Throughout the years that I have been involved in youth ministry, I have had ups and downs and felt every emotion possible. Through all of this, God has shown me three specific areas of this ministry through which I have been able to grow and remained focused on the mission at hand.
Ministering with Parents
You aren't their parent… but you might feel like it most of the time.
When you come to youth ministry events—or when youth ministry events come to you—you may meet them with anticipation and an overwhelming desire to invest. Or perhaps not. Perhaps you find yourself in youth ministry because there is a great need in your church. If that last person is you, let me just give you fair warning: the desire is coming!
The young teens in your church are babes in Christ and, like babies, they are very needy and dependent on the people who feed and invest in them. As a new parent, when you bring home that little baby, you learn quickly that you have to pour your time and energy into that child. And your time and energy is followed by heart. Burden is produced when you pour your life into another person; it happens naturally. So, like a parent, youth ministers quickly find themselves burdened for the young people in their care.
There is a strong chance you will find yourself praying, crying, worrying, stressing, and thinking about these students all the time. You will find yourself overjoyed when they do well in school, when they come to understand truth, overcome obstacles in their lives, and lead a friend to the Lord. You will find yourself angry when their grades begin to suffer, when they mistreat someone else in the church or even themselves, when they choose laziness and entertainment over reading their bible or coming to Bible study, and when they lose interest in spiritual things.
But then the questions come...
“What do I do with this burden? I’m praying for these kids regularly, but how do I practically minister to them? Many of them don’t have parents who go to our church; many of them don’t have parents who are saved. How do I minister to these types of students? Is youth ministry a parental role? Do I pick them up every Sunday? Do I pick them up to do Bible Study and other events with the church? Do I have to have all of the hard, important conversations that all young people need since their parents don’t seem to be interested? Shouldn’t their parent see that they need to step in?”
The answer is yes. Yes, you are their spiritual parent, and sometimes that looks like taking on traditional parental characteristics. Yes, you may have to pick them up or arrange rides for them so they can get to services and events. Yes, you may need to have hard conversations with these students when their parents won’t have them, or if they need help having them. And yes, their parents should see that they need to step in and make an investment into their child. However, before you take on more responsibility and burden than you need to, understand that you are just a discipler in their life; you are not their actual parent.
The most successful way to reach and minister to those students is by using the system that God has provided for them: their family. Many times, we youth ministers convince ourselves that we are the sole solution to this student’s deficit, and in some situations, we do have a critical role. For example, a couple in leadership in our Student Ministry was in fact led by the Lord to foster a couple of young girls from our fellowship for a season because these girls’ God-given system was not fulfilling their responsibilities. But this same couple has now reinstated these girls into their natural family and played a temporary yet crucial role in helping grow these children. They recognized they were called to function as scaffolding to the family unit, rather than become their family unit. Even when we feel like we have insight and wisdom concerning the young people in our ministry, the truth is we don’t have the solutions. God does, and God has provided everything those young people need to grow, including their family. You don’t need to be their parents; you to partner with them!
Realistically, if we want to minister to the students most effectively, we must realize that parents have insight and information on the students that we don’t. The parents have a perspective of the students that we will never have, and we need to tap into that resource rather than resent it when it isn’t working the way we imagine it should.
As youth ministers, we NEED what the parents have in order to effectively love and teach their children. As youth ministers, we have availability and relatability with the students which makes us excellent counterparts to the investment of the family and the church as a whole. We are working a different angle as their parents, but in most cases we have the same objectives. Likewise, the parents NEED what we have in order to effectively raise these students to be strong believers. The partnership is spiritually expedient if we want to make disciples of the young people in our ministry.
Last year, a parent gave me a very humbling and revealing perspective. He told me, “Listen Jeff, I don’t know for sure if you will be giving an account at the judgment seat of Christ for my daughter. But I KNOW that I will.” This is the reality for our parents, so we would be wise to endeavour in helping them make that fruitful.
Proper Perspective of Student Discipleship and Growth
These are souls, not a means to an end.
This may be one of the most radical ideas in youth ministry. Churches and youth pastors all across America are crying out that students need to be discipled, that students need to be invested in, that students matter, and that students can count for God. We wholeheartedly agree! While we would passionately stand beside that sentiment, we also realize that the means of accomplishing that discipleship is of utmost importance.
There is a growing movement in youth ministry in America today; it’s event-based, it’s entertainment-based, it’s program-based, it de-emphasizes teaching and sets low standards for learning. It’s a ministry model we would call Laodicean. Youth ministries in Kansas City are filled with students who are flocking to their youth groups with their friends, attending awesome services, going on epic retreats, inviting friends to spectacular events, and even very genuine love from the leadership teams. Those can all be good things, but the one thing that is missing is legitimate biblical discipleship. Youth group leaders are excited, they are invested, they are zealous, and in many ways, they are missing the true goal of ministry by not emphasizing what is most important.
As a youth minister, you MUST prioritize what is important: the Word of God. There is nothing more critical, fundamental, and foundational to ministry than instilling biblical principles in love. In fact, this is what ministry is ALL about. There is nothing of greater eternal value than the precious investment of the word of God into the souls of men. If youth ministry is meeting any other end than this, I would argue it is straying from legitimate biblical ministry.
The reason so few youth ministries emphasize teaching and training is because they take for granted the capacity of our young people. They stopped believing that students can understand the deep things of God’s word and have instead adopted a growth/retention model that panders to cultural sensibilities. As a youth minister, pragmatism cannot be our dominant philosophy to grow our ministries; feeding the flock must be.
Pragmatism has its place in ministry, though its place is in administration, organizing and planning to facilitate teaching the Bible. In other words, God has gifted the church in such a way as to provide all of the needs of the believers. There are teachers and preachers who students need to hear from in ways that are conducive for their growth. Whether your church has 20 congregants or 2,000, the students must be exposed to the word of God by the gifted individuals God has given your church. If you are that gifted teacher or preacher, don’t get bogged down in busy-work; make investing God’s word your central focus. Instead of spending hours of your life planning the Gingerbread House Building Deathmatch for the annual Christmas Party-Extravaganza, give that assignment to someone else...the students can even do that. Get in the word. Instead of planning for having an amazing schedule of games and activities at your youth event, delegate that to someone else. Arrange, delegate, and structure your ministry in such a way that allows students to be fed in the word of God by those who are gifted and prepared to do so.
Maybe you aren’t the teacher or preacher in your ministry. Maybe your group doesn’t have a gifted teacher or preacher. Well, the head pastor is the guy that you need to get these students in front of. No activity, service, ministry, or game is more important than those students hearing from the Lord. Don’t get me wrong: games and activities play a vital role in youth ministry. We must meet students where they are at, but this is simply the means by which we facilitate relationship building and open doors to share biblical truth.
Maybe you have a large group and you simply need more help getting the word invested. Our ministry in Kansas City has about 70 students who attend our services and events and only 16 counselors, so we have had to branch out to ask the church body for help. Several years ago, we started a program called Student Mentorship. Like adult discipleship, we pair a disciple (student) with a discipler (adult mentor). Just like in any biblical discipleship relationship, one person learns to apply the word as instructed by a mature Bible teacher. In our church’s adult discipleship, there are structured lessons that the disciple must work through with specific goals to complete in order to say that they have successfully been discipled. In Student Mentorship, there is less structure as the four goals are accomplished through a healthy mix of student-friendly hang-outs, conversation, question-asking and studying God’s word as they share life and have a good time—basically a Bible-based friendship. This has proven to be incredibly fruitful in our ministry. However your youth ministry chooses to structure discipleship relationships, we highly encourage pairing students with proven ministers and allowing your students to be in consistent contact (ours do twice a month for one year or more) with Bible-believers that they respect and love.
Thriving as a Body, Not Surviving as a Ministry
Students won't survive on an island. You are the bridge from the adult church body and the youth group.
You may be feeling like your adventure into youth ministry has become a trip to an island full of stinky kids, immaturity, and belligerent and reluctant Sunday attenders. Ministry is exciting, purposeful, meaningful, fast paced, and full of adventure, but sometimes you feel like you are lost in the Bermuda Triangle of ministry. You may feel exhausted, discouraged, depressed, drained, lonely, or isolated.
One of the biggest contributors to these emotions is analyzing ministry and realizing you don’t have a ton of help or resources from the rest of the congregation or even the parents. Most of the time, the rest of the church is busy with the work of the ministry: serving, cleaning the church, working hospitality, preaching, counseling, praise team, discipling, hosting, evangelism, and more. Sometimes in the midst of the ministry whirlwind it seems as though you have been stuck with the job of tending the children.This is when it becomes clear just how distinct your ministry is from the rest of the church, and you might be tempted at times to resent that. As a result, you may feel weary in well doing. But there is a danger as you grapple with these emotions: the students and counselors God has called you to love will pick up on how you feel and they will see how it impacts ministry. You can become a tired, discontent, and discouraged contagion.
I would like to submit to you that this doesn’t have to (and shouldn’t) be your situation. Youth ministry is a unique animal, but it is an animal that is managed similarly to all of the other beasts of ministry. What a youth counselor is working through emotionally is the same as any other adult discipler: people problems. We must be careful not to take on the identity of “ministry’s unsung heroes” as though we are are the only ministers working hard and feeling misunderstood. That is simply a proud and arrogant lie.
We must not isolate ourselves! We ought to be doing adult discipleship alongside the rest of the church and letting the adults in the church come into youth ministry and help minister alongside us. Integration and collaboration is critical for a healthy perspective of ministry.
We had our ministry’s fall retreat back in November. A couple who serve in our high school ministry ended up doing all of the planning and coordinating of the event, and one of the ladies on our team took care of coordinating the food. She visited and invited all of the adult fellowships that we have at our church to see if they would be willing to come prepare and serve the food for our students (an effective approach we witnessed at a youth event at Maple City Baptist last summer). This counselor ended up getting several different groups of people to drive 45 minutes away from the church so they could serve the students. It was one of the healthiest things I have ever witnessed in all of my years of youth ministry. The people coming to serve were able to interact with the students and the students were able to feel loved by the rest of the body. Not only that, our group of counselors didn’t have to take on all of the food duties, leaving us available to build relationships and converse with our students.
I can recall hundreds of times that I have felt like nobody cared about the students, like nobody understands the struggles that my team and I have, like nobody can relate to the sacrifice that we are making, like nobody is gifted in the same way that we are. These feelings are deceitful and elitist and cause us to believe things that aren’t true! Truth says this is our reasonable sacrifice, and because our body is fitly joined together, then they too are serving and meeting a need that sometimes I can’t see. We must guard against martyr syndrome because it will come out in our conversations and countenance and will poison the students we are trying to build up and disciple.
As youth ministry workers, we have to be willing to connect and submit ourselves to the parents, to the word, and to the other laborers in our local churches. This is where we will find great joy and success in ministry, and this is where we can see God use us and our youth in a mighty way.
If you are interested in investing into the next generation, consider enrolling in the Children’s and Youth Ministry course at the Living Faith Bible Institute.
Jeff Grasher is the pastor over the student ministry at Midtown Baptist Temple. He serves alongside his wife, Kylie, and their two daughters.
