One of the many opportunities I love about my work is that I get to meet lots of people from different churches. I get the privilege to compare and contrast what is going on in God’s kingdom across our local area. The truth is, when it comes to youth ministry, we are not in a good place.
This worries me.
Not because I think youth ministry is the most important area of church ministry, although I could certainly argue for this, but because there is a generation growing up without significant interaction with God’s people and without understanding God’s love for them, and the massive difference this makes for individuals and society.
It is all too easy to get caught up in church life as some kind of religious process. We start to go through the motions rather than continue to be earnestly seeking God’s guidance and provision by his Spirit. In this blog post, I want to suggest five growing trends that I am seeing where this might be the case. All of these point, perhaps, to fears that we have rather than the endless opportunities that God offers.
1. It is acceptable for a church not to do youth work
If the statistics are true, in Thrive’s area of England almost 80% of churches, across the denominations, don’t have any young people of secondary school age. My big fear is that churches are starting to see this as acceptable, as if this is just the ‘way it is’ and there’s nothing we can do about it. It is almost giving people permission not to bother because no one else is. Surely this statistic should drive us in the opposite direction?
In a recent church growth report, it was a fact that every growing church had a youth ministry. This doesn’t claim that a youth ministry is essential for church growth, but it does indicate that if you want your church to grow, having some kind of youth ministry will be part of what is needed to develop such a culture. So why would any church think it is ok not to grow?!
2. Numbers rule
We measure our primary success by how many young people we have in our groups. Of course this is an indicator but we don’t measure our Sunday services by this criteria. The important point here to note is that it is reasonably straightforward to attract a good number of young people to a group if it is purely social. You are much less likely to get similar numbers when it comes to running discipleship groups. Does this mean that the social group is more effective than the discipleship group? Of course not! People fear putting the horribly titled ‘God-slot’ in social groups for fear of putting the young people off. What are we running the group for if we don’t want them to hear about Jesus?
Numbers are a useful measure but it should never be our primary measure. We should measure steps of faith, Bible engagement, spiritual conversations etc.
3.A full rota equals success
Fill the rota up with helpers and leaders and you’ll have a successful youth programme. No! Many churches think that this is all there is to youth work.
This is so far from the truth.
Youth ministry is not about rotas and programmes, but about relationships and interactions. Of course, programmes and rotas are important to enable groups to function but this is not where our main focus should be. The danger being that we just want to get through the session and get home rather than looking for the opportunities God might bring us in that particular session. Leaders don’t need to have lots to do, they need time to chat with the young people.
4. Faith is taught not caught
Some youth leaders run their groups with the impression that as long as we quote enough Scripture people will become Christians. They can give theologically accurate talks and lead biblical discussions but there can be no sense of what difference it makes to the individuals’ lives. It is no good to teach about a particular godly characteristic without enabling the group to encounter God for themselves. Otherwise we are in danger of teaching Christian morality rather than a supernatural relationship with God the Father.
People need to experience God’s love for them not just understand the concept.
5. First rule of youth club is: we don’t talk about youth club
If your church has a youth group, go up to someone on a Sunday morning, who has nothing to do with the group, and ask them what they know about the group and what goes on. I guarantee most responses will be blank. They have no idea. Most probably can’t even tell you the day and time of the group.
For some reason we don’t tell others about what is going on with our young people. And we wonder why youth ministry can feel lonely and isolating sometimes!
If we want people to be praying, if we want more people involved, if we want people looking out for potential leaders, if we want people interacting with the young people, we must raise the profile of what is going on.
What’s more, if we are not talking about youth group, the chances are the young people aren’t either. They copy what they have modelled to them. If the young people aren’t talking about it, their friends are not going to hear about what happens and miss out on discovering God’s love for them. This is not acceptable, which takes us back to point number 1.
These are just five issues I believe we have to rectify and challenge. There are, I am sure many more. But if we could just start with these five, just imagine what difference we might start to see in our youth groups and in our churches.
Which of these 5 issues do you recognise in your situation?
What would you add to the list?