Phil Johnson has posted this over at Pyro and it is really worth your time and consideration:
At last June's Founder's Conference, Roy Hargrave delivered a powerful message that got me thinking about why so many churches lose their young people. (That wasn't the theme of Dr. Hargrave's message, but he brought up the subject in one of the points he made.)Here's a really brief summary of some of my thoughts on the matter:The very strategies many churches adopt to try to keep their young people involved in the church are the main reasons they lose so many of them. The dominant philosophies of youth ministry today are spiritually lame or worse—and almost completely counterproductive.Specifically, it's time we faced the fact that systematically dumbing down the teaching ministry and ramping up the party atmosphere while isolating our young people from the rest of the body is not a very good strategy for increasing the rate of retention among our youth.
Think about it: Youth ministries (not all of them, of course, but the vast majority of squidgy evangelical ones) deliberately shield their young people from the hard truths and strong demands of Jesus. They tailor their worship so worldly youth can feel as comfortable in the church environment as possible. They squander the best opportunities of those formative student years by minimizing spiritual instruction while emphasizing fun and games.
They let their teens live with the false notions that believing in Christ is easy, sanctification is optional, and religion is supposed to be fun and always suited to our liking. They fail to equip their high school students for the rigorous defense of the faith they will need in college. They neglect to integrate them as young adults into the adult community of the church.And then they wonder why so many young people abandon the church about the same time they leave home.How hard can it really be to understand why the "Youth Specialties" approach to student ministry has been such an enormous failure?
1 comment:
Tom Chantry posted some good thoughts on this...
Phil,
You’ve hit on a topic near and dear to my heart, and for two reasons:
First, this topic resonates with me because of my upbringing. I was a preacher’s kid, so of course it was easy to discount my father’s faith. I needed to be in youth ministries, right? Actually, I benefited tremendously from some youth leaders who faithfully, carefully led us in Bible study. There were a few clowns, and I didn’t respect them at all. Thankfully, in our church they didn’t retain their “ministry” long.
But something else had a greater impact: worshiping with the adults in my church. Watching them listen intently to preaching, listening to them sing boldly, and above all, listening to them pray in the prayer meetings. How many people argue that kids will be bored silly by a half hour of listening to grown men pray? I was bored when I was young and stupid, but all the while I was listening to grown men who weren’t my dad - in fact, they weren’t preachers or even church leaders at all - praying. I was greatly influenced by men who had mundane jobs - a carpenter, a guy who ran a pizza joint - because I listened to them pray and I knew their faith was real. It wasn’t just the professionals who spouted gospel; gospel oozed from these men.
I had great parents, and they taught me a lot, but our church was one of the greatest things they ever did for me. I learned the faith from the adults I worshiped with, and I heard it enlarged upon by serious, dedicated youth teachers.
6:58 AM, November 12, 2007
Tom Chantry said...
Second reason: I spent four years teaching in a Christian school, and most of my students were from large, fairly orthodox, evangelical churches which follow the typical model of “youth ministry.” They were kids from Christian homes going to churches with at least reasonably biblical preaching…and most of them had never once heard the gospel. They certainly had never heard the reasonably good preaching in their home churches, because they had never been to church. I used to make fifth and sixth graders write a narrative page at the beginning of the year: “This Week in Church.” It was invariably a story about being dropped off at a youth center for games and songs while Mom and Dad went to church to be fed. It was no shock after a while that these kids didn’t know the basics of the gospel.
Meanwhile I was a chapel preacher once a week in the high school. The student leadership was constantly pushing to turn chapel into a form of “youth group” during the week, with plenty of songs and skits but less “boring speaking.” The teacher in charge of the chapels (now a pastor also) held the line and I supported him: we were determined to make sure the kids in our care had some teaching during the week. Meanwhile their churches tended to say, “That school is good academically, but they don’t know how to minister to the kids.” But we Mknew these kids because we worked with them every day, and the simple fact is that the majority of them didn’t know the gospel at all! Some had heard it from their parents; most from nobody at all.
This was saddest of all in the better of the churches in which, had these kids ever been in a church service, they would have heard gospel preaching at least some of the time. But no, they were banished to gameland while the adults worshiped. I’m back in the ministry now with an increased resolve to do several things: to make sure the kids in my church get to worship with the adults, to make sure that I, their pastor, speak the truth to them, and to ensure that whatever Sunday School / Youth Ministry we ever have is biblical and serious.
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