Modeling & Shaping A Biblical View Of The Church

I was enjoying Sunday brunch with my wife after church at a local egg specialist café.  It was before we had kids of our own, so it was just time for the two of us.  Across the room I spotted one of the students from my youth ministry sitting with his parents.  I could not help but notice something else.  His parents were also enjoying time together – just the two of them.  I am not sure I have ever seen a set of parents so thoroughly ignore their child through an entire meal.  I had a view that allowed me to observe this lack of interaction with their teenage son. He was an only child and seeing the relationship he lacked with his parents explained a lot of his behavior.  I left the café wondering what sort of parent he might grow up to be if this is how family and parenting were modeled to him.  Would he even bother to have a family of his own?

We know that younger generations learn as much from what they observe as they do from what we actually tell them.  Some would argue that actions speak louder than words.  So, what were we telling students about the church when every time  people gathered at the church building, the youth went to their own room for a separate program?  What message did they get when we gave them one Sunday each year to participate in leading the service?  On those “Youth Sundays”, our high school group led everything in the service except the sermon.  Did we imagine that they would look forward to the day that they would be grown up and could participate in “big” church? Did we consider that when the day arrived they might not understand anything about it and just walk away?  Or would they search out a church that most resembled their youth group experience because it was less foreign to them?

I spent ten years serving in that church where youth ministry was segregated from the congregation.  The constant challenge before us was to somehow teach and give them a taste of what the church is meant to be, even though they were not properly experiencing it.  By the latter I mean that most did not worship with the rest of the congregation, nor did they experience any aspect of it beyond youth Sunday.  Fortunately that church has since changed much of how it does ministry. The next church I served in was vastly different and from that I learned how to more effectively model and shape a biblical view of the church.  What was so different?  Students were part of the church.  Rather than a token youth Sunday, we regularly had students serving as ushers, greeters, in the choir, on the music team, and reading scriptures. Some of our older teens were teaching Sunday school and when the church gathered for various functions, the teens were right in the mix.  This was an intergenerational church family where relationships spanned decades and all ages served side by side.   We had youth groups, Bible study groups and other activities specifically for students, but that did not preclude their involvement in the church.

Together as the body of Christ in all ages we worshipped God, sat under the preaching of His word, prayed, shared in Holy Communion, and enjoyed fellowship.  Students were not left wondering what the purpose of the church was because they experienced the church according to Acts 2:42-47.  They learned that the church exists to glorify God not to please them.  They experienced the process it takes to “equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” (Ephesians 4:12-13, ESV)  All of this was set in a context that was intergenerational.  Even more, we had all kinds of diversity in the congregation.  Imagine the impact on a student of standing next to an elderly gentleman with Down’s syndrome who is singing his heart out in worship.  A man whose faith carried him through the experience of D-Day on the beaches of Normandy prayed daily for the youth of our church (and the students knew that).  They knew people in every stage of life who were living out their faith against all kinds of challenges.  This is the church and they knew how to engage with it and relate to it.

We do teens a disservice when we segregate them from the life of the church. When we build youth ministries that do not engage students in the life of the congregation, the unintended consequence is a future of empty pews. Pew Research reports that 20-30 year-olds attend church at ½ the rate of their parents and ¼ the rate of their grandparents.  These young adults were teens a decade or two ago and many of them were active in church youth ministries.  Many are asking what we can do to get them back into church.  Maybe young adults are not actually leaving the church. They were never there to begin with.  It is time that we engage students in the life of our congregations.  Only then and there can we model and shape a Biblical view of the church as we pass the faith from one generation to the next.