Psychologists point out how our expectations have a profound effect on our experience of reality. In youth ministry, expectations can shape how we define success, set goals, train leaders, and plan our annual calendar. They are the difference between leaving a youth event feeling excited and encouraged or getting home and asking Claude for 25 options for “careers after youth ministry” (asking for a friend, of course).
Youth ministers often live with tension when setting expectations. We feel compelled to set a high bar in our ministries because we serve an all-powerful God who raised his Son from the dead. However, we are also acutely aware of the myriad of challenges youth ministries face in the modern world. Particularly when we are walking through difficult seasons of ministry and are not seeing a lot of fruit, we are tempted to adjust our expectations by lowering the bar of success to protect ourselves from becoming too discouraged.
An Unlikely Scripture about Setting Expectations
As I wrestled with both my own expectations as a student minister and how to set my leadership team up for success, I discovered an insightful biblical principle. I needed to lower expectations of myself and my own capabilities for seeing spiritual growth in immature teenagers, while raising expectations of the power of the Holy Spirit to sanctify them and create spiritual vitality.
To my surprise, I learned this principle is in Paul’s classic teaching on love. “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor. 13:4-7).
In this passage, Paul yearned for the Corinthian church, and by extension, all churches, to adopt a relational posture of love. If the church is a construction project, love is the brick and mortar that builds it up. Paul’s list of descriptions about love is not filled with arbitrary adjectives. Rather, they are prescriptions for how Christians are called to relate to one another in love.
Expect to Bear and Endure All Things
Verse 7 lays out the principle for setting proper expectations: love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. To bear and endure means that we should expect that working with students will be extremely testing, trying, and discouraging. Whenever I talk with someone who is exploring youth work, I tell them that a crucial part of the job isn’t in the job description. You need to be able to consistently and patiently put up with teasing, insults, and bad behavior from students without taking it personally or being offended. Teenagers sense insecurity in youth leaders like truffle-hunting pigs can smell a white truffle buried three feet underground. And many will dig into you with the same persistence and ferocity. Having proper expectations about bearing and enduring through difficult seasons is a key way God’s love flows through youth ministers.
Expect to Believe and Hope All Things
At the same time, youth leaders must expect to do more than just bear and endure. They must also believe and hope all things for them. The words believe and hope are far weightier than saying, “I choose to believe the best in others,” or “I just really hope things turn out well for them.” They describe a spiritual practice where we adjust our expectations of another person according to the power of the gospel and the sanctification of the Holy Spirit.
Imagine how Paul’s own encounter with Jesus inspired his perspective. The man who once zealously opposed the Christian movement went on to say: “Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ” (Eph. 3:7-8).
Believing and Hoping in Our Students
To believe and hope all things means to look past the things one must bear and endure in particular students. We must lay aside the low expectations we often place in our own capabilities and human effort. Rather, youth ministers must choose to see students in the way God created them for his purposes.
This means asking, if God got a hold of this student and transformed them by the Holy Spirit, what would their potential be? What would be the potential in our community if God did this with each and every teenager? Then you start to use your imagination to envision specific ways this would look in a student’s life. You pray (believe) for those things and even speak them as words of encouragement directly to that student. To hope all things means to expect that God will begin to transform them according to the working of his power.
I am forever grateful for my youth pastor, Thom Cunningham, who believed in and hoped in me. For seven years, Thom endured a loud, disruptive, inappropriate, habitual line-crossing and rule-breaking junior high and high school Michael. Despite my immaturity, he sat me down when I was 16 and told me he believed and hoped God was calling me to be a pastor. He spoke that into me and prayed that into me. By God’s grace and the working of his power, that’s exactly where my life led.
Aligning Our Expectations to the Gospel
Lowering our expectations of ourselves and raising our expectations of God takes the pressure off us to create disciples and build a successful, glamorous youth ministry. Then we are able to place our expectations in the proper place: Jesus. This moves us beyond setting expectations according to human wisdom and our best judgment. It points us to greater hope in a God “who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us” (Eph. 3:20). It sets our hope in the future, renewed creation where we get to see the fruit of God’s work. We’ll see the individual students we once endured, but never stopped believing in, radiating with the glory of their resurrected life in Christ.
At Rooted 2026: Biblical Humanity, we’ll return to Scripture to rediscover what God says about us. Together, we’ll explore the story of humankind: created by God in his image, separated from God by sin, redeemed through Jesus, and brought into new life together as members of the body of Christ. Join us as we deepen our understanding of who we are—and help the next generation discover their place in God’s story.
