An awkward question… I raised this in the workshop without time to really reflect on it. The question is this: Where in the life of a teenager does a team, a club, or a school do something irrelevant in order to attract students to their purpose? My friend Ken Moser points out that in his hockey playing culture of Canada, teams do not host silly games and pizza parties to attract kids to or introduce the concept of playing on a hockey team. Any sports team that students will participate in seeks to directly teach the game and train the players. Likewise, clubs and organizations that want new members will introduce their purpose and who they are in a straight forward fashion rather than seek to entice people with something other than that purpose. Some may host a social event that gives potential members a chance to meet the regulars over some food or something but there is no hiding the reason for gathering. So, why do we have a history of youth ministry that is full of messy game nights and outrageously crazy fun in order to attract kids to youth group? Why has youth ministry used entertainment so extensively to attract a crowd before giving them a tiny sample of what they exist for? Obviously we (and I mean this in a broad collective sense) have felt that either Jesus needs dressing up to make him cool, or we have to prove to the teen world that Christians can have fun too.
When I heard the following quote listening to a sermon by John Piper while working out, I nearly fell off the treadmill. “If you alter or obscure the Biblical portrait of God in order to attract converts, you do not get converts to God, you get converts to an illusion. That is not evangelism, that is deception!” It rings so true! And we could take it a step further to suggest that if we alter or obscure the biblical portrait of the church in order to attract teens to the church we have not brought students into the church but into an illusion. Even if we are presenting an honest gospel, packaging it in something other than what God intends the church to be means we are creating a generation of students who cannot relate to his church.
Obviously we don’t want to host boring youth groups. We don’t want to turn students off by expecting them to assimilate into something that is culturally irrelevant to them. However, I would contend that we have created something incredibly irrelevant when we major on fun and minor on what we are meant to be doing with students. If we look at the world of a teenager apart from the church, we see they spend most of their waking hours in school and then add onto that time in sports, clubs, and various other activities. We see them playing video games, watching television, and interacting on social media in their free time. In a typical week, students are not spending a lot of time playing meaningless games. So, have we decided that it is the church’s responsibility to provide zany recreation for teens? What are we hoping to accomplish by it?
I realize that many folks reading this do not waste their youth group times with excessive silly games. Most are not looking to entertain students to attract them or keep them involved. However, we have to keep in mind that this was the norm for youth ministry for a few decades and that means many parents experienced it and many current youth ministers grew up in this model. All of that means that bucking the trend is not easy. If we have thought it through and understand the oddity of what happened in the past, we are better equipped to move forward into the future. We can better understand why the stats suggest the failure of youth ministry. It’s not that good youth ministry failed, it’s that entertainment driven youth ministry has failed.
Next up… Two realities that should shape how we do youth ministry! Yes, that means we are moving beyond the past and offering a better future.
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