Last week I attended a gathering of fellow ministers and church leaders. The topic centered on how to attract and involve more youth and children in church.
To begin the leader asked a couple of teenagers to address the gathering, to tell us how we as pastors and lay leaders could be more accommodating to youth. A young woman told us her peers had decided that young people need adults to talk to them, and they need to be told the truth. Well and good. She then proceeded to tell us that since teenagers are so busy churches need to provide a study space at church complete with wireless internet access, and volunteers to help them with homework. Youth also need to exercise so a basketball court would be nice, and maybe a softball field.
A young man came next saying he had three points, but he could only remember two. His fellow adolescents, who interrupted him several times with loud whoops, wanted to tell us through him that they want respect. And they want experiences. Trips are good, he said, but they really want experiences. He didn’t really tell us what those experiences might be.
For the rest of the gathering time, while the teenagers who want to be respected and thought of as adults went out to play, we collectively agonized over how best to attract and keep “youth” in our churches. Out of the collective wisdom of uninformed and cliche-laden breakout groups we spoke of ways to make church culture more friendly to the youth culture around us so that we could have bigger and better youth groups, just like the noisy crowd of kids with us that day. We just need more pizza and more rock concerts and more youth activities and more fun youth directors.
I wondered if we were missing the point. Mark DeVries, in his insightful book Family-Based Youth Ministry, tells us that conventional youth ministry which separates youth off into a corner by themselves perpetuate self-centered immaturity which leads to nominal if not non-existent participation in church when they become adults. He documented studies which show that youth of small churches who took active part in all church activities with adults were more likely to remain committed Christians than those who were part of a large youth group.
Adolescence as we understand it is an invention of the late 19th century. It was totally unknown before that time. Educator and psychologist G. Stanley Hall, greatly influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, reasoned that humans go through an evolution from a lower life form to adulthood. As lower life forms young people cannot relate to the adult world because they do not have the capability, so a special educational process must be developed for them. He advocated strict age-segregation in schools to accommodate the evolutionary changes he supposedly found. In so doing he created an artificial social structure where young people now spend less than 7% of their time with adults and about half of their time with same-age peers. The result is a profound disconnect with adults and anyone else not of the same age as the child, and deep reliance on peers (on the same level of immaturity) for wisdom in making life decisions. These are the kids who told us they “need” internet and softball fields at church.
DeVries’ research confirms what the young lady told us about youth needing for adults to talk to and tell them the truth. This is an almost universal craving young people have, to have a significant relationship with a mature adult, preferably a parent. Lacking in this they feel forced to rely on the peer group for understanding.
The problem, I think, is at least two-fold. First, we don’t have mature adults to minister to kids. Many of them are themselves still locked in the perpetual cycle of adolescence and consumers of good experiences. They don’t know how to relate to these kids in a mature way. I know people in their 40s and 50s who are still adolescents in maturity and behavior. Parents have abandoned their offspring to the schools and (sometimes) the church to raise.
Second, when we do work with youth, we always group them into same-age classes and preach at them or feed them or entertain them and we do not form meaningful learning relationships with them. We do not disciple them. We do not get to know them and we do not create opportunities for them to get to know us so that they can trust us for wisdom and insight in making complicated life decisions. It is much easier and more “efficient” to have a class. But we must understand that to rely solely on a conventional youth culture gathering with pizza and loud music is to disobey the Great Commission.
Jesus himself had what amounted to a “youth group.” All his disciples were 18 to 20 years old when he recruited them. They were already assimilated into the adult world although still inexperienced. Instead of creating a special culture for them, he included them in what he was doing. He amazed them with the power of the kingdom by what he did in the course of his ministry, and explained it as they went along. The group was intentionally small enough (twelve) to encourage relationships. Jesus did not use our 21st century model of mass efficiency when disciple-making. By the way, classes and academies were in vogue throughout the Greek-oriented Roman empire and the model was being used by first century rabbis in Jerusalem. Instead of adopting the cultural fad Jesus stuck to biblical models that worked.
I believe DeVries is right. If we are to disciple young people we need to help them reconnect with adults, preferably their parents, but also adults of wisdom and character at church. We need to include them in the overall life of the church, in committee meetings and worship gatherings. We need to get over this nonsense notion that they are the church tomorrow and realize they are in the church today.
To begin the leader asked a couple of teenagers to address the gathering, to tell us how we as pastors and lay leaders could be more accommodating to youth. A young woman told us her peers had decided that young people need adults to talk to them, and they need to be told the truth. Well and good. She then proceeded to tell us that since teenagers are so busy churches need to provide a study space at church complete with wireless internet access, and volunteers to help them with homework. Youth also need to exercise so a basketball court would be nice, and maybe a softball field.
A young man came next saying he had three points, but he could only remember two. His fellow adolescents, who interrupted him several times with loud whoops, wanted to tell us through him that they want respect. And they want experiences. Trips are good, he said, but they really want experiences. He didn’t really tell us what those experiences might be.
For the rest of the gathering time, while the teenagers who want to be respected and thought of as adults went out to play, we collectively agonized over how best to attract and keep “youth” in our churches. Out of the collective wisdom of uninformed and cliche-laden breakout groups we spoke of ways to make church culture more friendly to the youth culture around us so that we could have bigger and better youth groups, just like the noisy crowd of kids with us that day. We just need more pizza and more rock concerts and more youth activities and more fun youth directors.
I wondered if we were missing the point. Mark DeVries, in his insightful book Family-Based Youth Ministry, tells us that conventional youth ministry which separates youth off into a corner by themselves perpetuate self-centered immaturity which leads to nominal if not non-existent participation in church when they become adults. He documented studies which show that youth of small churches who took active part in all church activities with adults were more likely to remain committed Christians than those who were part of a large youth group.
Adolescence as we understand it is an invention of the late 19th century. It was totally unknown before that time. Educator and psychologist G. Stanley Hall, greatly influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, reasoned that humans go through an evolution from a lower life form to adulthood. As lower life forms young people cannot relate to the adult world because they do not have the capability, so a special educational process must be developed for them. He advocated strict age-segregation in schools to accommodate the evolutionary changes he supposedly found. In so doing he created an artificial social structure where young people now spend less than 7% of their time with adults and about half of their time with same-age peers. The result is a profound disconnect with adults and anyone else not of the same age as the child, and deep reliance on peers (on the same level of immaturity) for wisdom in making life decisions. These are the kids who told us they “need” internet and softball fields at church.
DeVries’ research confirms what the young lady told us about youth needing for adults to talk to and tell them the truth. This is an almost universal craving young people have, to have a significant relationship with a mature adult, preferably a parent. Lacking in this they feel forced to rely on the peer group for understanding.
The problem, I think, is at least two-fold. First, we don’t have mature adults to minister to kids. Many of them are themselves still locked in the perpetual cycle of adolescence and consumers of good experiences. They don’t know how to relate to these kids in a mature way. I know people in their 40s and 50s who are still adolescents in maturity and behavior. Parents have abandoned their offspring to the schools and (sometimes) the church to raise.
Second, when we do work with youth, we always group them into same-age classes and preach at them or feed them or entertain them and we do not form meaningful learning relationships with them. We do not disciple them. We do not get to know them and we do not create opportunities for them to get to know us so that they can trust us for wisdom and insight in making complicated life decisions. It is much easier and more “efficient” to have a class. But we must understand that to rely solely on a conventional youth culture gathering with pizza and loud music is to disobey the Great Commission.
Jesus himself had what amounted to a “youth group.” All his disciples were 18 to 20 years old when he recruited them. They were already assimilated into the adult world although still inexperienced. Instead of creating a special culture for them, he included them in what he was doing. He amazed them with the power of the kingdom by what he did in the course of his ministry, and explained it as they went along. The group was intentionally small enough (twelve) to encourage relationships. Jesus did not use our 21st century model of mass efficiency when disciple-making. By the way, classes and academies were in vogue throughout the Greek-oriented Roman empire and the model was being used by first century rabbis in Jerusalem. Instead of adopting the cultural fad Jesus stuck to biblical models that worked.
I believe DeVries is right. If we are to disciple young people we need to help them reconnect with adults, preferably their parents, but also adults of wisdom and character at church. We need to include them in the overall life of the church, in committee meetings and worship gatherings. We need to get over this nonsense notion that they are the church tomorrow and realize they are in the church today.
Amen!
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