What Am I Doing Wrong?
by Joel Barwick
My first job in church ministry! I’ve been waiting for this day since I was 13, when I first felt called to be a youth worker. I’m going to see a revival amongst the young people in Newcastle - the church will be filled with them! I’m going to have a schools ministry, a Friday night outreach project, a weekly youth church, mid-week Bible studies, yearly residentials and so much more. But I’m 3 months in and there’s not a single young person at church. What am I doing wrong?
Meanwhile, the student ministry is growing week after week, the church media looks incredible, there are stories of people coming to know Jesus every week on a Sunday, young families have come and their kids are loving the children’s ministry, and the worship team has released an EP. Obviously everyone else is doing the right things.
I started a Youth Drop-in at church for youth to come and hang out after school. Two young people turned up for a couple of weeks and then just stopped coming. How demoralising. Feeling quite depleted and disillusioned, I explained how I felt to some friends who have been doing youth ministry since before I was even born! They helped me to see everything from a different perspective. City centre youth ministry is tough. It’s slow to start and hard to build momentum. Only by an act of God will you go from having zero young people to having a thriving youth ministry full of young people within three months. With this new perspective I said no to comparison and started to seek the Lord’s will for the ministry.
“Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labour in vain.”
I had my own ideas and vision for the youth ministry, all of which were to see young people come to know Jesus and to live as life long disciples of Him. They were good ideas! All things I listed at the start. But I got lost striving for them. I wasn’t able to implement what I wanted because it wasn’t the right time, but that made me feel like I was being unsuccessful. And because of that I started to do things just to prove to myself, and to everyone else, that I was doing a ‘good job’. I felt I needed to prove my worth, I started to ‘serve God’ to fulfill my own insecurities. It became all about me.
Of course, throughout this whole time, I was living in relationship with God but I never really sat and sought His will for the Youth Ministry. I felt that the unproductive thing to do would be to sit and begin praying about it. Surely praying about it is wasting time when I could be physically doing something about it instead?! I can’t remember why I started to feel like I should be praying into the ministry, probably because I was out of ideas or solutions to my own problems. But I started seeking God’s will for the ministry. Practically this just looked like spending 30 minutes praying and interceding on my work days. Straight away He started speaking to me. I felt Him calling me to start an outreach project in a different area to where I was originally planning. I spoke to the youth worker in this area and he told me how timely this was and how he felt the Lord had been speaking to him about the same thing. The ball started rolling!
In Acts 16:6-10 it talks about how Paul and his companions were kept from going to an area by the spirit of Jesus. After this Paul has a vision of a man begging for help in a different area. They decided to change their plans and preach the Gospel there instead. Through sitting and listening to God he revealed to me His will. Matthew 7:7 says ‘Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.’ I could have persisted in my own will and started an outreach project in an area the Lord wasn’t asking me to. I could have seen fruit from that but it would never have compared to the fruit I would see from allowing the Holy Spirit to guide me, just like Paul did in Acts. I’ve been told in the past to hold my ministry lightly and be open to change - I’ve now found that to be true for myself. It’s important to allow God to guide where you’re going and to not strive to see your own plans work.
The plans I had for the youth ministry weren’t wrong or without good intention, I’d just started to do them for myself. I’d started attempting them in my own strength. Psalm 44:4-8 says ‘You are my King and my God, who decrees victories for Jacob. Through you we push back our enemies; through your name we trample our foes. I put no trust in my bow, my sword does not bring me victory; but you give us victory over our enemies, you put our adversaries to shame. In God we make our boast all day long, and we’ll praise your name forever.’
Through God we see our plans and vision bear fruit! We don’t put trust in our own plans, but in God’s. Plans don’t save people, Jesus does. We’re called to build God’s house, not in our strength but in His because ‘Unless the LORD builds the house, the builders labor in vain’ (Psalm 127:10). Whatever situation you’re in, allow God to guide you, seek His will for the season that you’re in and allow Him to change the plans that you have. He is a good father who has plans to prosper you and not to harm, plans to give you hope and a future. Allow him to fulfill those plans through you.
