After Five Years This One Thing Holds True

"Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain." - Psalm 127:1

Of all places this verse applies, none may be so clear as in the work of ministry. I have definitely seen this verse to be true in my own work in youth ministry. It's been 7 years that I have paid attention to this, 5 years since I started 456, and I have seen class after class of students come and go. I remember in my earlier days (although these days are still 'early days'), I was very eager to build my own vision. I had my own naive ideas that were founded on legitimate desires that the Lord had put in my heart. But who could blame me for trying in my youth?

That is one of the great perils of youth ministry, particularly when students are put in leadership. Many students often don't have the spiritual or emotional maturity to lead diligently before the Lord. But the Lord chooses the youth anyway! Really, youth pastors are stewarding the Lord's calling over the younger generation, teaching them to lead and live rightly according to the hour they live in. Sadly, many youth pastors do not empower their teens with this vision because the youth pastors themselves don't know the Lord's calling over their students. As youth leaders, we have to get with the program. The Lord is calling our youth, and are we contributing to that calling or distracting our youth away from their eternal destiny in the name of entertainment?

Back to the verse, in my earlier days, we envisioned great evangelistic outreaches in the auditoriums of high schools. We wanted to take a full worship team, get some skits and students to give their testimony and put it all in the high school auditorium and get all of our friends saved! We just never could seem to get it together years ago, but just last year Angela Tsang from Blue Valley Southwest showed up and put together The Point Of Life Outreach in the Blue Valley Northwest auditorium! Students were saved and now we're doing it again in February 2013!

Four years ago we put together a rally called the Heal Our Land Project to unite all of the school's campus ministries and spread the vision of revival in our schools. We held these rallies in almost every youth group in Olathe, but hardly anyone showed up for an entire year! Now all of the sudden a new group of student leaders approached me with the exact same idea and now we have the "Night To Unite" this Saturday where FCA groups and prayer groups from schools all over Kansas City will be uniting in an evening worship and prayer at a local church, again years later.

Four years ago we also launched theWall, which for a season was a 6-hour prayer meeting to unite students in prayer every other week (or sometimes monthly) for an entire year. We had full worship teams, traveled from church to church until we landed at a prime location on Metcalf Ave., yet hardly anyone showed up. Those who did show up were some of the most faithful and dedicated students I will ever know, yet I knew the Lord told me that we were in a season of preparation, learning how to worship and pray without numbers so that we wouldn't be distracted when the numbers came.

Those earlier days, even though I tried many things perhaps in my own strength, trying to build the ministry myself, served to prepare me for these days of out-of-control expansion. Now when a student shows up with an idea, chances are I've done it before and can help them make it much better than when I did it.

It is clear to me now that we are in the season of the Lord building the house. The landscape of the high schools in Kansas City just changed in one summer. The freshmen that are coming into our schools are serious leaders that are hungry for a move of God. I wouldn't say that my labors in the earlier days were "in vain," but they definitely did not have the momentum that the Lord has given us today.

I sometimes feel like Isaiah who said, "I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and in vain; Yet surely my just reward is with the Lord, And my work with my God" (Isaiah 49:4). It is never in vain, but it sure is nice to have the Lord's help!