I once accidentally got drunk on communion wine…

I once got drunk on communion wine. This was certainly not my finest hour, nor was it intentional.

I was working for a big Anglican church in London as a Youth and Children’s Minister, helping run a Confirmation Service. This involved serving young people their ‘first communion’ and I was giving the wine out of a challis roughly the size of Mexico. When the queue was down to about two or three people, the Bishop filled my challis right up to the top. I bet he thought that was hilarious!

At a formal service with the Bishop in attendance, we followed the ritual of ‘draining the elements’ at the end. This involved the Bishop telling me to ‘down it.’ I remember that he offered to help if I needed it, but he had already awoken the beast and prodded a competitiveness that is primal only to youth workers. I knocked the whole thing back in one.

At this point I should probably let you know that at the time, I didn’t drink. At all. This was more alcohol in three seconds than I have consumed in my entire life. It hit me immediately like a brick to the face. I felt like a deer in headlights.

I cannot remember much of the service after that other than stumbling back to my seat where the assistant minister was quietly chuckling to himself. I also drove home that night! As I have barely touched a drop of alcohol in my life before this, I just didn’t think. I had no plan for this. When I arrived home my wife looked at me, concern all over her face. This is how the conversation went:

‘Are you ok Tim, you look awful?’

‘I… I… I don’t know where I parked the car!’

And sleep.

I’m never going to forget that feeling of stumbling around with only a basic idea of where I was, and no understanding of what my feet were doing. I felt lost, confused and helpless.

I was advised by a friend not to give that story, as it may make some readers lose faith in me as an author. However, this feeling of blind disorientation is far too apt a metaphor to ignore. Our young people go through life desperately needing step by step help as they grow. They search continually for value, identity, clarity, purpose, and very specific advice and help. They are begging for it, and when they see it available they beeline for it like a frenzied moth to a light.

In youth ministry, a listening, open and available youth worker offers a safe place for young people to share problems and get help. This is incredibly valuable and comes with all kinds of new responsibilities. And doesn’t it just make you feel a little powerful too?

Sudden cool guru status is like opium. It makes you a gatekeeper to spiritual and emotional health, an unexpected wise guide for right living, and a healing balm for hurting vulnerable people. It feels so good to help people, and it feels terrible to get it wrong. It can also feel somewhat compelling and impressive to wield that amount of influence over the impressionable. Herein lies the fine line between an experienced, wise youth leader and the heroic yet fool-hardly passions of the green.

What are the actual dangers?

There’s two things you want to look out for when developing a one to one discipleship ministry.

Making yourself essential

One of the key values that all good counsellors have is making sure that they are developing a treatment program that eventually does not include them. They want to eventually write themselves out of the picture. They also have someone themselves to ‘debrief’ to. They have their own supervising therapist so that nothing is held exclusively by just one person, and the emotional baggage keeps moving away from the epicentre.

It’s all too easy, however, to make yourself the fill-up station where your one to one relationship becomes the only thing that helps, and your meetings become the only time a young person feels relief. You become essential to their health, which – as you can guess – is essentially very unhealthy for them and for you. This dependent relationship drains you and creates mixed expectations within your own family life. It also confuses young people, unhelpfully establishing you as a self-perpetuating depersonalised coping mechanism. None of this is healthy.

This can happen easily in two ways: First, by not giving your young people the tools to grow on their own, including teaching them how to operate in a wider church context. Second, it can happen by making yourself constantly available without giving safe and clear boundaries.

Losing sight of clear boundaires

Speaking of clear boundaries, I remember having a young person call me at 2am on my personal line, while I was asleep in bed with my wife, because he was worried his girlfriend was about to split up with him. Fine, this is a big deal to a young person – but it’s not a 2am big deal to me and my wife.

Herein lies the problem with an unchecked incarnational model of youth ministry. It has an inherent mugginess of boundaries that provides a multitude of unsafe situations. You don’t want to argue with a family member at two in the morning, because you’ll both say stuff you don’t mean. Always being on is something parents do for a set number of years and they make a lot of mistakes as we all know. That close family relationship, all-warts exposed, cannot extend to 20-some young people 24 hours a day. It’s a recipe for the happening of terrible things — and also sets a precedent for those young people, allowing themselves into unsafe behaviours and times with other people in their lives who perhaps they shouldn’t trust.

There are a few bare necessities that youth workers require: Regular feeding, a comfortable place to sleep, fresh bedding (and underwear) and a frequent change of water (or redbull). There’s something else we need as well, though:

Space.

Space away from young people, church families, young people, school carparks, young people, the senior pastor, young people, church elders, young people, the treasurer, oh and young people. Youth workers need times when they are not ‘on.’

Some supporters of the incarnational model of youth ministry, however, advocate for making every single part of their life open and available for any reason so they don’t miss any potential opportunity to minister. They have an open-door policy for their entire lives, and they make sure that people can contact them in any way, at any time, for any reason. No space and no boundaries.

Often Jesus Himself is pointed to as an example of this by being always available to His disciples. But Jesus often withdrew away from everyone just for space so He could reconnect with His Father and refocus on His purpose (Lk. 5:16; Matt. 14:23).

Being always open to young people is not only a drain on your health and family, robbing you of your effectiveness, but it also creates very vulnerable times and spaces. Being alone on a phone to a young person at private hours, having them come into your house when you’re alone, regularly meeting with them in quiet spaces, and prolonged private message conversations can create levels of dependency and exclusivity that are simply a nightmare waiting to happen. Things are easily misconstrued and misunderstood in private spaces, especially with a young, hurting and vulnerable person.

To be properly effective, a discipleship relationship needs to have a degree of detachment, neutrality and independence from the person being discipled. This increases objectivity, and limits the unhealthy potential for co-dependence – and gives you far more opportunities to point away from you and towards Jesus.

Let’s do that!

This was an extract from Chapter 2 of ‘Rebooted: Reclaiming Youth Ministry for the Long Haul – A Biblical Framework.’

Photo by Geda Žyvatkauskaitė on Unsplash