The process of creating a youth ministry book in Myanmar started almost two years ago. Like most things, the end product was way different than the original idea. When we first thought of creating a book on youth ministry we imagined a single author who had youth ministry experience and was probably a youth ministry professor in a local bible college. We actually found someone with those credentials who was living locally. I had talked with him multiple times about taking his lecture notes and adapting them to be in a book form. He said it was a great idea and started working on it. As we got closer and closer to our first Myanmar MOVE National Youth Pastors Conference it was evident that he wasn’t finished and he had changed his mind about the future of the book. We philosophically differed about the result and implementation of the plan and decided to part ways in the partnership. That book is still not published. That was our first attempt at creating a youth ministry book and it was a failure.
Failure though leads to new ideas about implementation. So we decided that it was best to get a group of authors to contribute to the book. We would organize a meeting for all of them to come and talk through the plan. That meeting was in March of 2011 just 6 months ago. At that meeting only 3 of the 10 people we invited showed up. Though there were few, they were ready to take the journey to create the book. The others who hadn’t shown up said they couldn’t make it but wanted to participate. In the meeting we decided the topics of the book and the deadlines for completion of the chapters. We would have 10 different topics that discussed different aspects of youth ministry.
The deadlines came and passed without one chapter being turned in. The second deadline came and passed without any chapters being e-mailed. I frantically e-mailed and called all the potential authors trying to get reasons for the delays. As all people in ministry are, these leaders were really busy and some of them realized they did not have time to write a chapter for the book. We had to replace at least three of the original authors. So by May we still didn’t have anything turned in. I gradually met up with each of the authors and was told, “I missed the first deadline so I thought that meant I couldn’t write anymore.”
Finally we received our first couple of chapters from the writers. Somehow a misunderstanding occurred when talking with them. They had written the chapters intended for youth and not youth pastors. So we had to go and sit down with them and give them more detailed guidelines for their chapters. They all wanted detailed explanations about exactly what their chapter should include. So we did just that. We gave some of them rough outlines and others we sent a long list of questions they should answer to know what stuff they should cover. One of the authors didn’t feel like he could write well. So we sat down with him and did a video interview that Mary later typed out. They all really moved forward once they fully understood that we were willing to walk through it with them and explain exactly what we were looking for. This is a side note but there are no youth ministry resources in Myanmar and people in the church don’t write books unless it’s a biblical commentary. This was a new thing for all of these guys. They hadn’t written books that had factual research in them. They had written more from their own opinion and from the stand point of biblical interpretation.
We started the editing process on about 4 of the chapters that came in and sent them back to the authors to add more information or correct some of the edits. By the time September came we still only had about 4 chapters and were missing the final 6. We were supposed to go to print on September 15th and hadn’t read and edited half of the book! Slowly they came in and Mary was able to spend a lot of the final week reading and editing the chapters. We ended up with a total of only 8 chapters but the book will be over 100 pages long. We made our deadline barely but we made it.
In our first book project we learned a lot of lessons. Below are bullet points of what was learned:
- If you are writing a book with specific chapters it’s smart to give each author a one page outline of their chapter including goals and objectives
- Youth that are leaders and Youth Leaders are a completely different thing
- Deadlines are good as long as there is Grace
- Choose the right people to participate in projects especially if you have tight timelines
- Make sure everyone types their chapter in the same font, same software application and the right margins. Some languages fonts and formats aren’t compatible.
- It is good to have multiple authors for a pioneering book project because 80% is better than 0%
- Persistence is needed to finish projects of any kind but especially when working with 10 different people from a different ethnicity who are very busy. Don’t be afraid to call them on what they had promised but give them grace to have time to finish
- Sometimes something doesn’t exist because no one is organizing it and being a good cheerleader
About Ryan
