How do we go about making a Priests quorum into a successful Venturing crew? I'm not really sure I qualify in any sense to really answer this. I certainly don't consider myself to have successfully implemented Venturing in my priests quorum, yet, although I do feel that we've certainly been implementing many aspects of the program. It is clearly my desire to use the Venturing program as a primary tool for the Priests quorum Mutual activities. I suppose I can say what I've tried and what's happened as a result, as well as what I'm trying to do now. As such, this section will be a mix of narrative and theory.
When Venturing was just coming into existence as its own division in BSA, I was serving as ward Young Men president. I had two priests attending, with a third soon to join our group. It was announced that Brad Harris would be presenting a regional introduction to the Venturing program to all of the stakes in the area as a part of the LDS-BSA relationships meeting. I was curious, and started doing internet research on the program.
There were a few things that I noticed right away that caught my eye. First was the introduction of the Ranger high adventure award program. I really thought that this would spark some interest in the priests I was working with. In particular, I liked the aspect of pursuing proficiency in outdoor skills, including things such as First Aid training and CPR certification. Related to the Ranger award was the Bronze award. Initially, I looked mainly at the Outdoor Bronze as a half-way point to the Ranger. Later, I started looking at the Youth Ministries more closely.
When I introduced these aspects to my young men, they seemed pretty interested in the idea. My approach at the time was to select some aspects of the Ranger Outdoor program, and spend activity time getting ready to pass them off. This included such things as Leave No Trace, Cooking, and Land Navigation. But it never really gelled, and none of these areas were ever successfully tried. The main problem was an inconsistent attendance, and there were many weeks that I had none of the boys attending. In retrospect, I am fairly confident that the problem was not the format of the activity program, and that in different circumstances it may have worked out better. Soon after this, I moved to a different ward.
In this new ward, I was nearly immediately called as Varsity Scout Coach (which deserves comment of its own at some later time). After almost one year, and just as our Team was approaching it's annual summer camp, I was called as Young Men president of this ward. This gave me my second attempt at using the Venturing program.
High school graduation had just recently taken place, and only one of the active priests was still in high school. When the change in YM leaders occurred, the rest of the priests chose simultaneously to attend the University singles ward. (I think they didn't want to deal with my attempting to establish a different structure in the program. They probably would've moved on within a month anyway.) I also had one teacher from my previous team advance to the priests quorum. So I was in a similar situation as before, with only two active priests to participate. (There were one or two less-active boys we tried to work with, but not too successfully, and we didn't really get any invitations of friends to come.) The next teacher to advance to the priests was to occur in six months.
My approach this time was to focus more on the experience areas. I think that this worked a little better. In our planning process, we tried to make sure that we had activities related to different experience values. We never succeeded in feeling as though we had much organizational structure beyond working with the assistant to the Bishop as crew president.
We did have some good activities, and I do feel that our experience helped the young men develop postive character traits (or rather strengthened existing traits). We learned much about trying to have activities with a purpose, and had fun in doing so. In this sense, I feel that this Venturing experience was successful. However, we didn't really have much direct connection to the Venturing program. We did experiment with Parliamentary procedure. The boys actually thought this was great fun, probably because they played around with pretending they were multiple people in the group, as well as a rather bizarre series of items on the agenda. It became clear that the procedure actually imposed more restrictions than providing a mechanism to get tasks accomplished, although I think the skills were important. I think I'll try to still use many of the aspects of the procedure in the future, although not as a complete procedure.
The biggest problem this time through was falling prey to overpredicting what we could accomplish. For example, we had the idea of doing a personal history interview service project for members of the ward. We took some time learning about personal histories, brain-stormed about different aspects of a life history that we could use to prompt memories, and role-played good listening skills. All of this went well. However, when it came time to do the service project, we got no immediate interest from ward members. Nor did the priests really make much personal effort to find the opportunities. (They had ideas of who to ask, but never did it.) I thought that if I could get ward members to show interest in getting this done, then the youth would gladly fill in. Unfortunately, in spite of my personal attempts to get some desire to get volunteers, we never had any members express interest. (I do think the young men would have done it if someone actually asked for the service.)
As another example, we were interested in the Youth Ministries requirement of participating in a cultural program. The method of interest that they seemed most interested in was in creating a movie. We came up with a broad outline of the storyline, based on a story by Sister Ardith Kapp. The problem that came up was that nobody would volunteer to take the basic storyline and create a full script (or even sections of a script). So the idea was interesting to them, but the details became the stumbling block. I'm not sure how to have best helped this. One thought I had was to put the script together myself. At the moment, I think I probably should have let them try to make the movie impromptu so that they could experience why a script is helpful. (Ah, the joy of retrospect.)
My quorum/crew had grown to three active priests and two young men who participated on weekdays. With the introduction of the Duty to God award in the Priesthood session of General Conference of October 2001, I wanted to rethink my strategy for Mutual activities. My first instinct was actually to think of the Duty to God as the program to directly implement. From the announcement in October to the first online references in December, I was excited but in the dark about what would happen. As I started to look at the materials in December, I thought I could use them as a direct framework for the mutual activities.
Although I continued to think about Venturing, I found myself thinking too narrowly about implementation. I wanted to have a crew, but when I talked with the priests quorum assistant about planning for activities, I found us caught up in the trap of thinking in terms of mapping out which Duty to God requirements (they're actually goals, but we were thinking of them as requirements) we could take care of together. While this is not a bad thing to consider, I think we missed a broader view of what we could accomplish.
At this same time, our stake discovered that the ward boundaries would be redrawn the first week of February 2002. All planning of implementation was put on hold. After the ward changes, I find myself still a young men's president (at least partially because I stayed in the same ward as my previous and current bishop). I also have a larger group of young men to work with, as I have five active priests in my quorum, including one Eagle, two Life Scouts (needing Family Life and projects), and two Star Scouts (one of which needing not much more than a Scoutmaster conference and Board of Review). Motivated to a large degree by my contemplations relating to this document, I am more convinced than before that I should try to use the Venturing program as a tool to build our activity program. I'm sure that we'll still find ourselves treading water a bit, I think that we'll do a bit better.
So here's my game plan. First of all, I have an assistant quorum advisor, who has been called by the bishopric as the Venturing Crew Advisor. (I'm a bit reluctant to lose that title, but I think it's not really a problem.) I'm going to make sure that we work to both understand the program. (This is critical, as I intend to move in the summer for a postdoctoral appointment somewhere.) My plan is for my assistant to help make sure that activities manage to get started promptly and carry on, while I take care of the spontaneous and random problems that occasionally arise as a young men president. This should help activities remain more smooth. I also intend to use this opportunity to spend more chances talking one-on-one with the boys, so that we can focus more on their personal goals in a personal way.
Secondly, the quorum size is large enough to have a full crew leadership staff. Positions that I think are particularly important, in addition to the obvious (hopefully) need of a president, include the Vice President over membership (so that we can have youth direction about the individual needs of young men, as well as tracking opportunities for recognition) and the Vice President over activities (to help coordinate the planning efforts of all of the young men). I'm not too worried about a Treasurer, but I think a Secretary is important. I'd also like to use the opportunity to practice committee structure.
As far as activities are concerned, I believe that I will still use the model of planning activities around the six experience areas of Venturing. But I will help make sure that these pay very close attention to the four personal development areas of the Duty to God program. In particular, I hope to give the Venturers opportunities to plan activities that will help them fulfill their goals. However, I'm hesitant to use the planning process to select which goals as a crew we will work on. Rather, I'd like for individual young men to identify goals that they are interested in pursuing and volunteer to plan an activity program around that goal. (In addition to keeping the goals personal, this will help young men qualify towards the Venturing Gold award, by planning activity programs around the experience areas.) I see the Duty to God as a personal program, which the quorum should work together to help members achieve, rather than as a quorum program which individual members complete.
However, I think I will try once again to encourage the use of the Venturing award program to motivate activity ideas. I believe I will encourage the crew to provide opportunities to earn the Youth Ministries and Outdoor bronze concurrently. I see the Youth Ministries bronze as a near-extension of the Duty to God award, and the Outdoor bronze as an opportunity to use high adventure and outdoor activities as a method to practice and experience gospel lessons. I'd like to follow the example of the crew I read about which used the Ranger program as a tool for missionary preparation. (We'll see how much busy high school agendas make this difficult.)
Having been serving in this calling for a few years now, I recognize that it is highly unlikely for this to go entirely smoothly. Certainly, that is part of the purpose, for how will the young men learn what is involved in planning and practicing, without the existence of the failures as well. I think one of the greatest challenges is to remember that this is the process. As an advisor, this will take plenty of practice on my part, to use every opportunity as a teaching opportunity while not making everything a preaching opporunity.