my middle school guys small group has been…uh…challenging this year. i think i could summarize it best with:

i really like each of the guys individually; but i don’t like them much collectively.

i come to consider it a ‘good night’ when we have a 5 – 10 minute bit of focus and honesty (out of our 60 – 80 minutes together). and we’ve been having a ‘good night’ about once every 6 or 8 weeks.

after a particularly bad night a few weeks ago, i was understandably discouraged. i got thinking a bit about what we’re trying to accomplish, and it dawned on me that we’ve been forcing our agenda (i have a co-leader) on the guys, hoping they’ll buy into it, rather than discovering and responding to their desires.

i called my co-leader and said something like:

we only have about 5 weeks left with these guys before they leave us for the high school ministry. i don’t want them to look back at our two years together and think, “that was ok; but marko and tyler seemed frustrated most of the time.” i want them, at the very least, to think, “my small group leaders loved me, and our group was a place i looked forward to being every week. it was like family.” if we had another full year together, maybe we could rethink this in some other way; but at this point, i think we’d be wise to consider what it is that they guys want out of this group — why do they come? — and meet them at their point of desire, rather than forcing our own spiritual/educational agenda on them.

after some back-and-forth, we decided to have a birthday party that week (for all of them — it wasn’t anyone’s birthday, really), and play some games, and make sure we left a good amount of time to pray for each other (one of the only spiritual practices they’ve taken to).

as i write this, we have 3 weeks left. we bought them each a copy of The Way Bible (a great bible for high schoolers and young adults), which we’ll give them on one of our last nights. and i plan on continuing this re-orienting for our limited remaining time.

(by the way, it’s clear to me that my thinking on this was totally informed by Morgan Schmidt’s excellent book, Woo.)

i was massively revising an old seminar on middle school ministry while in new zealand last week, and updated some stuff i didn’t find complete enough anymore. i had previously taught an axiom: “quality middle school ministry always takes place in the context of meaningful relationships and meaningful ministry opportunities.” it wasn’t that i completely disagreed with that; but it didn’t feel like the whole story, or the best way of expressing the whole truth.

so i came up with this:

great middle school ministry takes place at a 3-way intersection:

• feeling stuff (belonging and safety)
• doing stuff (particularly serving, but also the sort of ‘doing stuff’ that provides a shared experience for relationships of meaning and a sense of agency)
• saying stuff (“verbalization of belief is more important–or a higher priority–than accuracy of belief”)

last night, all the small group leaders from my church’s youth ministry had an end-of-the-school-year thank you dinner and wrap up. the high school and middle school leaders ate together; but then we slit off into separate ministry groupings to debrief the year a bit. here’s a little pano of our middle school small group leaders, minus about 5 or so who couldn’t be there last night (you can click on it to see it bigger, if you’re so inclined):

the main thing we did was share stories (i’m a BIG fan of this, btw, as stories communicate all sorts of embodied truth). once the ball got rolling, everyone had something to share, and there was a beautiful sense of “i am not alone.”

i was, by far, the oldest one there (there are a couple other leaders my age, but they weren’t at the meeting). and i was also one of the only leaders there with more than a few years of experience. but, honestly, this was one of the hardest years of middle school ministry for me in a long time. i shared with our team that i really struggled, second guessed myself, and wondered what was going wrong. i vacillated between being completely stoked about my guys and being completely annoyed by them. my group was too big, and too impossible to focus, and too easily distracted (yes, more than normal for middle school guys!), and too quick to speak on top of each other (almost constantly).

as i was about to share with the other leaders last night, a metaphor for my experience of being a middle school ministry volunteer this year jumped into my mind:

i used to be a golfer. like, i used to golf about 2 or 3 times a month. i read articles about golfing. i bought golf clubs. i tried out new courses. and, yes, i even watched golf on TV (and played a lot of tiger woods golf on my xbox).

but i was never a good golfer. at my best, i was a mediocre golfer. i probably would have had to triple-down on the number of times i played in order to see a difference in my game, and i wasn’t willing (or able) to do that. so, consistently, my golf games looked like this:

approximately 10 – 20 shots in a row would totally suck. i hit the ball too short. i shanked it. i putted past the hole and right off the green. i lost it in the woods or the lake. i topped it, hard, and the ball dribbled forward about 10 feet. occasionally i even completely whiffed–swinging my club with focus, intention and expectation, but not actually connecting with the ball. somewhere between the 7th and 12th bad shot in a row, i fairly consistently had the same sorts of thoughts enter my head or exit my mouth:

this game sucks.

why would anyone subject themselves to this? and i’m paying for this! what is wrong with me?

there is absolutely no enjoyment in golf beyond the cigar in my mouth and the beer waiting for me in the clubhouse.

but, then: deep into my discouragement and disillusionment and fatalism and plans to quit, i’d hit a chip shot onto the green and it would drop in the hole. or i’d somehow hit a fairway wood just right, and by some miracle, it would perfectly curve around that tree in the middle of the fairway and catch the leading edge of a downward slope, adding 50 feet to my shot.

and when i hit one of those shots, well, i couldn’t stop then! i either had to take another shot to see if i might be on some sort of streak of brilliance (or i’d suddenly become a fantastic golfer, somehow), or i took another shot because i just didn’t care, since i was basking in the joy of what had just occurred.

THAT, my middle school ministry friends, is what this past year of leading an 8th grade guys small group felt like for me, a 33 year veteran of middle school ministry. there were absolutely stunning moments of beauty. flashes of insight. spaces of deep honesty and vulnerability. DMZs of listening to each other. absolute god moments.

there were less moments of awesomeness than there were moments of annoyance; but there were just enough to keep me from quitting.

and here’s the litmus test for me: i stop and think of each guy’s face, picturing him in my mind’s eye. and i pay attention to what i’m feeling. and i can honestly say that for each one of them, my internal response is “oh, man, i love that kid! he is so awesome. i have so much HOPE for his future.”

so, yeah, i’ll take another small group next fall.