The congregation grew from 250 to close to 500. One consistent brand across 10+ departments. Volunteer teams that were recruited and trained rather than recycled. And the LED wall is still mounted today — the temporary fix turned out to be a permanent front door.
Union Baptist Church
Student Ministry Leader → Youth Ministry Minister & Discipleship Point of Contact · Digital Media Specialist · Administrative Support · Durham, NC · 2014–2020
The result they were getting
Ten students on a Sunday. The youth pastor had resigned, and the volunteers and the students left with her. A church operating on a $4 million budget had a next-generation ministry that had effectively stopped existing.
The system producing it
The ministry had been designed around a person, so when the person left, the ministry left. Underneath that were three more design problems nobody was naming. Communication ran on email and announcements to a demographic that reads neither. Every youth-adjacent ministry — dance, mime, children’s choir, nursery — reported sideways rather than into a shared strategy, so nobody owned the whole. And the programming had been built by adults, for adults’ idea of what students wanted.
What was redesigned
The programming.
I started by asking. Brought the students together in groups over pizza and asked one question: what do you actually want out of this? Then we built that — which required the leadership, me included, to set down our own vision of what it should look like.
The team structure.
I built an A team and a B team. The A team was the core — the people making decisions and serving every Sunday. The B team was the wide bench: thirty to forty volunteers called in three or four times a year for major events and nothing else. The church didn’t have enough volunteers for open solicitation to work, so I stopped soliciting and built a standing roster with a workload light enough that nobody burned out. The B team never felt used, because they were only ever called when the hands were genuinely needed.
The way the team was led.
Baptist tradition runs on structure, and structure is usually the right answer — but I couldn’t recruit and hold volunteers by handing them a procedure. So I built the leadership culture on four commitments — care, commitment, communication, community — and underneath all four, creative freedom granted before it was earned. These are the Four Cs on the framework page; this is where they came from.
The communication system.
I installed text reminders — the church had nothing like it. Weekly reminders, encouragement in between, direct check-ins with students who’d drifted to other churches because we hadn’t given them a reason to stay.
The money.
Our allocation was $26,000 inside a roughly $100,000 next-generation envelope. Not enough to run a year. So I stopped spending it on weekly programming and reserved it entirely for the four major annual events, then funded the weekly work separately — through the youth missionaries and a dedicated youth offering that routed giving straight back into student programming.
What it produced
Sunday attendance went from 10 to a consistent 60–100, with 100 as the floor we held ourselves to, inside a ministry roll of 300–400. The core volunteer team grew from 3 to 10, with a 30–40 person bench behind it. The brand book I wrote became the design team’s training tool, and video promotion expanded from the senior pastor’s sermon series to 44 ministries. Licensed to preach here in January 2014.
And the part I’d point to first: two of the leaders who served with me at Union are on the leadership team of the church I’m planting now. When I called to ask, both said the same thing — what they’d stayed for was the creative freedom. A decade later and across an organizational boundary, the system still holds the people.
“It was a joy to work with Ezekiel for several years while he led our youth ministry. He stands out as a teacher and minister.”