The morning sun was already doing its thing as we sat on super-heated metal chairs in the church parking lot.
I was a 19-year-old college freshman faced with the daunting task of keeping four junior high boys interested in a Bible story while sitting under the sizzling San Fernando Valley sun. My introduction to teaching Sunday School was no picnic.
Without the benefit of a roof over our heads or even the shade of a tree, about all we managed to do was make friends. Their names were Dan, Jeff, Dudley, and Jimmy. More than 40 years later, I am still in relationship with three of the four.
Dan Boyd is now the pastor of a large church. His brother, Dudley, is a successful businessman and Christ-follower. Jeff Miller is a church administrator. The only one I’ve lost track of is Jimmy.
Confessions of a Struggling Youth Pastor
Fast-forward four years. I had spent the time in a Bible college where I carried a full load of classes, worked a full-time job, and wedged in weekend time to goof off with those boys and others who joined our slowly-growing youth group.
Upon graduation, I was a wet-behind-the-ears “theologian” with lots of fancy ideas about church growth and disciple making, while missing the very obvious dynamic of disciple making already at work in my life.
I read a lot for pleasure. One of my reading schemes included reading the entire book of Acts at least five times a week throughout my entire sophomore year of college. I studied church-growth books and bought curriculum for our church education programs. But I never really understood the power locked up in simple disciple making. I knew that it was something we were supposed to do, but it didn’t seem all that important to me.
Strange as it seems now, once I began to understand the importance of disciple making, I still didn’t recognize that I was already doing it. That’s because I was doing it without any real intentionality.
My job description as a youth pastor required me to sit behind a desk all day in a church office (wearing a suit and tie). Obviously, not much was going to happen in that situation. But at night, and on Saturdays, I simply hung out with the kids in our youth group—and they were growing in the Lord. You might say I was getting paid to not do very much while actually fulfilling my job description during my free time.
“You might say I was getting paid to not do very much while actually fulfilling my job description during my free time.”
I was a struggling misfit. I wanted desperately to change the world, but everything in my paradigm was upside down. Whenever I prayed about my job, my entire focus was on the programs we ran. The actual disciple making was just something that came kind of naturally and involved a lot of fun. There were serious moments and lots of opportunities to teach the deeper meaning of Scripture as it applied to individual lives.
But this was all informal. I would have never called those kids my disciples. I might even have thought you were a little crazy if you called them that; but in reality, they were my disciples. I may not have said it, but my life fairly screamed, “Follow me as I follow Christ” (see 1 Corinthians 11:1). And the time I spent with them, away from church activities, was the most significant contribution I made to God’s kingdom during those years.
Learning from a 16-Year-Old
If my life was upside down job-wise, it was about to get more complicated in a way I could never have imagined.
My young brother-in-law, Tim, got into some trouble at school a couple of times. My mother-in-law was a widow, a deaf-mute, and was also going blind. The State of California, in all its wisdom, decided that Tim would be better off living with my new wife and me rather than with his own mom. Worse, if we couldn’t house him, the state would place him in the foster care system—not a pleasant option for any young person.
Ruby and I were just 20 and 21, and we had been married for only two years. We were still trying to figure out life, our marriage, and my job. Life was no walk in the park, but suddenly everything got even tougher as we were forced to learn how to parent a 15-year-old kid struggling to make something of himself. We loved Tim, but we had little wisdom when it came to meeting his needs. We needed help, and we needed it in a hurry.
I remember forcing him to wear khakis to school instead of the low-hung Levi’s with cut-off belt loops he was used to. We were hoping that a change of uniform would keep him from being accepted with the “lowrider” kids, like those he had spent time with in his recent past. We also helped him get a newspaper route so he could gain a sense of worth by earning his own spending money.
“If my life was upside down job-wise, it was about to get more complicated in a way I could never have imagined.”
The paper route included a hidden motive on our part: If he earned money, we could then fine him whenever discipline became necessary. We figured that if he worked for the money, the fines would be more painful, hence more effective.
Both strategies worked. He caught on to the house rules so quickly that I doubt he lost even $5 to the fines. And the lowriders rejected him out of hand (it seems that clothes sometimes do make the man). This all came together in the form of pretty good behavior and few strong possibilities for friendship, except for hanging out with the kids at church.
Enter Dan Boyd. For some reason, Dan gravitated toward Tim. The class cutup in school, Dan was very outgoing and made friends easily. He simply focused friendship on a guy that was trying to figure out his world. (Dan was one of the original four boys that day in the Sunday School class under the broiling California sun.)
Tim and Dan’s acquaintance burst into a tight friendship almost overnight, and it was only a month until Dan led Tim into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Today, Tim is a toy-design engineer at Mattel. He lives a solid Christian life, is an elder in his church, and has raised his own children to serve the Lord.
I remember wondering why Dan was so successful with Tim. As I pondered the quick turnabout in Tim, I was faced with the sobering fact that the class clown had done something in a month that the budding theologian might have never pulled off.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Dan’s secret was friendship. He spent time with Tim. Tim became his disciple, though none of us would have used that word at that time.
“Tim became his disciple, though none of us would have used that word at that time.”
Being fairly bright, it didn’t take long for me to put two and two together and reach four. Watching Dan with Tim, I realized that any real success I had seen in my own short years of ministry came more from hanging out with kids than it did from the programs we ran.
It was my own friendship with guys like Dan, Jeff, and Dudley that God used as building blocks for ministry. Those boys and a couple of others (now including Tim) had become my disciples. It was through them that we enjoyed whatever growth we experienced. In other words, we were doing something right while looking for something splashier, because the real thing seemed too simple. 
An Embarrassing Lesson
While I was still processing the Dan/Tim axis, I met a guy who would drive the lesson home even further. He was a newly appointed youth pastor working in a gang-ridden neighborhood in East Los Angeles. His group of kids expanded from nothing to more than 200 in just a couple of months.
You need to understand that when we met, I was still pretty full of myself and my formal education. You also need to know that this young man had no formal theological training at all. That he wasn’t properly trained only served to make things worse for me. I was offended—actually, you might better say jealous—by his success in spite of having no seminary training.
I remember pressing him for his program. I wanted to know the secret of the rapid growth he enjoyed while I was pastoring just 30 kids after a period of five years. This successful young man seemed kind of confused by my use of the word “program.” It was foreign to his view of the ministry. Finally, he said something to the effect of, “Well, I guess my program is to get the kids praying, reading their Bibles, and spending lots of time talking about what they’ve read.”
His answer was a total put-off to me. I didn’t want to accept that something so simple, run by an undereducated person, could vastly outstrip all the fancy tools I had at my disposal.
You guessed it. The Holy Spirit eventually got to me through that guy. I met him only on one occasion, and I don’t even remember his name. But his example really stung. I just couldn’t get him out of my mind. Spending lots of time being turned off by his story only made me think that much more about his words. Finally, I managed to link his success with those young gangsters to Dan’s victory in Tim’s life. After that, it didn’t take long to discover that prayer, Bible reading, and talking about Scripture were the keys to unlock some doors in my own life.
“It didn’t take long to discover that prayer, Bible reading, and talking about Scripture were the keys to unlock some doors in my own life.”
Lessons Learned
The youth group in our church soon turned into a disciple making machine. We were admittedly slow to jettison our fancy programs. But we added hanging out, centered on the Bible and prayer, to everything we were already doing.
A very dead 6:00 am Tuesday prayer meeting for high-school students suddenly burst into life when we all started sharing “what I got from my Bible this week.” That prayer-and-share meeting soon became the launch pad for an everyday invasion of our high school with humorous Christian literature and outreach in the form of intentional friendships. We grew numerically as the kids were growing into ministry. I was making disciples, and it became natural for them to make disciples of their own. Looking back, I guess that is what you could say of Dan and Tim—I had discipled Dan while hardly understanding it. It was only natural that he would disciple Tim after he brought him into a relationship with Jesus.
That prayer-and-share-the-Bible time was so effective that I recently got a Facebook message from a very godly woman who told me it is the reason she is solid with the Lord today. She is involved in ministry and says the reason for that is because I made her read the Bible every Monday night during high school. She went on to admit that during those days she only read her Bible on Monday nights so she would have something to say on Tuesday mornings. We brought her into the scriptures, and the Holy Spirit caused life to grow in her heart.
