Category Archives: Youth Ministry

Life After “Cool Church?” A New Vision for Youth Ministry, Part 2.

Posted in Youth Ministry by

If you have been following this conversation feel free to scroll down and begin reading at “What we could do instead?” In case you are just joining the conversation, this post begins with an introduction to the problem: The current “relevant” youth ministry model has led to the abandonment of the church by 20-somethings.  

Twenty Five years ago Stuart Cummings-Bond predicted in a Youthworker Journal article (1989) that ghettoizing youth away from the rest of the church would have disastrous results. He called it “the one-eared Mickey Mouse.”  Today we see the fruit of this model in the abandonment of the church by twenty-somethings. Will we do things differently for the next generation arriving to our programs? Or is it ok with us that young people leave the church when they leave our student ministries?

Churches continue to invest heavily in youth ministries that are parallel to and “cooler” than the adult church – The youth pastor’s vision of what the big church could become. This model gave us the youth service as a place of evangelism for the young and learning lab for the larger church. In this model, the larger church first opposes then ignores the “radical” things happening in the youth room. At least for a time. That time typically ends when we call a new pastor. Then the new pastor, invariably a former youth pastor who learned attractional ministry in the youth room, redesigns the main sanctuary and re-packages the worship model to resemble what he was doing in the youth group a decade earlier…only with a larger budget and fully-functioning coffee house. Has it occurred to you how remarkably similar your new sanctuary looks to your old youth room? Similar decor, similar music, similar technology, similar dress, identical message.

And we wonder why youth grow bored with the adult church, or perhaps worse, remain in church but as shallow and self-absorbed as they were when they arrived in youth group as 15-year-olds 15 years ago. As the Mormon bishop referenced in a previous post “We make givers. You make takers.” (https://thegospelside.wordpress.com/2012/09/30/mormon-bishop-to-the-mega-church-thank-you/)

Why did we do this? Because it built fast numbers. Segregationist youth ministry is pragmatism at its worst. We used to be able to say, “Well it is working. God is using it, so who are you to judge?” However, the data has piled up: Cummings-Bond was right. Segregationist student ministry is a short-term, non-solution that threatens the very future of the evangelical church movement.

What could we do instead?

Research tells us that by segregating students into homogenous age groupings we are emptying our churches. What if instead of giving students what we think they want, we gave them what they need: A praying, confessing, Scripturally faithful, Father trusting, Jesus following, Spirit surrendered, faith-practicing community that wants to help them get their hands dirty for God?

As Youth Ministers we are first and foremost practitioners. We usually want to start with “How-to.” However, it is important that we start with the philosophical change of directional we need to make. Here are four research-supported places we could start…

1. Change Our Questions: Move from “Is this effective?” and “What are the people at ____ Church doing?” to “Is this biblical?” and “Does this produce disciples who love God enough to make other disciples?”

2. Change Our Priorities (Steve Wright, Rethink, 2008) Do we want to build a youth ministry or youth ministers? As Detroit pastor Harvey Carey says, “Youth ministry should be youth who do ministry!” What would we have to change to have Kingdom priorities? Here are four priority shifts I think most of us need to make…

A. God: Shift from self-centered (God for you) to God-centered (“God. I. We. They”). God is our starting point. It is God who is Glorious and worthy of all praise. Salvation is at God’s initiation and at God’s Expense. We are welcomed into God’s family…the community through which God’s realm will be revealed. Our welcome of others comes from God’s welcome of us and should always result in a passion to serve a lost and hurting world. We start with God and move toward the world. Our calling from God drives us in mission rather than the world’s need.

B. Family: Shift from separation from parents -to- a partnership that equips parents. View parents as the primary spiritual influence on kids- because God does. (Deut. 6:6-9)

C. Church: Shift from…

  • Segregated ministries–to-championing the church. Youth participate in every aspect of the church. When “big church” meets, the youth are there.
  • Cultural relevance-to-Scriptural faithfulness.Why do we do what we do? If it is “because it works” rather than because it is Scripturally faithful, let it go.
  • Student ministry-to-student development. This is about relationships: A life on a life, 7 day a week program.
  • Excitement as dominant emotion-to-Wonder.

D. World: Shift from mission is something I do “for me” -to- “I am an unashamed proclaimer of God’s Kingdom in word and deed.”

3. Change the outcomes we work toward in our ministry: disciples that make disciples. “That we may present everyone complete in Christ.” (Col. 1:28)

Is our first motivation to create high numbers or highly committed disciples? A group must be large enough to be a group, but what would happen if we grew by being the deepest thing rather than the widest thing?

What does discipleship look like? Kenda Creasy-Dean, in Almost Christian, describes the characteristics of committed disciples.  Highly committed students have:

  • A Creed they know and believe
  • A Testimony of God’s action in their lives
  • A Community they are supported by
  • A Mission t0 give their life to
  • A Hope for the future

Does your youth ministry program toward developing those characteristics in students?

4. Change our programs so that they build students toward our goals

  1. Equip families.
  2. Teach (parents, leaders, kids) the excitement of historic, life-changing faith in Christ.
  3. Use games & humor purposefully. *By all means, enjoy yourself in church. I am not saying faith is not enjoyable, just that it isn’t entertainment.
  4. Use the youth group experience to create environments where the energy is in the students experiencing God (vertical) and loving and challenging one-another (circularly) rather than toward the leadership on the platform (horizontally). After all, Even their teachers don’t spend the hour lecturing any more!

Next up: Principles & Core Values for the Ancient-Future Youth Ministry

Life After “Cool Church”? A New Vision for Youth Ministry, Part 1.

Posted in Youth Ministry by

One of my assertions in the “cool church” post that went off last week is that the abandonment of the church by twenty-somethings is precisely the outcome that the youth ministry methods we have used the last twenty years should  have been expected to produce.

Many wrote to express the opinion that the problem lies with the “message” in youth ministry. It is too political or too weak or too strong. Since there are churches that have retained their youth whose message has been too strong, some that have had almost no message and some whose message was too off-topic, I do not think the message is the primary issue. I have a different take. As I see it, the issue, for the most part was not the message but the method. Many youth ministry’s had a clear, Christ-centered message and youth leaders that had great friendships with young people. The issue is that we had all of that in the youth room. We never bothered to connect the youth program with the parents and the larger body of Christ meeting in the main sanctuary. We created an affiliation bond with the youth program but not the church. 

Youth Leaders, pastors and parents, does that resonate with your experience at all?

It took me years to notice the results of what we were doing. I had to see the data to have the “aha!” It is a problem faced by both the parachurch and church youth programs: We created affiliation bonds with us, the church in mission, rather than the church local that would sustain their faith through life if they did not stay with us into leadership.

The data is undeniable: we can preach an uncompromising message, but if we do it ghettoized from the larger church we end up with students who never have a reason to cross the sidewalk into the sanctuary. As the Mormon bishop said in my “Mormon Bishop” post, “We make givers. You make takers.” He was so spot on it made me cringe.

What if instead of doing youth “services” at the same time the adults are meeting, evangelism based on getting students to come to our really cool thing rather than going to them and turning our youth program into Nickelodeon shows with a Jesus message attached – with far too much effort in the light shows and technology that no longer impress kids anyway. What if instead we gave our youth pastors a new job description:

1) Partner in ecumenical evangelism-taking teams of evangelists from our local church to the high school in partnership with the other churches in the community.

2) Train your people called to youth to make them phenomenal discipleship leaders-those ecumenical evangelism ministries are freed to stay in their sweet spot- evangelism, and the church goes back to what we used to be great at: Christ-centered disciple-making.  

3) Resource parents to help parents become the front line of spiritual formation in the home that Deuteronomy 6 and Psalm 78 say they should be.

4) Integrate students into the main service. …Students on the usher list, the music team, hospitality, greeting, reading scripture, leading congregational prayer, giving testimonies…for the right ones, even preaching. 

5) Organize multi-generational “soul friendships” where the older pray for, read the Bible with, and care for students.

6) Participate in multi-generational service projects with students and adults…not just youth leaders, the whole church.

Those things that foster students owning the church as their own. They happen by necessity in the tiny churches without youth programs…the ones who keep their kids at twice the rate of those of us with our expensive programs.

David Kinnaman is brilliant, but “You Lost Me” is about getting back the 20-somethings who left. As Kinnaman says, “We lost them.” They are gone. And we will keep losing more young people by perpetuating our errors on further generations of youth.

Now is the time to make important changes. The evangelical world has 35-50 year olds in church to connect with. In the mainline we have 70-90 year olds. That is a much harder gap to bridge. The evangelical church can start now…or you can wait twenty years until you are where the mainline is today.

Anybody up for a challenge?

Is the way we are doing youth ministry emptying the church?

Posted in Millennials, Relevant Church, Youth Ministry by

My “Cool Church” post has become a love it/hate it item on the internet. One critique is that I am simply wrong in the premise students drop out of church when they leave our youth groups.

What does the data say? Back in 2009 Brett Kunkle gave a good summary of what is now undeniable: 7 separate studies say the same thing – Youth abandon the church after high school. http://www.conversantlife.com/theology/how-many-youth-are-leaving-the-church If you doubt him, how about David Kinnaman’s new book about 2o somethings abandoning church, “You Lost Me.”

Youth worker: Cowboy up! We have to face the facts. It is easy to blame the church, the parents, and the culture. But look at the data carefully:

-61% of churched high school students graduate and never go back. (Time Magazine, 2009)

-78%  to 88% of those in youth programs today will leave church. (Lifeway, 2010)

Think about it: All students leave church at 61%. Students in youth programs leave at 78-88%.  Implication: Students attending a church with NOTHING for them attend church at a 50% higher rate in their 20’s than if they went to a church with one of our youth programs!

Youth pastors, we might actually be harming the numbers for churches without youth programs. We are giving our lives to students and it turns out that NOTHING might have been better for their participation in the body of Christ as an adult. If that doesn’t make the hair on your neck stand up then nothing will.

Please hear me: I am NOT saying we should fire youth pastors and disband youth groups. We know from history and common sense that unled things die. I am also not one of those saying that youth ministry is “unbiblical.” Greg Stier wrote a good rationale for why YM is both biblical and vital; http://www.youthministry.com/articles/leadership/defense-youth-ministry.

However, if we have integrity we will look honestly at way students are leaving the church when they leave our ministries. We need to look at…

-The unproductive segregation of youth away from parents, the larger body of Christ and leadership in the main worship service-something most of us who are pastors would never risk because “excellence” would suffer. We need to help our students become participants, “givers” to the community of faith; not just “consumers” of religious services.

–What we count. Do you count “decisions”? “Attendance?” When I was on Young Life staff I kept a copy of all of the numbers our national organization gathered from us: clubs, campers, and conversions. I noticed that there was a fourth number that actually accounted for the other three: the number of leaders we had that went into the world of students. I found a ratio in effect: For every leader that would go to the campus to meet students in September, we had 7 students in “club” by December, 4 campers in June and 1.5 “commitments” by July. Our stellar Regional Director, Marty Caldwell, looked at several years of this data and immediately pointed out a truth: We become what we count. We need to count disciples who make disciples. We need to count the right things if we wish to develop the right things.

–Our failure to resource parents – the ones God has actually given “our” students to. Two resources: Steve Wright: ReThink and Rob Reinow: Visionary Parenting.

We can do better. We can teach our students to love doing the things Christians have spent 2000 years loving doing: To read the Bible, study it, live it. To love and serve their friends, and talk about their life and their faith…their convictions and even their doubts. We can model for them participating in and building real faith communities. We can build students who know how and why to pray…who worship and walk with God. We can make students who live grace-filled lives towards others and make different decisions for themselves than they would have because they are amazed at God’s goodness and mercy and love for them. There are good resources for this out there. Ken Moser’s, Programs to Go will give you 18 youth group meetings to get you started. http://www.effectiveyouthministry.com/programs-2-go.html. I have a “What we do in a discipleship group” that I can email you.

To quote Paul, there is “a still more excellent way.” It is an ancient way. A rooted way. A connected way. A way that resources parents and makes leaders “soul friends” to students and helps them live lives of faith and love as they walk with God and serve the church and the world.

Big changes take a great deal of courage and effort. But the fruit will be eternal. And that will be so worth it.

Questions about Confirmation

Posted in Liturgical Church, Youth Ministry by

What is Confirmation? “Baptism is God saying, ‘You are mine.’ Confirmation is our agreement back, ‘I am yours.’” In other words, Baptism signifies you are a Christian and Confirmation that you have chosen to be a disciple, and as such, are committed to your local parish.

Age of Confirmands?

  • Confirmation is a person’s adult faith decision, so older is better than younger.
  • Students experience their life so much differently after starting high school than before that they tend to discount their very real childhood faith experiences. Youth leaders will always help students to honor their previous concrete-operations faith decisions, but we are swimming against their experience of themselves.
  • They must be old enough to have experienced life’s challenges in order to have a faith experience that sustains them through those challenges.
  • Students must have the developmental maturity to make a lifelong adult decision…when thought of in those terms, 7th grade is pushing it. Please start no earlier than that!

Goals?

  1. To make sure students are evangelized not just catechized. Best practice: Begin Confirmation with summer camp! Our Chapel Rock junior high youth camp has a “What is a Christian, and will I be one?” message sequence. The camp program was specifically designed to be a Confirmation pre-retreat.
  2. For kids to own, “This is my God (Christian), my tribe (Episcopalian/Anglican) and my family (parish).” Best practices:

        -Connect old and young. “Adopt a granny/grandy/prayer-partner/buddy programs leave generations connected to one another in ways that give momentum to the entire church.

–Integrate kids into worship at every level possible…segregating in worship builds religious consumers.

–Make church family-friendly. Church exists for the glory of God and the building up of the body of Christ. (Eph. 4) The guiding principle is that those stronger and wiser in the faith serve the weaker and newer. Blend musical forms and instruments.

–Resource the parents to be Christian leaders in the home: Make Confirmation a parent program as well as a student one!

–Make sure the curriculum teaches “why” rather than simply “what.”  We want students to understand how Anglican traditions, sacraments and liturgy deepens people’s walk with Christ. Confirmation should be evangelism that leads to a life of discipleship. Even the best curriculum needs translation into your context. Currently many are using Confirm Not Conform.

–Give them the tools to sustain a lifelong faith: walking with God, living a life shaped by faith, serving others, being able to deal with life’s challenges.

Planning Priorities?

  • Plan Confirmation as part of the larger “Roadmap of Faith” to take an un-churched person to mature faith:  1) Meet people, 2) Tell them about Jesus 3) Help them to grow, 4) Plug them in to church, 5) Train them to join us.
  • Plan your program around experiences: Start Confirmation with camp. End with a service trip. The parishes with the most retention when students become adults came from the our churches doing start/end programs.
  • Make Confirmation at least a school year in length.
  • Teach a positive message. Often we use language that intentionally differentiating us from other Christians. When students get to college we often lose them to evangelical and RC churches when our kids don’t know how to respond when asked, “Do you know Jesus?” (In Arizona, RC youth programs have adopted evangelical language.) When we start with the universal Christian message and emphasize: “We are like other Christians, but with the following distinctives that will bless you,” we teach our uniqueness without having students think we kept something from them when they get to college.
  • Create ownership. The local Catholic diocese is moving towards students having a drivers’ license before starting Confirmation. They put it on the student to drive themselves to the meetings to insure ownership. Find ways to create ownership in your Confirmation program.

Whatever Happened to Sin? The Message in Today’s Youth Ministry.

Posted in Youth Ministry by

There is a lot of conversation floating around the youth ministry world these days around the topic, “What is our message?” More particularly, “What do we say about sin?”

Is our Gospel a negative message? “You are a dirty wicked sinner and better get saved from the hell you deserve!” Or a more positive Good News? “You really are a nice person. God loves you and all the other nice people-who would be even nicer if they only knew the niceness of God.”

Actually, in most circles we don’t much hear the clichéd negative message anymore. If there is a motto in youth ministry today it might be, “Lower the bar.” Make it simpler, more approachable, less scary, less commitment…less message. “Less is more”, seems to be in the water of youth ministry.

What do I think the message ought to be?

Having done rural, suburban and urban youth ministry, with rich, poor and middle class kids of virtually every ethnicity, it is obvious that context matters as to what needs to be emphasized in our message. Urban kids involved in the underbelly of our culture know that they are sinners. As a group they tend not to believe that God could possibly love them, given the things they have done. On the other hand, suburban kids, who have been told that everyone deserves a participant medal and are steeped in the philosophy that God is really lucky to have them on His team, those kids could use a good message of “you aren’t really all that.” Don’t we in youth ministry tend to give students the message they most expect but least need to hear?

Youth pastors tend to fall into two camps: those feeling the compulsive need to convert people, and those apathetically giving up on Jesus’ call to invite those outside the faith into discipleship. How can we be faithful without being compulsive? Overall, I like it when we proclaim a message of positive realism.

Positive realism really is the Christian story. There is a reality to brokenness that is undeniable. But there is a positiveness to what God wants to do in the world in us and through us. One can be patient with people if we actually believe the Christian narrative: God made us for himself, and, although we have wandering hearts, God is wooing us back and taking possession of that which was always his. Jesus died for our beauty not just our brokenness, and God is now calling us to a role in his transforming work and, in the end, it will all turn out for Good.

That is a message to take to the streets, my peeps!

Memo to Senior Pastors: What to do about these Youth?

Posted in Youth Ministry by

Sr. High youth are the church’s best bellwether. They have just learned to think critically and have neither the patience nor the filter to be very kind in their critique. Help your parish both listen to their voice and lead those young people toward adulthood as committed Christians in the Anglican tradition. Here is how:

I. Love and like the youth and children – the same way you love and like the adults. Talk to them like adults. Smile at them. Ask them how they are doing. Be their friend. After you are their friend, ask them about their faith. The more connected they are to you, the more the more connected they will be to the church…and the more other adults will imitate what you model. Bill Rhodes in Phoenix used to do “pizza with the rector” after church to discuss the sermon. A pile of kids loved their little Anglo-Catholic high church as a result. It wasn’t that they loved chant. It was that Father Bill loved them and took them seriously.

II. Help the adults to be aware of the “messages” we are sending. Students believe what they see. When students don’t like church it might be because they are picking up the messages we are sending and believing them. When we act like worship isn’t important they believe us. When we treat them like they are not important- they believe us. When we invest in leadership for every group but them- they believe us. When we don’t teach them how to worship or engage them in the planning and leadership of worship- they get the message. When we segregate them into another room and have a low-bar for spiritual and life-expectations, they get the message.

III. Have students in big-church. We are not against age-appropriate groupings, but we do not want to segregate students during worship and give them “their own service.” If we do that we will turn them into consumers. Consumers never come to church to give. They only come to get. The outcome data on the mega-church is that youth groups that “give kids what they want” develop students who always want to be served and drop out of church when asked for adult commitment. So we want students in church, but we have to make it accessible to them. See below:

IV. Worship with excellence- We are not merely putting on a good show, we are worshiping Almighty God. Youth want us to treat worship with joyful reverence.

A.    Teach the historic faith in word and ritual. Robust, energized faith is on display at our fastest growing churches. We are about something greater and grander than ourselves – and worship reminds us of that!  We have to explain our rituals…and not just to the youth. Our traditions are deep and detailed. When students know the “why”, the “what” has meaning and power. Many adults have forgotten why we do what we do to. Vision is leaky- we have to keep repeating it.

B.    Make worship family friendly. Episcopal Church researcher Kirk Hadaway, in his report “Facts on Growth” said that one of the factors that growing churches have in common is drums. One can be family friendly without drums…but don’t rule them out either.

C.     Have youth participate. Have them serve in every way canonically possible. Make sure you explain and train without talking down.

D.    Preach your socks off-and theirs. Stephen Cady, whose Ph.D. project is on “Engaging youth in the church,” was quoted in a recent ChurchNext interview. In his research among Methodist youth groups, he found that 100% of the youth disliked the sermon. The ten largest churches in America are all led by former youth pastors. That is no an accident. Speaking to youth made them good speakers. Nick Knisely, bishop of Rhode Island and an effective preacher to young people said, “I learned to preach at youth camps. Three things are important: Be their friend first, be conversational but energetic, and if you believe the Scriptures it gives them permission to believe the Scriptures.” One great source for youth friendly preaching is Andy Stanley’s book “Communicating for a Change” – I would never go to the guy’s church, but 15k people a Sunday go to hear him preach because he is good at it.

E.     Music?

  • Quality over genre. I have heard people argue, “Youth want bands!” and the opposite, “Youth want contemplative!” We keep camp data on what high school and junior high students like liturgically. Excellence is the key more than genre. People like Chad Sundin (folk liturgist) for the same reason people like Joel Joa (hip/hop contemporary): Both genuinely love God, genuinely care about others and genuinely do their craft with excellence. We get all hung up on “we need someone who can do Taize” or “We need someone who can do rap.” The genre of music is not as important as doing it well. The excellence of the music, the musician’s walk of faith and their care for people are the critical pieces. Passion, excellence and genuine relationship are the keys to students!
  • Hymn’s rock. Contrary to popular belief, almost all students like the great hymns – because they are deep. Similarly, lame praise music is lame and good praise music is good. Consider using hymns with modern instruments and arrangements.
  • Blend genres. Done well, this is the Holy Grail! Most youth have at least 10 different genres of music on their iPods. For the most part, they don’t listen to too much of any one style. I have seen urban kids love excellent classical music and chant in Episcopal Churches (although most can not take too much of it) and kids raised on classical Anglican music loving Christian hip/hop (although they probably can not take too much of that either).
  • Music should be missional. Offer music selections from the musical genres listened to by those you want to have in church.

V.  Help parents understand their need for a Christian education. In Soul Searching, Duke researcher and Episcopalian Christian Smith, tells us that the weak faith of our students is a direct reflection, not of the theology of the church, but the parents. We need to resource parents to be the primary spiritual influencers of their children.

Bonus tool: “A Lasting Faith” – the mission and vision for youth ministry in our diocese, is a research-based outline for building a youth program that reproduces Christian leadership.