BibleSponge

Perhaps the biggest blindside hit that the most well-intentioned YM will take square on the chin comes from our need to “be engaging” to youth and issues they deal with.  My question for the masses is “at what cost?”

When we focus on keeping youth from getting bored, we set young people and ourselves up for potentially dangerous consequences like:

• Creating A Reactive Christian
• Watering Down Of The Gospel
• Denying The Sufficiency Of Scripture

Creating A Reactive Christian (aka Spiritual Brat)

An unintended consequence of youth services structured around activities and events to “keep teens from getting bored” can be summed up in one word - “entertaining”.  When we “entertain” youth, we base our success on how interested they are by how they react to the message, games, activities, etc.  And if they react the way we think they should, then it is deemed a successful youth service.

Now, let me just say that there is absolutely nothing wrong with mixing in activities to break the ice or get the blood flowing.  However, these start to deactivate the effectiveness of ministry when they are the highlight of the evening.  They become that highlight because of the emphasis we put on them.  If we put as much passion and emphasis on the Word we give to young people, we probably would be in the messed up state that we are in today!  ( Don’t believe me?  Take note next time how many youth actually bring their Bibles.  But I digress.)

When we approach YM this way, youth end up doing what we have taught them to do – they become reactive.

reactive

readily responsive to a stimulus (Merriam-Webster)

reactive Christian

readily worshipful to tailor-made surroundings

Do you see that?  The response is based on a stimulus.  This conditions a youth’s worship habits and/or spiritual temperature to be based on the conditions (or stimulus) around them.  What happens when that stimulus is not there?  Simple.  There is no reaction.  A young person’s worship, attentiveness to preaching – everything becomes dependent on their surroundings.

Some will disagree with me, but youth need a moment or two of downtime.  No, it is not the end of the world if they get bored here and there.  To disallow them some time to seek Christ on their own without spiritual training wheels will only result in creating a spiritual brat.  They will never begin to develop the proactive Christian that Christ has called us to be.

Watering Down Of The Gospel

This is not unique to YM.  It’s been prevalent in the church and has finally trickled down emphatically in the realm of YM.  There’s no long, theological explanation needed.  The warning has already been given to us in 2 Timothy 4:3-4

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

The NASB translation says “but wanting to have their ears tickled”.  The Greek word is knēthō (κνήθω), which means “to scratch” or “to tickle”.  Don’t miss the idea here.  When you have an insatiable itch, you let nothing stop you from scratching it.  I’ve been known to use everything from letter openers to doorways to scratch my back.  When wanting to get youth into a building and fill a parking lot up, churches will put just about anyone or anything in front of youth to keep them interested.

The end result is a message with more Dr. Phil or the odiferous Oprah than Dr. Jesus.  We present love and acceptance in the spotlight, while repentance and judgment from the Father are left backstage in the dark nicely tucked away.  God is love, but God is also holy.

Denying The Sufficiency Of Scripture

Last but not least, when we depend on our antics and schemes, we make gods of ourselves.  No really.  I’ve seen this in ministry as well as at events in the music arena.  For example, my band once played at a secular event with another pseudo-Christian band.  They started the music performance off and I could not believe my ears when I heard their game plan. 

“We’re going to play a few secular songs to get them interested and then we’ll switch over to Christian music…” (paraphrased, emphasis added). 

What?  While this may seem harmless to the casual passerby-er, let me translate this as a seasoned Christian would hear it:

“We’re going to become so much like the world, that we will get their attention, then because of what we are doing they will be interested and then we’ll give God His chance.”

Although that’s an extreme example, it is a very real one that could be applied to our approach to YM.  Too often, I’ve even caught myself orchestrating a service and it wasn’t until I looked back that the Lord revealed my errors in my approach.

Our approach to YM becomes “what I can do” instead of “what God can do”.  Or worse yet, that we shy away from the idea that scripture is able to attract us to its Author and rely more on the world to attract them than the Word.

Since I finished Youth Ministry Pt. 2: Divided We Stand, I thought it to be a good place to pause and bring your attention to compelling thoughts on the subject of nurseries in the church.  Since it is in a sense a form of separation and is often affirmed by church members who dare us to interrupt their pristine worship environment with the occasional interruption of a child, it seems to fit my current mood and thoughts on separation.

Many pastors will make the argument for the legitimacy of nurseries based on Nehemiah 8:1-4.  However, this approach is not scripturally sound as you will see it picked apart easily.  ENJOY!

Nehemiah’s Nursery: Part 1

Nehemiah’s Nursery: Part 2

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.

Truer words have never been spoken that in John 8:32. Because once you start down this path, you may be freed from your youth pastor or youth leader position quicker than Pavel Datsyuk sniping a goalie in a shootout (it’s a NHL thing). You will undoubtedly be labeled an ‘un-realist’ or ‘crazy’.

When I started down the path of trying to create a biblical-youth ministry, I knew going in to have my resume updated. How? The Lord began to deal with me and I started with a series of articles from one of the most intelligent men of God that I know, Pastor Voddie Baucham. You can find his articles on this subject here, here and here.

After reading and studying these articles, I began to line them up against the Word and funny thing, they match. However, just because God may lay a truth before you, if it is not inline with the current trends of church, it may not be embraced by all. Even worse, by the leadership of the church.

While these articles are a great starting point, there is plenty more places you can look and listen. I spend some time on the road, and Voddie’s sermons on the subject will inspire and light a fire inside you that will burn everyone around not willing to embrace the Word instead of the norm! Go to his podcast page, the message you should begin with is “The Centrality of The Home”.

As I began this journey, I never in a million years thought that it would go the way that it has gone so far. Since I’ve began pursuing this, I have been removed as the youth pastor and “offered” the opportunity to teach youth in rotation with other teachers (not even considered on the first month’s rotation), as our youth ministry has become an abstract in the the church landscape.

After 3+ years of blood, sweat, tears and countless hours from potential family time, the ministry has taken on a new direction under a common misconception. The idea of a family-based youth ministry that lines up with the Word isn’t satisfied by simply adding more parents to the fray.

So what is the approach to youth ministry I will be exploring? I’ll finish this entry with a mission statement that both lines up with the Word and addresses a current problem. This is what my entire approach to a bible-based youth ministry will be built on.

Youth Ministry Mission Statement:

To equip and assist parents to fulfill their biblical obligation to disciple and evangelize their children and to reach out to spiritual orphans in the church.

Stay tuned as we continue with our next entry focusing on how our current approach is not only unbiblical, but perhaps antithetical to the Word of God.

Isn’t it funny how many of us walk without brokenness in sin everyday? And, as long as that sin doesn’t reflect poorly on us in culture’s eyes, we continue to walk in it and bask in knowing that we are our own gods. This works until the Father of Lies takes us so far into our sin, it eventually backfires in the public eye. It’s only then that we treat our sin as sin. And in the process we allow ourselves to become a complete fool.

As I was getting settled in at work this morning, I began the ritual of my morning indulgence of Starbucks (venti bold, no room) and reading the news headlines when I stumbled across a tragic ending to a legalized infant homicide (abortion).

Sycloria Williams was 23-weeks pregnant. She arrived at an abortion clinic outside Miami for a scheduled infant homicide. After her cervix was dilated, she began waiting in the chair for the murderer – ah hem, excuse me I mean Dr. Pierre Jean-Jacque Renelique.

Knowing that life is meaningless to such a butcher as Renelique, it was no surprise that he was late for the infant’s death sentence. What was a surprise was what happened next. As she waited, the birthing process began. The baby was born alive. Just as a loyal henchman should. an unlicensed (I guess there’s a special license you have to have to kill children) assistant cut the umbilical cord, threw the baby in a biohazard bag, and tossed it in the garbage.

But that’s not even the most ludicrous part of this story. The mother is now suing the doctor and her attorney, Tom Pennekamp, released this remark:

"I don't care what your politics are, what your morals are, this should not be happening in our community,"

Followed by this gem from Tom Brejcha, president of law firm that is also representing Williams.

"The baby was just treated as a piece of garbage,"

Now let me put this into a Christian perspective and show how asinine this argument is. She is upset because the clinic worker treated the newborn like garbage. It was ok for her to schedule a death sentence for the infant. And it was ok to go through with that death sentence, as long as the infant homicide took place out of sight. And it was acceptable to allow that sin to take place within the dark confines of her womb. No one would have cared, nor would this be a story. My, my how our view of sin takes on a different meaning in our lives when we are forced to see it face-to-face.

All of the sudden, she is concerned about the baby’s welfare. Why was that? Why care all of the sudden? Why the morals out of nowhere? It’s simple. Sycloria Williams was forced to come face-to-face with her sin. Rather than her sin be consumed in the darkness of some secret place in her body, it was playing out right in front of her very eyes.

Although this horrific event seems antithetical to how most of us see our lives and our sin everyday, it is much the same. Many of us walk with our own secret sin and never give it a second thought. And unlike her, we are never confronted because our sin doesn’t make it out into the public eye.

Sin separates us from God. This is evident when we consider how Jesus trembled when he “cried out in a loud voice ‘ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI?’ which is translated ‘MY GOD, MY GOD WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?’” (Mark 15:34). Jesus was not scared of the beatings he would take. Nor was he afraid of the cross. However, it was the temporary separation from God, the Father, that Jesus endured when he took on the sins of the world that tortured him most.

Can it get any worse? You bet. Given enough time in our sin, we can reach a point beyond salvation. What? Understand that no sin is beyond God’s reach of forgiveness. But, when we get used to this type of sin, we lose the ability and urge to repent, because we start to fail to see the sin the way God sees it. It is at that point, that we create a potential point of no return beyond salvation. Sure all of our sins are forgiven when we confess them and we will be cleansed (1 John 1:9). But when we fail to take our sin sincerely, we lose the feeling of burden that sin brings and become incapable of asking for forgiveness by confession.

In the upcoming days, I will begin a series on Youth Ministry.  After a lot of prayer and fasting, I have come to what I believe we must do in order to produce a YM that lines up with the Bible.  Our current model is broken and possibly antithetical to God’s instructions of our responsibility to young people.

I can speak of this almost completely unbiased.  My early years in religion were in the Roman Catholic church (where YM is all but non-existent).  It wasn’t until I was reborn and brought up in a protestant church in the last 5 years, that I discovered this fad called Youth Ministry.  So I am not a product of the last 30+ years of YM indoctrination. 

I say ‘fad’ because it has become precisely that.  When I began this venture into YM, I believed that my purpose was to pour into the youth to disciple them, evangelize them, to fill the spiritual void that parents left.  I was erroneously under the impression that I could offset failed Christian parenting with some ‘cool music’ and a ‘relevant message.’

Although there were times that the spirit could be felt, at the end of the night, I knew there had to be something more.  That something was right under my nose – it was parents.  However, the typical anecdote of adding more parents to the fray would just increase the number of spectators to a failed venue.  If youth ministry was the water and the youth’s spiritual void was the bucket, I was doing nothing more filling up a bucket with holes.

So what was missing?  What dynamic was eluding the YM at my church?  Why was 90% of the YM still without a biblical worldview?  Why were the majority still falling away by their freshman year in college?  The questions raged on and on.

Finally, God opened a door to knowledge that has not only changed my focus in YM, but how I order my family at home.  A man by the name of Voddie Baucham has sounded the alarm on the current failed state of YM.  You can argue it all you like, but it’s hard to argue against the word of God.  His approach only seems radical due to the way culture has conditioned us.  But, when placed along side the Bible, it unequivocally stands up to any modern approach to YM employed by churches throughout.

Here is what is in my arsenal for the upcoming posts on YM:

• Weapon -  the book of Ephesians
• Ammo – verses 5:15 – 6:4
• Aux Ammo – jaw-dropping statistics
• Communications – this blog
• Reinforcements – Deuteronomy 6
• Strategy – a plan that will take courage and genuine love of youth to implement

I don’t profess to know all there is to know about YM.  And I’m sure that there are several that have been in the field a lot longer than I have.  However, just because the parking lots are full, kids are having fun, and the senior pastor is happy because the numbers look good on paper, doesn’t justify our current failure rate of 70%-88%.  Failure rate?

Stay tuned, the battle is about to begin…