the music minister (or music director) was viewed as second most important team member on the church staff, far ahead of youth, children or education.  The role was highly important because of the amount of “face time” they shared with the teaching pastor.  The two-man team was like as Batman and Robin, Jordan and Pippen, Andy and Barney.  They worked as a tag-team planning worship elements, service designs, and ways to incorporate creativity into the plan.  This function is very rare today.

Today, the worship minister is not that important.  Most church leaders view children’s ministry as the #2 most important staff position to fill.  A poor children’s ministry equates to fewer young families and diminished growth potential.  Worship leadership might make it to the third or fourth slot on most church teams.

All these reasons (and many more) lead to lessened interest in exploring God’s call in worship ministry.

Fast forward 25 years.  I anticipate there will be few, if any, young people following God’s call into music ministry.  I believe there will be very few full-time worship pastors, only found on large church staffs with multiple services.  I sense that schools of music at the seminary and Christian college level will no longer prepare students in church music or worship leadership.  Those degrees will go away.

I believe the want ads will be filled with churches desperately looking for someone, anyone, to lead worship at their church, but no one will be applying.

These are just my predictions.  I hope I am utterly wrong, but I don’t believe I am.

 

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Church Ministry Resumes vs. Personal Advertisement Pieces

Last year, I was asked to help a church searching for a lead pastor.  They asked me to look through all the resumes they had received and see if I agreed with their top 5 candidates.  It was the first time that I, as a pastor who has my own personal church ministry resume, looked over so many other pastor’s church ministry resumes.  I was completely, utterly shocked.

Binder Full of Ministry Resumes

The spectrum of difference in design and scope was unbelievable.

Some resumes looked like full-color, 4-page media press releases.  Pictures, backgrounds, graphic designs, and interactive links.  One extreme resume had the prospective pastor in various tight-fitting muscle shirts, standing in intimidating poses with lightning bolts and thunder clouds surrounding him, like he was Thor or a WWE wrestler.

I promise you, I am not making this up.  He sold himself as a hell-fire preacher and prophet who brought with him apostolic signs and wonders.  I guess that is why he needed lightning bolts.

Others were really poor Microsoft Word resume templates with barely any information, no images, terrible spelling, and pathetic design.  These resumes communicated humility (which I appreciated) but also poor work ethic, no creativity, and lack of vision or skill.

So where is the balance?  Where is the middle ground between speaking to your experience and giftedness without selling yourself to the highest bidder?  How can a pastor selection team learn about your convictions and passion in ministry and yet not feel if they are being sold something?

Here are some ideas for the church ministry resume.

1.  Be honest and clear and minimize the hype.  Don’t exaggerate. Don’t embellish.  Be forthright and upfront.  Tell your true ministry experience and journey without hyperbolic language.  Remember it is God who is the giver of all good gifts and you are not a gift to the ministry world.  In the same vein, don’t be so humble, so contrite, so simple that the prospective church feels sorry for you.  You are a servant of the King – live in that calling with courage and confidence.

2.  Be helpful, resourceful and industrious.  Make the printed resume easy to read, easy to follow, and easy to access additional information.  While business resumes are usually no more than 2 pages in length, a ministry resume is not held to that same standard.  It can be longer and more developed without the perception of overkill.

I highly recommend creating an additional biographical blog site to go along with the ministry resume.  This site becomes a virtual repository of personal and theological information.  On the site, you can create links to Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, embed recent Twitter feeds, post and link any sermon video or audio available from any church, add your personal philosophy of ministry statement plus any doctrinal or theological statement you hold to.  You could add pictures or photo albums of your family to give a sense of who you are outside of ministry.

3.  Be visually-oriented and narratively-focused.  Every person under the age of 60 is visually-oriented.  They need pictures, images, and color to move their eyes across the page.  Without going overboard, your resume needs to have a visual appeal to it.  Consider your church’s bulletin.  What if it was only text and no images?  Would you want to read through it?

Also be narratively-focused.  While bullet points and jaunted sentences might appeal to the quick reader, your resume needs to tell a story.  The story of your journey with Jesus, call into ministry, and experience from the field.  It needs to have a beginning, a past, and a present flow.  Bulleted lists and strict outlines struggle in communicating time and story.

I am in no way an expert on church ministry resumes, but I offer mine as an example to start with.  My church ministry resume has gone through thousands of edits and redesigns.  The great part is, I am not looking for a church position so I don’t feel any sense of urgency.  If it helps, be my guest.

Church Ministry Resume 2014

 

The End of Paid Youth Ministry

Every two years I teach a class called Introduction to Youth Ministry.  And every two years, I wonder if it will be the last go-round.

I have been speculating and saying publicly for years that full-time youth ministry positions were going the way of the dinosaur.  I could see it in the job postings, hear it in conversations with Educational Ministry professionals, and watch it in the churches of KY, where I serve.

At one point (5 or 6 years ago), I was receiving two or three calls a week asking for resumes of young, graduating CU students looking to serve in full-time youth ministry.  But those calls are becoming less and less.  The vast majority of calls I now receive are for children’s ministry leaders.

While I knew a change was afoot, I didn’t have any other supporting evidence.  Until Group Magazine published its May/June 2014 edition with the front cover questioning “The End of Paid Youth Ministry?” I knew someone would eventually start talking about this shift.

The piece is written by Mark Devries, founder of Ministry Architects, formerly Youth Ministry Architects.

Group Magazine May/June 2014 Edition

Devries tracks compensation and benefit packages for full-time youth ministry leaders over the past decade.  The trend showed that from 2005-2010, there was an increase in salary and benefit packages.  Yet after 2010, there has been a steady decline.

Since that point, the compensation packages have been moving downward, making the average compensation in 2012 – $37,500, which includes take home pay, medical insurance, life insurance, retirement, travel and resource expenses all in one bundle.  In reality, the take-home pay is much closer to $25,000 which is hard to live on in America, particularly in the cities, as a single income.  Its doable, but a stretch.

The other trend of interest is youth ministry leaders who work a second job, meaning the youth ministry is not their only source of income.  Since 2005 that percentage has increased from 17% to 36%.

Devries conclusion is simple and straightforward:  “It’s not the end of paid youth ministry, but the end of full-time, fully-benefited youth ministry.”  Churches, with tighter budgets and the insufficient funds to keep up with rising medical cost, are thinking differently.

Devries goes on to say,

When we assess all the ancillary expenses required for a full-time employee, it’s not hard to understand this shift – health and other benefits for a full-timer can run as much as 30 percent of salary, making two part-timers (without benefits) a much better ‘deal’ for many churches than one full-timer. (emphasis mine)

I have seen this trend everywhere.  Churches can hire two interns or two part-time youth leaders, say one for middle school and one for high school, or one for children and one for teenagers, and not provide any benefits, insurance or time off.  In a sense, they get two (or even three) for the price of one. I have been seeing this for years.

To all my Ed. Min. students (and anyone else interested in youth ministry), if you want to serve students in the local church then find a great job doing something in the public or private sector.  Something you love.  Something you can live on.  Something you can find fulfillment in.  And then seek out a youth ministry position to serve teenagers and students in the local church.

Devries seals this revised vision when he says, “Working a second job to support our ministry calling doesn’t mean we’re bi-vocational – it’s a single vocation, expressed in different ways.”  Absolutely on-point and will be essential in the future.

Thank you Group Magazine for bringing light to this change.  We needed to hear it.