Youth Ministry

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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?

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