Youth ministry reaches a dead-end
After going on the World Race, Gary and Katherine Weston were determined to take Jesus’ model of discipleship to the youth pastorate. A church in the Bay Area hired them and they went to work. But soon they faced situations that stretched the boundaries of their job description.
Katherine describes one in this blog: “Molly graduated from high school last June, and moved into our home immediately following our Guatemala mission trip in July (she was one of the participants). Molly and I meet regularly to read God’s word and pray together, we’re living shared life. ‘Doing life together’, as I’ve heard some say.”
But things grew complicated in ministry and suddenly, early this year, they were asked to leave. Shortly thereafter they were church shopping and rethinking their lives. Sadly, variations on this scenario play out so frequently that we need to ask, “Are these incompetent people or is something broken with the system?”
Most youth ministers just want to disciple young people, but get caught up trying to satisfy too many constituencies and too many competing agendas. Along the way they learn that a youth minister’s job is an impossible one. They’re charged with running a program and keeping the tithe-payers happy. The jaded young people in their groups have a host of other options and show up with a bag full of mixed motives. Just keeping them busy is a full-time job.
And because they’re hirelings who can be dismissed suddenly as were the Westons, they have to take care of business if they want to stick around.
The result: For every tenured youth pastor at a church with a stable, thriving youth program, there are five churches struggling to find their way in what the Who called “teenage wasteland.”
If the youth minister paradigm is broken, it’s better to acknowledge it than to bury your head in the sand. There are guys who are smarter than me diagnosing it and prescribing change. Chief among them is my good friend Mark Oestreicher, who wrote Youth Ministry 3.0. His predecessor, Mike Yaconelli, said this before he died, “Youth ministry as an experiment has failed. If we want to see the church survive, we need to rethink youth ministry.”
Specifically, I see five reasons why it’s broken:
1. Program vs. relationship tension. Youth ministers can’t win. Most are wired and motivated to do relationship. Yet to satisfy their various constituencies, they have to spend a majority of their time feeding the beast that is their program. Many, having studied scripture, understand Jesus’ model of discipling, but are handcuffed to a job description with a deep conflict of interest at its heart.
2. Many are too young. They’re still in their twenties and haven’t answered many of the basic questions that students are asking themselves. Yet they get thrown to the lions with little backup. For example, as covered in a previous blog, there are three fundamental questions that only fathers or father figures can answer. It’s unfair to ask youth ministers to take responsibility that properly belongs to parents. They can be a friend and even a teacher, but few can be the father figure that students need.
3. Misplaced accountability. Parents, perhaps feeling ill-equipped to fulfill the job of discipling that God has given them, shovel pass the job onto someone who has signed a W-2 and can be dismissed on a whim.
4. Parental abdication. The very role of a youth minister enables parents in their dysfunction. Rather than being forced to see and wrestle with the bankruptcy of their own discipleship efforts, their responsibility gets lost in a broken system.
5. Stuck in the culture. Even the best-equipped youth ministers are stuck on a playing field tilted against them. American culture is a spiritual meat grinder set up to undermine a young person’s spiritual foundation. It’s cynical and media-driven and it creates an environment that is poisonous to the life of faith youth ministers are charged with creating. What’s more, because of misplaced priorities, youth ministers have to fight for the time they need to detox the students in their charge.
If you’ve read this far, the good news is, there is hope. But if reality is broken, you have to embrace it if you are to affect change. Of course there are wonderful, encouraging exceptions to the bleak picture I’ve been painting. Some youth ministers, having themselves been discipled, are employed in churches run by boards and pastors who understand all these challenges and have the good sense to empower them. They work in communities composed of intact nuclear families where parents have not bought into the culture, who have prioritized discipleship above academics and sports.
If you’re fortunate enough to be an exception to the rule, then you have a special responsibility to raise up the remnant who will show the next generation a better way.
The rest of you, whether parent, pastor, or pew-sitter, may have diagnosed many of these issues, but still be wondering what to do. When an entire system is broken, no one person can fix it. We all have a role to play.
Pastors: Need to take the long view and themselves get out from behind the safety of their pulpits long enough to disciple parents to not shirk their discipling responsibility. They need to commit to discipling and empowering youth ministers to get away from the program model and back to Jesus’ model.
Parents: Need to repent of wrong priorities and blame-shifting and massively reorganize their lives to fulfill the mandate of “training up a child in the way he should go.”
Pew-sitters: If you don’t have children, you may feel like you’ve got no dog in the hunt, so to speak. But we all have to realize that the church is just one generation from going the way of the church in Europe. One reason revivals happen is because people heed 1 Chronicles 7:14 and recognize that they need to change, that if they don’t change, their current lifestyle will lead them over a cliff.
Pastors who want to change need support. Parents need encouragement. Students need caring relationships. Jesus asked us to make disciples and the place to begin is with our young people.
Youth Minister Strategies
Muddle: You can muddle along. But when the system chews you up and spits you out, you can’t complain, knowing that it was set up to do that.
Incrementalize: You can make changes at the margins. Specifically, spend more time with those who want to be discipled. Go on longer summer short term mission trips. Give your best leaders radicalizing experiences.
Opt-out: One youth minister had one of the top youth ministry jobs in the county. Head of youth ministry for LifeTV church in Oklahoma, he was burning out doing all the program stuff. So he quit a year ago and went to Mexico to serve as a missionary.
The point is, you don’t have to be swept along by the cultural current. If you were called to disciple as Jesus did, determine to find a way to be true to that call. If the youth ministry model has reached a dead-end, then maybe it’s time to look for alternatives.
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If “opt-out” continues to be an option, when and how will change be effected. Certainly Jesus had an “opt out” option. Praise be to HIM that HE didn’t retreat and become a monk (I know … wrong era, but you get the point).
I have been a youth leader at 2 different churches in the past and also worked the creche at one church. Ive now realised that in the “kitchen table” church there is no need for either….its all about family.Friends come with toddlers…they can sit and draw on the grass as parents sit and chat in the garden…no pressure, just loving and encouraging one another, sharing Gods word and meeting needs.Teens can join the conversation, learn from their “elders” ask questions as honest and open as they want and be built up in relationships.
Cant really remember seeing any scriptures in the bible regarding youth meetings or youth pastors? Was God not trying to show us the formular of how it should be in His church when He gave us the example of families?
Just a thought….
Great post! Here’s a link to an article from iMonk called “Five Things That Youth Ministers Need To Hear (and you’re afraid to tell them)”. I passed this article around to every youth pastor I know a few years back.
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/five-things-that-youth-ministers-need-to-hear-and-youre-afraid-to-tell-them-so-ok-ill-do-it
I say…buckle up for the ride! I’ve spent the past 10 years speaking around the country to teenagers. Only recently have I joined a church staff and taken on the enormous responsibility and privlege of discipling students day in and day out. Unfortunatley, the “system” is broke. Sending kids to “youth group” and finding cool things to do so they’ll invite their lost friends to hear a stranger tell them about Jesus, is definitely jacked up. And I’ve vowed that this will not happen on my watch. So…out with the old and in with the new. Discipling students is the only way to be faithful to Jesus’ mandate in Matthew 28. Slowly but surely we’re moving forward. I hope you’re commiting to staying the course and choosing to turn a deaf ear to the voices clammoring for more activities and more programming. Instead, cast a clear vision of radical discipleship and pray that God raises up a few who will accept the call and follow hard after Jesus. Again, I say…buckle up for the ride! Thanks Seth for thinking outside the box and encouraging others to do the same.
Parents are and will be the best youth ministers ever! We need to get back to the Biblical mandate from Duet 6:4-9, where the Parents are supposed to teach their children on a daily basis. The problem with that is, the Parents are not equipped to teach, they are not there spiritually. THEY need to be taught how to disciple their own kids. Think about it, youth ministers spend maybe 1-2 hours if that with a kid or kids per week, and Parents spend, or should spend, countless hours with their own kids each week. Plus, kids will die for their Mom and/or Dad. What I am trying to say is, whatever Mom and/or Dad are teaching to their kids, good or bad, the kids are going to take to their hearts and tuck it away. Trying to change that is like pulling teeth. Why not then, teach the Parents at an early age WHAT to ingrain in their childrens minds? But we’ve always had the Sunday school education wing, and that’s the way it’s always been. The other thing then that will need to be addressed is what to do with the spiritual orphans, I mean the kids that show up at Sunday school and their Parents are not believers. I would say it’s sounds like an opportunity to reach out to the PARENTS once again.
I was talking with a girl desperate for discipleship last night. She said she finally just went up to a nearby Methodist church’s office and ask the lady there if there was anyone who could disciple her. She answered, ” I’m sorry, we don’t have a program for that.”
Forgotten on the side of the road by a pastor who I asked to disciple me. Told him I would sacrifice whatever it took to do it. Eventually found a man willing to. Thank God! “May the dust of your rabbi be all over you.”
Great article, Seth. You’re addressing a lot of things we’re mulling over and praying about at our church right now.
Seth – another clear trumpet ! A.
Good word. And convicting. Since I’m not a youth pastor – but have a teenager – it certainly made me think and then go look up all your blogs on parenting! Pray for me as I pray for my kids and try – on my own – to do the best job I can of discipling my kids … I know prayer is the key.
I love #2. I am 35, I started youth ministry when I was 25. I can’t tell you how much I have learned and grown in those 10 years.
I express Similar view in my blog entry:
Could the church become a community of Fathers? I address the trend of Surrogate Parenting the church encourages, that feed into the culture of separation of the generation.
http://phillipministries.blogspot.com/2009/07/could-church-become-community-of.html
So thought provoking… I remember when I was first considering a life of ministry and what that could look like. I was about 15 I think, and I saw a need to reach out to young women so that when they grew up, they didn’t have all these issues that older women seemed to have to deal with at their big time Women’s conferences. I had this idea, “What if we caught everybody early enough and those kinds of conferences weren’t necessary.” I still like that idea. From my perspective now, it’s the reason why parent’s aren’t discipling their kids. They have their own junk they don’t know how to handle, they aren’t equipped, and they’ve never experienced a true discipleship relationship of their own. It will be key to figure out how to minister to those parents effectively, and quickly. At the same time, it’s just as important to minister to young people as best as we can so they don’t become the next generation of dicipleship-starved adults. It’s a battle with 2 fronts. I love that this is such a big task, we’ll need a big God for that.
after 13 years on church staffs doing youth ministry i decided to put my money where my mouth was…
i’d always told the parents that THEY had the best opportunity to disciple and minister to their kids… as jeremy said above, i saw my kids for maybe a couple of hours a week, whereas their parents, well, they LIVE with their kids. there was no possible way that i could (or at least should) have anywhere near the impact that they have (or should have had). but it was always about the “program.” more glitz, more trips, more fundraising.
7 years ago i left church work and my wife and i are houseparents at a children’s home. we LIVE with them, and it’s just like i tried to explain for all those years. i wouldn’t trade this for anything a church staff position would have to offer…
Great piece Seth, but I am not sure of why you only tell half of your story. I think your readers might hear some of your passion – but you are not really sharing your pain and your frustration – and they might not understand how you weep for so many.
You are sounding like the thousands of pastors across America who say they are ‘discipleship churches’ but yet when asked – they barely can name their own disciples, let alone the discipleship relations that should be filling their churches. “Discipleship” is probably the biggest scam in the church today.
Why are teens not being discipled?
Its really not about bad parents, church committees or senior pastors – its so simple and yet we try to water down the truth. Most youth pastors have never been discipled. They have been in bible studies, small groups, seminaries, mission trips and on and on…. but they have never felt the anguish and the joy of being a disciple. And consequently they cannot go to a conference, hear a talk or read a book and hope to pass along what they themselves never experienced.
And consequently their ego becomes center stage.
No one ever showed them how to disciple the disciplers within their ministry. Their personality, their lifestyle and their dreams will only be attractive to a percentage of a youth ministry…. who then will lead the rest? So many others will come forth to disciple teens if only they are equipped (discipled) and if only the great commission was as Great in their minds of youth leaders as it is supposed to be.
There is a simple test of discipleship.
Jesus walked up to a few and invited them to follow…. the key to discipleship is that he asked them and then he stuck with them for three years. Why do we need youth conventions, training events, books and media hype to get kids… all we need to do is walk up to someone and ask them to ‘follow.’
And so Seth, I guess when you come face to face with the hundreds of youth leaders that respect you and your faith journey – just ask them if they have been discipled.
If the answer is ‘no’ ask them if they would really consider going side-by-side with teens and adults for three years (or forever) and warn them that it is messy. It’s hard work, there will be rejection, rebellion, frustration, failure and of course countless victories and a next generation of disciples.
And let them know that at the end of the day and the end of their life, they will know that they did what was right – they discipled.
Youth ministry, WOW! What a RIDE! Programs, events, bands, lights, Music, drama, and friends: these all important yet mere tools of a wood worker! Each one has a specific reason to carve at the hearts of young people to build excitement to empact. Yet, the eyes of young people today seek friends, as Jesus would appeal. We are Paul and the youth are our Timithy. Love and teach them to love and they will. Allow yourself to be come a friend to youth families. Youth can see your heart through your action and how you live. If is “broke” then fix it, one relationship at a time via parents, staff, musicians, and youth. The Secret is love.
Yes time is not my friend, I have three young girls needing my fatherly love and one more on the way. Building a new youth facility, total hands on, what I can’t do that, yet the families can and will. Many hours, now the spiritual things are a must. Do your youth enjoy themselves?
What ever happened to the fun memories, embedded with Jesus? Create those lasting impressions with friendships. That is where I came from and I’m still here! 13 years in youth ministry and growing more dependant on God everyday. I’m just now learn how to play the guitar at age 37.
The secret I found is loving them all, even if they stab you in the back. You get tougher skin. Even if they gossip about you. Better you, then someone who can’t take it. Even if they quit on you. God wishes to empower someone else for the job. Even if they ask you to leave. There is something greater for you. Even if you must do thing you’re not equipt to do. God will give you the ability or reach out to someone God puts in your path. Even if you feel all alone. Many are their with you or have been, call a fellow youth minister who has been their before.
The clock is broke when it doesn’t change with the time. I believe a church is broke when we don’t change some of our methods with the times, yet keep the message the same. Don’t become as the world, but be a light standing out in this world full of love and willingness to except them as they are just as Jesus does. If they are to change allow God to do that work in them. Empower those who are willing, being aware of their weakness, educating them of their needs from God. I want my time and God’s time to be one.
Love in Christ,
Ashley
Thanks for this awesome post! It needs to be circulated to the masses!! The youth of this generation…and their families need to be discipled…NOT entertained! There are youth pastors out there who get that…I know because I have been married to one for the last 17 years! But it doesn’t matter that I understand this…the Church, it’s leaders, parents, grandparents etc…need to grasp it! Young people today do not need more ‘program’; they need the TRUTH.
one more thought…wish he hadn’t called this a “dead end”. sounds so final! rather, how bout a “rest area” or a “re-fueling” station. let’s stop, re-focus and fill up with truth and then get back on the road…there’s work to be done!