I recently had the opportunity to contribute to The Rooted Blog. Here is a snippet of the article. It was also picked up by The Gospel Coalition over the weekend.
“God has no grandkids,” my mentor used to say. What he meant was simply that no one enters the kingdom merely because their parents were Christians. They must encounter the gospel themselves and respond to it. In youth ministry, we are driven by a passion that every generation needs the gospel. We know that youth ministry is a vital part of the ministry of a healthy church. We’ve also read criticisms of modern youth ministry, including those who don’t believe it should exist. Yet the truth is that the percentage of youth being reached for the gospel is dwindling. Studies by Lifeway and Barna give us alarming statistics. I think it is reasonable to conclude that youth ministry is at a crossroads. Has it been a failed experiment, as some would suggest? Should it never have existed in the first place? Is there a healthy way forward? Which way we turn will impact whether the next generation is in the kingdom or not.
In recent years, I’ve turned my sights towards helping churches minister to teens in non-traditional ways. For more than a decade I’ve been helping small churches do youth ministry, and now I’ve totally changed direction on how I do that. I used to meet with leaders in a small (often rural) church to help them create a scaled down version of what larger churches do. I no longer advocate that. In fact, I specifically tell small churches not to start a youth group, nor to aspire to do what the big church down the road is doing.
Why?
I have found that these churches simply cannot sustain a typical youth program. They start out with excitement and vigor and maybe get a year down the road before things start to fall apart. Leaders step away with no one to replace them. Students lose interest or get swept up by a big church youth group because it’s cooler. Imagine for a moment that you’re a volunteer with limited time and I gave you a book of youth group meeting guides. The plans will work well as long as you have a bunch of students show up. Maybe you see a dozen at first, but then one night only a few students arrive. You can’t run the program because it won’t work with only a few. So instead you go get ice cream together and chalk up the night to “relationship building.” After a few experiences like that, students lose interest because they are not being fed spiritually. The youth group crashes, leaving years before anyone has the guts to try again.
Read the whole article here
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