How To Be The Ideal Youth Worker

What makes an ideal youth worker ideal? What ingredients do you need to add to the mix? What specific traits and skills should we be developing to fill holes in our youth worker template?

This was a brilliant question posed to me in a training session this morning. I’m going to attempt to summarise my answer here.

There are several tiers to an ‘ideal’ youth worker starting with the nonnegotiable and working down to specific specialised skills. All of these should be developing, growing and organic.

We all love diagrams right? Here’s one I made earlier.

There are no ideal youth workers, we all know this, and every youthworker will be different depending on context. However I feel these principles are mostly transferable. They are the basis for what I expect from myself and my teams. They also form the framework of my interview process.

Love For God & Young People

At the top of the pyramid are the most important: a love for God and a love for young people – and a keen flow between these two. If you don’t have these you’re following the wrong trail.

F.A.T.

Second we see the key traits of longevity; faithfulness, a commitment to God, people, projects and ministry life; availability, a – within safe boundaries(!) – accessibility to people and projects; and teachability – a proactive willingness to learn and grow that is accountable and open.

Commitment to …

This tier contains the essential faith-driven lifestyle commitments: An ever growing passion for reading the bible, prayer and worship personally and within community.

Development of…

Here we see specific skills that will be useful regularly in all kinds of youth work. Listening skills are always valuable, as is the ability to think and problem solve creatively. A growing theological understanding is also important, alongside learning different ways to communicate this understanding. Finally it’s key that every youth leader is trained in best safeguarding practice.

Specialising in…

The final tier includes the main areas where a youth leader should think about specialising. Not all of these will be essential to every youth worker.

Relational practice can be developed in many ways, but comes down to forming lasting, impressionable bonds with young people. Activity basis is taking specific gifts, talents and passions that you have and developing them in ministry contexts, for instance sport, music, drama, debate or knitting.

Inclusivity is always important but will rely on your context. This may include working alongside various ages, social and health difficulties, specific cultures or members of the LGBT community. Similar to this is working with those with different learning styles; key if you are doing lots of communication work and schools projects.

Parental support is particularly valuable if you’re doing church-based ministry as family worship is always the end goal. Finally management is vital if you’re overseeing projects and people.

This last tier is always the least important and is always the area that changes most throughout your youth work experience.

How to apply this in team management

These five tiers should form the basis of in house growth and training.

You should have the top two tiers sown solidly into the regular fabric of your projects, ministry and recruitment process.

The third tier is checked up on through community involvement (generally) and through regular individual supervision sessions (specifically). I try to do individual supervision in various ways once every 6 months, and team supervision annually.

The last two tiers should form the basis of group training that you run and attend. The top of these should be three-line-whip sessions for the whole team with regular annual repeats, and training for the last should be made available to those who want it.