{"id":1301,"date":"2011-08-09T11:49:19","date_gmt":"2011-08-09T17:49:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/?p=1301"},"modified":"2011-08-11T00:11:44","modified_gmt":"2011-08-11T06:11:44","slug":"in-defense-of-youth-ministry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/archives\/1301","title":{"rendered":"In Defense of Youth Ministry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many “Christian” parents do very little to disciple their children in the faith. It is a tragedy. One group <\/a>thinks that the church has done a disservice to parents by developing youth ministries. In their opinion, youth ministry (as well as any age-related ministry) allows parents to shirk their responsibility as the primary spiritual leader of their children. They have produced a video called Divided<\/a>. While I found several problems with the movie, I’ll point out two:<\/p>\n

1. It is clearly fake. It pretends that some kid is on a journey, when he clearly has already come to these conclusions from the teaching of his parents and pastor. No problem that he has come to these opinions, but he pretends like he is still truth-searching. I am guessing this will be revolting to most thinking individuals.<\/p>\n

2. It does not portray youth ministry for what it really is. It makes it look like youth ministry is all about entertainment or trying to usurp parental roles.<\/p>\n

Like most propaganda (and dare I say even conspiracy groups), it has a lot of truth in it, but throws in slight twists to bring the audience to conclusions which are illogical and unfounded.<\/p>\n

80% of children\/youth leave the church by the time they go to college. I’ve never been a fan of such a statistic. In fact, I want to see that percentage go to zero. But as bad as that number sounds, it may not be as “bad” as it appears on the surface. (Of course that number is bad, but let me explain.)<\/p>\n

I think this number has always been the case. Even in Jesus’ ministry, the vast majority who followed Him did so for only a time. Regardless of our ministry techniques, I think we have to be aware that most simply won’t follow Jesus all the way. If you have a drastically different number for your church, I question if you are truly following Him or have watered it down.<\/p>\n

It’s so easy to water down the Gospel. One way to water it down is to stop reaching the messy, hurting world out there–just take care of yourself and your family. Youth ministry says, “No, we will not isolate ourselves. We will reach every kid we can with the Gospel–even if 80% of them end up walking away.”<\/p>\n

NCFIC<\/a> thinks they have a better answer–get rid of youth ministry. (I was made aware of this group by a post from a youth ministry leader, Marko<\/a>.) Now it is true that many of the issues they present are valid problems that many youth groups face: simply entertaining kids, trying to take the place of parents in discipling kids, etc. In fact, I’ve written about that.<\/a> There is a strong movement within youth ministry to address these issues. That’s one thing I like about youth ministry, among many other reasons:<\/p>\n

1. It is self-critiquing. Youth ministry is constantly changing, because we ourselves see our own faults. Nothing that was brought up in this video is news to youth workers. We are guilty as charged. But I love this about us: We readily admit our failure and seek to serve God more biblically and faithfully. Now a question to the NCFIC<\/a>…could it be that there are just as troubling problems inherent to your philosophy of ministry?<\/p>\n

2. My experience of good youth ministry is the closest thing I’ve experienced to New Testament church. Here are several ways my experience of youth ministry outshines your typical church:<\/p>\n

a. It has been evangelistic. It does not cater to church people. Like Jesus, it is ok with upsetting the 99 to find the 1. I love how so many youth pastors get in trouble with “church folk” every time they accomplish something incredible for the kingdom of God. This latest video might even be another example of that.<\/p>\n

b. It has been focused on discipleship. Most churches are unwilling to truly challenge their congregations. Their goal is merely to give a positive message that everyone will appreciate. My experience of youth ministry, on the other hand, is that youth pastors are doing everything they can to push kids to truly devote their lives over to God. They are not happy with simply numbers in a pew or dollars in a plate. In fact, it’s the only place in church I can think of where we don’t pass around a plate every week, thank God. The messages I’ve heard from youth pastors in youth ministry have always been convicting, challenging, and prophetic. Not your typical Sunday morning sermon.<\/p>\n

c. Lay people do the work of ministry in youth ministries. There usually aren’t full-time “evangelism pastors” or “worship pastors” in youth ministry. We adults who serve in the youth ministry are truly ministry teams, and we’re usually not paid to do so. We don’t have fights over how the money is spent. Youth groups don’t split like churches do. As youth workers, we work. And we work together. And nothing, baby, can tear our teams apart!<\/p>\n

d. Speaking of youth workers, I don’t know of any other group of people in the church who are more sacrificial with their time, money, and energy. I know I am biased here, but I would rather start a new church with the people in my previous churches who were youth workers than anyone else in those churches. 9 times out of 10, they are the most on-fire, passionate, God-seeking, God-honoring, Scripture-studying, prayer-focused, evangelistic, joyous, fun-loving, faithful, growing people in the church.<\/p>\n

e. Youth ministries serve. We go out to our communities and we work hard. Try doing that with adults. They never have time with their busy schedules to put roofs on houses or share the Gospel to people in Mexico or rake the leaves of the widows in the church. But youth groups are doing it all the time. On top of this, many churches don’t provide much financial assistance to youth ministries–and youth usually aren’t old enough to have full-time jobs–so the youth also work very hard raising the money to go on such ministry trips.<\/p>\n

f. Youth ministries are real. We don’t pretend like we’re ok. We regularly confess the problems in our home lives and inside our hearts. We don’t feel the need to be super-spiritual or happy all the time. Unlike Sunday mornings, where everyone is always smiling, shaking hands, and pretending like God is the most important thing in their lives.<\/p>\n

g. Everyone shares. In most churches, the pastor preaches, and the rest of us listen. Not at youth group. We all ask questions, share what is going on in our lives, and laugh together. We’re often sitting in a circle on couches or on the floor, not in pews facing the choir. When we worship, we are less concerned with the quality of the music, and more concerned with baring our hearts before God.<\/p>\n

Youth ministry made a big impact in my life. In short, I believe youth ministry is the best thing to happen to church in the past 100 years. I’m no longer a youth pastor. I’m now the “senior” pastor (although there is no one else on staff at our church, so that makes no sense). My goal is to turn this church into as much of a youth group as I can. In my opinion, youth ministry shows the church just exactly how far it is fallen and where to start in getting back on track. No, youth ministry isn’t perfect. It’s far from that. But it’s the one area of church ministry that should be encouraged and even modeled after–not vilified and removed.<\/p>\n

In my opinion, rather than get rid of them, churches need to become more like their youth groups. Many churches already are. If anything, I say: Youth group all the more, baby!!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many “Christian” parents do very little to disciple their children in the faith. It is a tragedy. One group thinks that the church has done a disservice to parents by developing youth ministries. In their opinion, youth ministry (as well as any age-related ministry) allows parents to shirk their responsibility as the primary spiritual leader […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,4,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-culture","category-the-church-world","category-youth-ministry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1301"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"http:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1334,"href":"http:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301\/revisions\/1334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}