Youth Ministry leaders and followers during the COVID crisis

In my last blog post on leader/follower relations in the church that I am interning with this summer, I discussed the fluctuation of leader and follower roles throughout the entire church structure — both the staff leadership structure and the situations where followers can become leaders on committees. In this blog post, I will be discussing the specific leader/follower relationships within the Youth Ministry, where I am specifically interning. The Youth Pastor who is the one who the rest of the staff reports to is very engaged with both the staff members and students. He understands the needs of all the followers underneath him and is very flexible to address these needs. He also is mostly informal, making him very approachable, which helps in youth ministry.

Leader follower relations for the youth program have been distinctly stunted by the COVID-19 crisis. Because in person ministry has been postponed, and every meeting has been moved to online formats, there has been a significant decrease in engagement, which is always a concern in youth ministry. Zoom fatigue is real, especially for high school and middle school students, and that applies to engagement with the church as well. Most summers are full of trips — either mission trips, conferences, or just fun trips that help build community — and a lot of students are saddened by the missed opportunities that trips provide. This means that for leader/follower relations, there is less chance for leaders to actually engage with students — due to a lack of involvement based on the strange circumstances of this summer. This summer in particular is a major weakness in terms of youth ministry.

That being said, I have witnessed the leaders of Youth Ministry, including the Youth Pastor and both the Directors for High School Ministries and Middle School Ministries have been very creative in planning and programming for this summer. We have developed a “subscription box” for people to join so that they get a little gift from the youth program and hopefully they will stay engaged despite the lack of in person activities. The creativity involved in planning this summer has been very impressive, especially because the way that staff has to communicate also mostly online — no office visitations are allowed. Ministry can often be draining and it is made more difficult by the COVID-19 crisis, but the church I am interning with is adapting as well as they can.