Written by: Eric Kuiper
When we hear the word training, we often associate that with the idea of teaching people how to do something. If you get job at Starbucks, they train you to make lattes and frappuccinos. It’s about technique and repeatability.
If the hope is simply that you get employees to produce a widget of some kind then training people how to do something is a great idea. But what if you hope for something more for the people you are training? What if instead of making a widget you’re seeking transformation in people’s lives? Then what should training look like?
The Western Great Lakes Region has a monthly gathering of all the staff who are in their first two years along with a number of other Church Partners and Mission Staff. During these times we do consider how we do things: how to give a Club talk, how to sell a camp trip, how to plan fundraising events, how to build a strong committee. But more than simply talking about how we do these things in Young Life, our Regional Training Group focuses heavily on why we do these things.
So much of what makes Young Life what it is, is its way of doing things. Young Life has some very specific hows. This, in many ways, is a strength of the organization. The method is the brand. Because of this, its really important for new staff to have an understanding of the whys that exist behind the hows.
Often there is a rich history behind the hows. This is why one of the first assignments any new Staff Associate interacts with is centered on the history of the mission of Young Life. To understand where we are, we need to understand where we’ve come from. Young Life asks a lot of its staff—the more they understand why they are doing what they are doing, the more thoughtful, the more passionate and the more committed they will be.
But there is another kind of space we work to create in exploring why we do things: the space to question.
There’s a story someone once told me, I’m not sure if it’s true, but it makes a great point:
A young woman was in the kitchen helping her mother make dinner. Her mother asked her to cut the end off of a roast, season it and stick it in a pan. The young woman asked her mom why she was cutting part of the roast off and throwing it out. Her mother said, “That’s the way you do it. Your grandmother always did it that way.”
Not satisfied, with the answer, she pressed her mother again, “But, why? Does it help the meat cook better?”
“I don’t know,” her mother said, “It’s just the way we’ve always done it.”
“I’m calling Grandma,” the young woman stated.
A few minutes later she had Grandma on the line. She explained the situation and asked her why she always cuts the end off of the roast. Her grandmother laughed as she replied, “Because my pan was so small. It was the only way I could fit a roast in that thing. I never do that any more. I’ve got a much bigger pan.”
If our new staff is going to lead this mission into the future, it is critical that they are given space to ask questions of why we do what we do. It is only through this type of training that will come to a place of having ownership over the work they are engaged in. But this is not only good for them, it’s good for the mission. Any organization that has as much history and success as Young Life does desperately needs to have a space where the question why? is asked.
In the Western Great Lakes Region we’re committed to creating that kind of space. We’re committed to not only training our staff in the best practices we’ve learned from our past, but also in asking the right kind of questions so that Young Life’s future will be as rich as its history.
Eric Kuiper is the Director of Alternative Programming for Celebration! Cinema, the Executive Director of Into The Noise, an organization creating immersion experiences at major cultural festivals to understand how popular culture forms us spiritually, and is an adjunct professor of Theology + Film at Western Seminary in Holland, MI. Previously Eric was a pastor at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, MI and was on full-time Young Life staff for over 11 years. He is now the Regional Trainer for the Western Great Lakes Region. He and his wife Katie live in house full of blond-haired, blue-eyed boys in Grand Rapids.