Youth Ministry: Preparing for Failure?

—PJ King

The way we do youth ministry is failing. I am writing this series, Youth Ministry: Preparing for Failure?, because after high school, half of our youth will drop out of the church for good. While there are a lot of positives in current youth ministries, I’m harping on the negatives because something is broken. What are we doing wrong? What can we do better?

Now, take off your easily-offended glasses, put on your discerning ones—and let’s get started.

---

I grew up in youth ministry. From 7^th grade on, I participated in Sunday School, drama team (Sunday afternoon), Sunday night discipleship and Wednesday night events. I always went to summer camp, did all the service projects, went on every mission trip, and went to Disciple Now each February (except that one time I was sick). And I ran sound for both Sunday nights and Wednesday nights throughout most of high school. When it came to youth group cred, I was ballin’.

Having been removed from youth ministry for some time now—and having watched many of my former peers walk away from the faith they once professed—I have begun to wonder: is youth ministry effective? More personally: is your youth ministry effective? How many kids who go through your youth ministry remain in church during and after college? (I know that’s a difficult number for most laity to track, but retention is probably the best gauge of effectiveness.) According to research at LifeWay, if about half of them stay in church after college, then the ministry is better than average. But that’s a lousy average, isn’t it?

Youth ministry, in its original form, was Sunday School, which began in the 19^th century for the education and evangelization of the un-churched and uneducated children and youth of the day. Seeing the success of age-oriented evangelization, parachurch organizations (such as the YMCA and YWCA) were created to network and disciple Christian youth. In an effort to keep the youth within the church rather than parachurch organizations, many churches (and denominations) began to offer similar youth programs.

It was not until the 1940s, however, that many churches began to create the ministerial role of “Youth Pastor” or have “Youth Councils,” individuals whose primary duties were the caretaking of the youth in the church. Then, in the 1980s, youth ministries began to notice the numerical success of “seeker sensitive” churches and adapted the model for themselves. Although many churches have now rejected the “seeker” model at the corporate level, many still maintain it in their youth ministries.

Over the course of 150 years, youth ministry progressively changed from a community outreach tool to a discipleship network to a combination of the two. A significant problem, though, is that many youth ministries today are trying to do both outreach and discipleship at the same time, to the same kids, via the same means—which is impossible. Discipleship, which is intended to grow the Christian youth, instead is dumbed down so that the unconverted won’t feel awkward, un-knowledged, or out-of-the-loop—which keeps the believers on baby milk, too. Then, because there is such little difference between bringing the students in and training them up, hoards of youth pass through these ministries without ever realizing that they are unregenerate. They are taught not to drink, not to have sex, and to “love Jesus,” without ever being challenged to grow spiritually. They have little doctrinal grounding, remain caught in worldly relational patterns, and never come to understand that knowing God is not simply a side-show but the very purpose of our lives. The only thing this prepares our students for is to walk away from the church after high school because they think they are already moral, and that their morality is all they really need in order to be a Christian. The church, in their eyes, has already served its purpose; they just don’t need it anymore.

Additionally, almost every youth group I know of (especially at larger churches), operates under another fatal assumption: the youth should be segregated from the rest of the church. This assumption yields catastrophic results for Christian community across all generations.

One of the faulty thoughts that I (and many of my peers) had when I was in youth group was: “Oh, those adults, they’re holding us back. I’m glad we don’t deal with them much. They are so not spiritual!” Do you remember the thought pattern?

“Our worship leader plays guitar with the lights down and candles lit: We’re super-spiritual compared to those lights-on, sit-and-stand, piano-and-praise-team-listening old-fogies!”

“I go on a mission trip every year. I’m way more missional than my parents”

“I’m going to a youth event all the time! My parents only go to church twice a week – they must not love Jesus as much as I do!”

“I hate listening to our Sunday sermons! They never apply to me – I’m not married, I don’t have kids, I don’t ‘lead a family’. ‘Hey preacher, can you talk about something more relevant to me?’”

Am I terribly off on this? I had some of these thoughts myself and I heard frequently when we youth “leaders” were discussing the problems of the rest of the church.

And the youth weren’t the only ones with perspective problems. I heard plenty of complaints from the Senior Adults:

“Why do they have to be so loud with their dad-gum guitars?”

“Why are those kids running around and yelling all the time? Can’t they just sit and be quiet?”

“Drums are of the devil! Those kids need to stop using them or they’re going to have sex right there in the meeting.”

Are these really the attitudes you want your church to have towards itself?

I am raising these all-too-common issues to help you identify what might be going wrong in your youth ministry: unregenerate teenagers being taught merely how to behave, confusion between outreach and discipleship, and the harmful effects of segregating youth from the rest of the church are the common ones I’ve found. My question for you is simple: is your youth ministry preparing youth for the Christian life after high school? Or is it preparing them for failure?

Next time, I will address the overarching causes to these problems and suggest ways to deal with them.

Do you think that the above is not an accurate representation of youth ministry at large? Do you see these problems in your own church? Leave your thoughts below.