I’ve never been so disappointed. The group meeting was a shambles. Streetwise teenage boys were running rings round poor George - and he didn’t even seem to notice. The teaching time was like a pitched battle. The style of everything was years out of date. ‘George,’ I thought, ‘you should have given up years ago.’

Colin, on the other hand, was a vibrant, ambitious, up-to-date youth pastor. He’d read all the books and been to all the conferences. He arrived on the scene like an exploding bomb; soon everybody was talking about him, and youth group numbers trebled overnight. He spent loads of time chasing up kids, carting them off to concerts, listening to all their problems. He often told them how much they meant to him.

Then, suddenly, one day he wasn’t there any more. He’d accepted a bigger job in a larger church. He promised to come back soon to see them all, and for a while he sent his favourite kids text messages.

But he’s never been back. The kids, disillusioned, started to drop out. Because he’d left unexpectedly in the middle of the year, his co-workers struggled to maintain the impetus. The programme didn’t seem so exciting any more... and soon the group was right back to where it had been before the bomb went off.

When is it right for a youth worker to leave? It’s an important question. It’s all too easy to outlive your usefulness - or, on the other hand, to walk away too early, only to see everything you’ve built up collapsing around your ears. Timing is desperately important.

So if you’ve been thinking recently, ‘Maybe it’s time I finished’ - how can you be sure you’ve got it right? Let’s look first at how you could get it wrong...

Five bad reasons for leaving...

When I took charge of youth work in my present church, I set targets for myself and gave myself five years to reach them. Fifteen years later, some of them have been achieved. By my successor’s successor. 

Those fifteen years haven’t been a fiasco, however! There have been lots of unexpected successes and unplanned developments. One thing I’ve learned is that in youth work, although you need to aim at definite targets, there are so many variables involved that ‘success’ can look very different from the way you first envisioned it!

But if your eyes are fixed too firmly on the goal your first set yourself, you may not notice all the good things God is really doing. Most youth workers spend a large proportion of their time feeling like failures - even when things are really going well. For example, I’ve known too many people who gave up, saying, ‘That’s it! I’ll never win those teenagers over; they just don’t like me’ - only for the kids to say in surprise, ‘He’s leaving? Why? He was all right. We liked him.’

Don't leave because peers think you're too old

There's a general assumption that youth workers need to be young and trendy. Not at all. George, admittedly, couldn't cope, and there are lots of older people who just lose the inclination to stay current with what kids are interested in, and lose the energy to chase round with them at high speed.

But not everybody does. And we need adults of all age groups to work with teenagers. The younger ones are extremely important; they can relate to young people most easily, and serve the role of modelling the next stage in life for them; but especially in an age when families aren’t functioning particularly well, teenagers need Dad-substitutes and Mum-surrogates who will share with them the perspective of a different stage in life. Older youth workers have more experience, more maturity, and usually more wisdom.

After you reach a certain age, there will be a growing, subtle pressure placed upon you by other adults: isn’t it time you gave up and did something more dignified? Too many good workers give in to this pressure. Don’t get out until God calls you out!

It doesn’t do young people any good to see leaders constantly clashing with one another. And if you have an unhappy relationship with one of the team, you may feel it’s time to back out tactfully. But why?

If you walk away from the problem, the message you communicate to the young people (who aren’t stupid, and see more than you think) is simple: God can’t deal with this one - it’s too difficult. If on the other hand you adopt the costly, painful way of addressing the problem directly, and trying to solve your differences together, you may still find it hard to work together, but you’ll be showing the teenagers something valuable: that even Christian adults can find it hard to get on, but that in Christ conflicts can be resolved by grace. It may be the biggest thing you ever teach them.

Of course, it takes two to resolve the problem, and if the other party just isn’t willing to unbend, you may well have to walk away in the end. It happened to me once. But at least you will have given the power of God’s love a chance to transform the situation, rather than just evading unpleasantness.

Don't leave because you feel you're short of ideas

None of us can be brimful of new gimmicks and arresting innovations all the time. Most people who have been in youth work for a while know what it’s like to be absolutely stuck for inspiration. And if you came in as a ‘new broom’, wowing everybody with the exciting and original things you brought to a jaded group, you may well feel panic when you’ve run through your entire list, and they’re looking at you expectantly waiting for the next firework show! But that doesn’t mean it’s time to leave.

Pray for inspiration. Pinch ideas from other places. Do some of the same things with a slightly different twist. But consider this: what teenagers want is not just endless novelty to tickle their bored imaginations. They really want committed relationships with people they can trust. It isn’t your exciting ideas, but your faithful friendship and guidance, which will pay off in the end.

Don't leave because it's time you did a 'real job'

However, while it’s dangerous to leave for the wrong reason, there can also be bad reasons for staying around...

Five bad reasons for staying...

This has been the trap into which hundreds of youth workers have fallen, down through the years. ‘But if you leave, what will happen to the young people? No one else will take it on!’ And so we grit our teeth and sign on unwillingly for yet another year...

But there’s no verse in Scripture which says that a church must have a youth group. And if God intends your church to have one, he will supply the leadership and the gifts necessary for its survival. It’s his problem, not yours. You could actually be hampering the work of God by staying in a position where he doesn’t want you any more!

Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto had a remarkable singles ministry, led by an unusually gifted man. Then he left the church. The leaders decided that there wasn’t anybody else there with the necessary gifts - so they closed the ministry down, to howls of protest from people who wouldn’t have led it themselves, but felt that somebody ought to. Pastor Ray Stedman was absolutely adamant: unless there was someone with the right gifts, God would not bless the ministry.

A while later, someone arrived in the church who was absolutely right. Singles work restarted. And soon it was bigger than it had ever been before.

But if Stedman had capitulated to the pressure, and allowed the original work to continue, what would have happened? It might soon have become a second-rate caricature of its former self. It might have dwindled into such a state that it could never have been revived.

And similarly, I’ve seen youth groups which were once brilliant (like George’s) collapse into a state of dilapidation because people kept going when they shouldn’t have. Often it was for the best reasons; but it was misplaced faithfulness; and the results were ruinous.

Don't stay because you love being a youth leader

Youth leaders have a young and dashing image. People admire us for our selfless commitment. Kids can be wonderful friends, and make us feel much younger than we are. And many of us find them easier to impress than our own peer group.

For all those reasons, many youth workers fall into the trap of building their identity and their sense of self-worth around the job. And so it becomes very difficult to leave, because there goes your identity, too! We need to recognize honestly that our value and status has nothing to do with our work amongst teenagers, but that it depends on our acceptance by a God who made us and loves us. If we ever reach the stage when we need the kids more than they need us - it’s definitely time to get out. Fast!

At first I didn’t enjoy being an ex-youth leader in my church! I was still a member of the Leadership Team, and I had quite a few other responsibilities. But the clearly-defined role - ‘responsible for everything between 3 years old and 18’ - just wasn’t there any longer. People started to ask, ‘What is it you do these days?’ and I found I couldn’t answer clearly.

There is a real loss involved in stepping down from a commitment such as ours. But if it’s the right thing to do, don’t let any such consideration hold you back. God has remarkable ways of deploying your gifts in other areas and bringing you just as much satisfaction through unexpected avenues. (And just this summer I’ve been hired as chaplain to a secondary school. God’s led me back into youth work.)

Don't stay because there are young people who still need help

Guess what? As long as you stay in the job, there will always be young people who need a bit more help. Youth groups never achieve perfection! You have to be willing to allow others to continue the work you have begun - realizing that the responsibility for those kids isn’t yours. It’s God’s, and he has many different agents whom he can bring into play to achieve his purposes in those young people’s lives. You were just one of them.

However, as long as you aren’t planning to emigrate to the planet Saturn, you will still be seeing your former charges. And your friendships with young people don’t have to end just because you’re no longer their leader. You need to be careful - you don’t want to supplant the work of your successor, and become a rival source of guidance and help - but if you work on it together, you’ll find that the relationship of trust and confidence you’ve built with some young people can be a powerful reinforcement of the group’s work, and a real help to the new leaders.

Don't stay because nobody can do it as well as you can

All of this may seem quite confusing. How do we know, then, when the time is right to leave? How can we exit with the least possible damage? And what should we expect to happen when we do? That’s what we’ll examine in another YWI article to come...