Creating a Healthy Church Culture (As A Youth Pastor)

How can I help change the culture within my church?

What exactly is a healthy church culture — what is our role in leading that? As a student pastor, you serve in a pastoral role. You are shepherding the lives, hearts, and souls of both Christians and non-Christian visitors in your body.

But, youth pastors aren’t usually in an equal leadership role as the lead pastor or elders.

A lot of it just has to do with being an example in speech, conduct, in love, faith and purity, and it’s obviously going to be difficult. It’s easy to joke on student pastors and how easy it is for them to look like a JV pastor or not quite a real pastor.

I’m gonna address this generally, and then hit on a couple of specific things.

1. Have an example mindset

Let’s be honest, some student ministries and pastors have ruined the reputation of everybody else, that’s just a reality that you’re fighting from behind. So what you need to do is have the mindset of being an example.

It’s incredibly important for us to be people of conviction, committed to following Scripture wherever it leads, and patient as well. Be in a place where if God has called you there, then plan on being there for the long term, not feeling like you have to change everything about your church or your church staff right now.

“Be the voice who is constantly drawing people back to the Scripture.”

When it comes to theology, someone came to me saying “One of our pastors said that anything that has to do with Calvinism is heretical.”

And at that point, you’d need to address that not everything that Calvin believed was heretical. True, he’s a man and he’s faulty, so there are some things that he was wrong on, but let’s take it back and compare Calvin’s teachings to Scripture. There’s gonna be some areas where we have to agree and some areas where I think we also have to disagree, but it’s really ambiguous right now because we don’t know what everyone else is thinking when it comes to things that we should agree and disagree on. But we know, if he’s drawing his teachings from the Bible, then we would agree with them.

Let’s try to avoid foolish controversies, and let’s go back to the Scriptures.

2. Have Patient Conviction

There are going to be times when it will be helpful for you in the student ministry to help gently bring the pastor to the realization that we need to check something with the Scriptures.

There are a lot of misconceptions about people who believe all sorts of things. They’ll throw out a label prematurely saying, “Oh well, they are this. And they believe that.” But we need to talk about it, is that really what they’re believing, is that really what that person taught? We should have a patient conviction to follow Scripture, knowing this is a long-term and always be turning the conversation back to the Scripture. A couple of the questions had to do with, where you feel like your church is in terms of performance, if it feels like everything’s based on this appearance and performance, and you wanted to have it more relational and have real accountability with the staff.

Well, someone has to lead in that, and it could be that you are the one who needs to be the catalyst. Bringing up how you are working alongside each other, and it feels like you don’t really know each other. Recognizing that you’re guarded against each other, and the feeling of not being able to share. You might need to just say “Let’s really share. We’re pastors together, let’s share with each other!”

Maybe there’s a big conversation about music, and I think that’s a wise question to ask. There needs to be a conversation, you need to make sure that the songs that you’re singing together are biblical and are honoring the Lord.

A lot of times, you can’t allow yourself to get angry or frustrated. If this is where God has called you, then you need to have that patient, long-term conviction to Scripture, and come back to that.

What About Controversial Issues?

Sometimes there are some more controversial ministries out there.

Looking across the board, you see ministries like Bethel, Hillsong, or Elevation. Some of those ministries you wouldn’t wholeheartedly endorse, but some of the songs they are producing are really good. I’m perfectly fine with using songs from a ministry that has people I disagree with theologically, if the song that they’ve written is honoring the Lord, and is biblical. I do think there is a conversation to have, especially with your students, you could simply say, “We’ve been using some stuff from Bethel, but I’m not endorsing that as a ministry.

You guys need to check everything that they say with Scripture, but this song that they’ve done is really great and we’re gonna use it to worship the Lord.

But then again, if you do have a pastor or someone in your church who’s making decisions and says, “We’re not going to use this,” I think it’s fine to support that decision. If corporately, the pastor’s decided that we’re not gonna sing from a group like this, and you need to support the pastor in that, then you could have a conversation at home, talking about how you can listen to music that exalts the Lord, that’s biblical, but we’re not gonna do it corporately because we don’t want to give our church to give a seal of approval on that ministry.

How to Nurture Your Church’s Culture for Long-Term Change

You and I need to be going to go back to Scripture, with patient conviction, for the long-term. Remembering that culture change creeps slowly and usually happens relationally.

This conversation originally happened at a youth ministry conference at Snowbird.