TGC part 2

The result of the training that was so common in the late 80’s and into the 90’s and the need to produce “results” contained some unintended consequences.  My first several years of ministry revolved around efforts to attract and retain. I had the advice of a guy on our staff who had previously been a Young Life director.  He spoke to me about gathering “critical mass” in order to build some momentum.  It was explained that once a crowd starts to grow, it can snowball with the right strategic efforts.  The challenge was to attract a crowd but also to keep them coming back. The church wanted a thriving youth ministry and was less concerned about the specifics of how we got there.  In fact, many leaders in the church recalled the days when a burger bash or pizza party could draw a crowd and that was good enough for them.  I quickly realized one of the challenges I faced.  Adults in the church did not expect students to be meaningfully engaged in the church.  They wanted them to hear the gospel but what mattered most was a packed out youth room.  As I interacted with youth pastors from other churches, the song was  the same.  As a result, we learned to entertain teens.  We found great new games, made outrageously funny videos, hosted bands, put together some good drama, hosted comedians, and worked to create a sophisticated youth group that exceeded the experience we had ourselves when growing up.  In the midst of all that, we proclaimed the gospel as best as we could and tried to funnel students into small group Bible studies where they could experience real discipleship.

Two unintended consequences emerged that we did not realize had the potential of killing the church.  One was that we had effectively segregated the youth from the church.  This is the famous one eared mickey mouse effect. When the students only spent time in the youth room and rarely visited any other place in the building, they had no contact with the generations of believers who could have also had a positive influence on their faith.  Many in our youth group only attended worship on Christmas and Easter! What does that suggest about the future of the church?  What happens after youth group when they don’t know how to interact with the larger church?  Sadly, some leaders in my church were fine with knowing that there were students in the youth room and not being disturbed by them otherwise.  Yet the next unintended consequence was equally problematic.  We had effectively replaced parents as the primary disciplers of teens in the church. Scripture is clear that God’s intention for passing the faith from one generation to the next is the family.  Mom’s and Dad’s are to open scripture with their kids and teach them to pray, raise them in the faith, and nurture a relationship with Jesus.  Since we did all this in youth group, many parents did not see the need.  They were just so grateful that we were helping Jonny follow Jesus.  Now, we rightly celebrated the fact that we reached kids from unchurched families and sometimes parents joined the church because of our youth ministry. For those students we were not replacing the role of parents.  Yet we did not differentiate and to be honest, I did not understand the role that parents were meant to play. I rejoiced when I saw parents taking initiative in nurturing their kids faith, but I saw that as an exception to the norm. One could argue that we did not respect the role of parents – even though we saw ourselves as supporting them by nurturing faith in their students.

How does all that have the potential to kill the church?  It’s simple really.  If we attract and retain by entertaining, we only hold on to people as long as they are entertained.  The medium is consumeristic, meaning that people are consumers of entertainment.  If the church is entertaining, they will go elsewhere as soon as they get bored or want something other than what we are offering.  We need to do ministry that is engaging, not entertaining.  There is a significant difference.  We also kill the church when we keep students in a holding pattern and do not expose them to the rest of the congregation.  They simply don’t learn to interact with or appreciate the other generations if they never encounter them.  The best we can hope for their future is that they would join a church of only their generation.  We could argue rightly that such a congregation is not really the church.  When we replace parents as the primary means of discipleship in their lives, we are doing generational damage.  What I mean by that is we are creating a vicious cycle that will only repeat itself.  Rather we need to do ministry in a way that teaches students to make disciples of others.  And we need to figure out how to engage parents in nurturing the faith of their teens.

More to come…