How To Poach Your Own People - Lessons I'm Learning The Hard Way
How to Poach Your Own People
Lessons I’m Learning the Hard Way
For 18 years, I’ve helped students and leaders get ready to go do great things. Some have become pastors. Others lead worship, college ministries, men’s and women’s ministries, or serve on church boards. I love those stories. I’m thankful I got to be part of them.
But I’m having to ask myself a question that hurts a little.
How many people did I prepare to lead somewhere else because I never made room for them to grow here?
Our youth group needs people who can pastor, lead worship, build community, mentor college students, and help make decisions. Almost every kind of leadership someone could offer the church has a place in this ministry, too. Yet sometimes I could see those gifts clearly enough to celebrate them when someone left, without seeing how to make room for them while they were still here.
So this year, I’m learning how to poach my own people.
Apparently, some of my best prospects already have my phone number.
This summer, Pastor Daniel Medders asked my intern a question that caught me completely off guard.
“Are you called to pastor?”
We were sitting at a table talking about her future, and I immediately started trying to soften the expectations. Where I pastor, families often have college and career plans in motion years before graduation. They have good dreams for their kids. I get nervous about how they’ll respond if a student begins exploring a call to ministry that changes those plans.
Community service hours? Absolutely. Leadership development? Wonderful. Something meaningful for the college résumé? We can help with that.
But a call that might change the résumé entirely? I was much more cautious there. In my mind their SALVATION was the goal! I think I may have been scared their parents would hold them out of church if I pushed calling to much.
Daniel kept talking about the need for pastors and how we need to be bold about helping students explore that calling. It probably took me two weeks to let that conversation really sink in.
I had been allowing my fear of how someone might respond to make me quieter about what God could be doing.
And once I saw that, I started seeing other places where I had done the same thing.
A worship intern who needed me to believe in them sooner. A young, locally licensed minister who needed me to stand up for them when it mattered. A student exploring a call to ministry while I was already thinking about sending them off to college.
oof...
There have been people who found their place somewhere else, and only then did I recognize gifts that had been right in front of me. I had been looking for how they fit my idea of the ministry. God may have been growing something in them that would have changed my idea of the ministry.
That’s the part I’m learning the hard way. It costs me my feelings. It makes me admit that I don’t always know best and that trusting God includes letting him do something I didn’t plan.
Poaching your own people starts with looking at them again.
A couple of years ago, Pastor Friedeman challenged me to have more “I see in you” conversations, including with my adult leaders. He wasn’t challenging me to find more compliments or make something up. He was challenging me to help people see what someone else sees when they look at them.
Recently, a young man moved to town and started attending our church. He heard me preach one Sunday and mention that I was the youth pastor. A few weeks later, he was in our First Steps class for people moving toward church membership.
Over lunch, I learned that his gifts lined up with things I had been looking for. He didn’t arrive with every qualification. He was willing to learn, commit, and serve. I wanted to help him find a place where he could contribute and stretch what he thought he was capable of.
What a rock star he has been. He shows up. He communicates. He follows through.
I saw gifts God had given him for our church, and I told him about them. Then we gave those gifts somewhere to go.
That’s something I can actually practice: take someone to lunch, learn what matters to them, notice their gifts, and say out loud what I see. There may be a future leader sitting in a membership class who hasn’t considered that they could be part of the future I’m praying for.
Then I have to make an invitation that reaches beyond what they’re doing now.
I have a student whose future had been headed down a very defined path. Her family had dreams and plans, and they were preparing for that direction together. Through Wednesdays, Sundays, camp, NYC, retreats, Bible studies, and other places she encounters God throughout the week, a seed of calling has been growing in her life.
After that conversation with Daniel, I started leaning in more. I began bringing her onstage, giving her smaller opportunities to lead, and asking her to share her story. In a few weeks, she’s scheduled to help me preach. We’re meeting to work on how she can share what God is doing with other students.
Last week, she approached me wanting to know why she wasn’t on a leadership team that was about to meet.
I had already nominated her to lead our evangelism team. I explained that I had been imagining her in that role. But if being part of this other team mattered that much to her, then I needed her on both!
She was pursuing an opportunity to lead. I needed to listen to that, too.
She’s also pursuing college at Trevecca, a Christian university here in town. I’m excited about the opportunity for her to explore her calling there. And I love that “in town” means she has the possibility of continuing to grow as a leader in the church she already calls home.
Graduation can change her role without ending her place in the mission.
That’s part of the invitation I’m trying to make to our seniors and former students through internships, camp counseling, serving as sponsors, and other leadership opportunities. I want them to know there is a future here that includes who they’re becoming.
Of course, the invitation only means something if I’m willing to make room.
If somebody tells me they need to leave to grow, I need to take that seriously. Every ministry has limitations.
Limitation is
an invitation.
When a leader reaches the edge of the opportunities I’ve offered, that’s an invitation for me to grow, too. A student’s calling might ask more of us than our current plans allow. An adult’s gifts might open a ministry we haven’t imagined yet. Before I assume they need another place, I need to ask whether I’m willing to help this place grow.
Was the ministry out of room, or had I stopped making room?
It’s not about making people stay. It’s about making sure my limitations aren’t the reason they have to leave to grow.
Did I recognize what God was doing? Did I affirm it? Did I give them meaningful responsibility and walk with them as they learned? Did my vision have room for the leaders I was helping develop?
Dr. Dwight Gunter shared something his mother used to say: people are much less likely to criticize their own work, so put your leaders to work. What sticks with me is the ownership in that. People ought to have a real hand in building the ministry they’re being asked to care about, including the freedom to help make it better.
I’ve done youth night a thousand times. Literally. How many nights have I spent leading the leaders while they led the youth?
There’s no rule that says I can’t be in the trenches with students while my leaders take the wheel. Their growth is my growth. When they step into a new adventure, I get to learn how to lead in a new way, too.
And our students gain more people who can lead, care for them, and help them follow Jesus. The trust we’ve built over years gets passed on through people who are now building that same kind of trust with somebody else.
Sometimes, poaching your own people starts with reconnecting with somebody who already left.
During my sabbatical, my wife and I visited a church between Orlando and Tampa. We were worshiping freely on a Sunday morning without having to work. A beautiful thing.
Then a former student I hadn’t seen in five or six years nearly tackled me.
I hadn’t even known she was there. We started catching up, and I told her I was coming back Wednesday to visit the youth pastor and see their ministry.
Because who really stops working on sabbatical? And when else does a youth pastor get to travel around checking out other youth groups?
She told me she was a middle school small group leader. We made plans to catch up that night.
On Wednesday, I was almost in tears watching her minister to her students. Afterward, she introduced me as her former youth pastor and one of the reasons she got into youth ministry. A seed planted more than a decade earlier had been growing somewhere I didn’t even know to look.
We got to talking about our old retreats and trips. Her church wasn’t going to Nazarene Youth Conference that year. Two of my leaders with registration spots had recently moved to Kentucky.
I could feel an idea coming together.
After getting my pastor’s permission, I reached out. I needed a youth sponsor. I had just watched her lead. I had discipled her for seven years. I knew what she could bring to our students, and I told her so.
About ten rounds of God moving things around later, she was at NYC with our group.
Recently, she flew back to Nashville and spent a Wednesday night sharing her testimony and helping bring an SEU worship night to our students. She works as an SEU admissions counselor. Our students can’t wait to see her. They talk to her. After church, I watched her spend an hour having a real conversation with a student in the parking lot.
I MEAN, SHE DOESN’T EVEN GO HERE!
And yet God has given some of her leadership back to us. She has a ministry and a life in another place, and somehow she has become this honorary leader in ours, too.
I couldn’t have organized that story. But I could recognize what God had grown in her, tell her what I saw, and make a specific invitation.
That’s what I want to keep practicing with the people God puts in front of me: look again, name what I see, invite them into something bigger, and grow enough myself to make room for them.
My job is to make disciples who make disciples. That includes students, leaders, and parents whose gifts may take this ministry further than my plans ever could. I want my people to know they can be leaders who are led, and together we can raise up people who will lead somebody else.
Sometimes the limitation was me.
The lesson I’m learning the hard way is that sometimes the limitation was me. I was asking God to grow leaders while expecting them to fit inside a ministry I already knew how to lead.
Their limitation was my invitation: to believe sooner, make room, and trust God with what we could become together.
I still want to send people out to do great things. But I want them to know they can grow and do great things here, too. And if that means I need to grow alongside them, that’s an invitation I want to accept.
Turns out, learning to poach my own people means letting God change the pastor they already have.