BibleSponge

Perhaps my upbringing has allowed me remain unbiased and embrace the thought of a biblical-based youth ministry approach (YM).  Why?  I was raised in the Catholic church.  As any Catholic will tell you, youth ministry is not high on their agenda.  There’s ‘Sunday School’ and that’s about it.

How in the world could someone with Catholic upbringing have firm grasp on what a biblical-youth ministry is?  Simple.  I have not been indoctrinated into the maligned state that churches throughout the land currently use regarding YM.  I am not attached to the broken system judging its success on how great the kids feel for the moment, how entertained they can be, how well we keep them from getting bored and how full the parking lot is.  Because I am not filled with the misconceptions that have lead us to three decades of failure, I have no problem changing and completely re-thinking the idea of YM.

As shocking as it is to you, imagine what I thought.  This approach to YM is opposite of what I had been doing for 3+ years!  It has been bittersweet as I can bask in its revelation, yet quietly bow my head as I have been humbled before God in seeing the errors (albeit innocently) in which I was operating.

As best I can tell, from the time I’ve been in the protestant church, parents have been told that we are the professionals and that they should just leave the youth to us.  So in essence, parents are simply doing exactly what the church as taught them to do over the past 30 years.  All across the land, churches run the YM in a segregated approach.  They have cut living parts off the body and are wondering why they are dying off at record rates.  Or they wonder why our current failure rate in our approach to youth is 70%-88% (more on this later).

The segregated model of youth having their own worship time is best described if we look to the body as Paul did (Ephesians 4:15-16).  If you remove any part of a living body, eventually that part will die.  And that is exactly what has happened.  Youth have been shoved off to youth leaders and youth pastors for so long that in the last 30 years, there has yet to be a generation produced ready to change the world for Christ.  Worse-yet, youth leaders are expected to offset in a couple hours what lackadaisical parents allow to pour into their teens all week!  The best planned sermon/games/music cannot offset countless hours of MTV, SpikeTV, Cosmo magazine, etc. when applied like this.

So why the division?  Dare ask that question and here is what you will likely hear…

Well, the ‘insert name here’ church down the road does it and you should see the hundreds of kids there every week. 

You see, those are the wrong numbers to care about.  What difference does it make if there are 200+ kids attending a mega-church youth event if 3/4 of them are going to fall away from the faith by their freshman year in college?  The difference?  The teens are out of their parents’ hair and they don’t have to expound any effort to disciple them.

As pointed out here, the only thing worse than creating these spiritual ghettos, is the loss of integration with the body at large.  This only proliferates a void of significant relationships with adults throughout the church.  In addition, it allows detrimental ideas, like that of the Emerging Church movement, to enter a backdoor into a well-intended ministry.