Student Ministry that Matters

3 Elements of a Healthy Student Ministry

Ben Trueblood

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781433644498
• eBook ISBN: 9781433644504
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Is your student ministry healthy? This is a question every student minister has asked. It's a question that brings both anger and tears. You are growing in numbers, but something just didn't feel right. It doesn't feel healthy. This is the "there must be more to student ministry than this" moment. Regardless of your ministry context, church size, denomination, or years of experience, it is possible for you to have a healthy student ministry. The three elements, explained by author Ben Trueblood, will lead you to that very thing. Student Ministry that Matters gives you and your leaders a framework to answer this question, " Is my student ministry healthy? " and help you highlight areas of improvement as you seek to lead a student ministry focused on health.

Chapter 1

The Three Elements of a Healthy Student Ministry

In the 2004 Athens Olympic Games Matt Emmons, American sport shooter, was on his way to his second gold medal of the games. He needed to post a score of 7.2 in order to take home the gold, and his lowest score to that point was a 9.3. He had it in the bag. As he took aim on his last shot, he pulled the trigger and recorded a perfect bull’s-eye. The only problem was that the target he hit was not the target in his designated lane. Matt’s bull’s-eye was on the wrong target, and instead of claiming his second gold medal of the games he slipped to eighth place in the event.

In order to have a healthy student ministry, you need to be aimed at the right target. My hope for this book is to give you the target that can help you win. Regardless of where you fall on the student ministry leader spectrum—volunteer, part-time, or full-time—you can aim at this target and have a healthy ministry where students and their families become lifelong disciples of Jesus.

That is the win, isn’t it? Not to see students change for a short time, but to actually see them living for Jesus for the rest of their lives. You can see this begin to happen in the small group you lead, in the class you teach, or in the student ministry you lead.

Your target for a healthy student ministry consists of three areas I will refer to as “elements.”

The three elements of a healthy student ministry that you will engage with throughout this book are extremely important because they will help you fulfill the calling that God has placed on your life to serve in student ministry. Seeing student ministry through the lens of these three elements will help you keep your eyes, and your work, focused on long-term health rather than on the many shortcuts that give the illusion of health. Many believe that student ministry is about having more students at “X” than they had last year.

This is a dangerous belief because it can cause you as a student leader to see student ministry as a formula rather than a disciple-making organism. Formulaic student ministry says, “I know if I do these eight things, then I will have more students than I did last time.” Student ministry in this context is reduced to the execution of a playbook rather than reliance upon God to reveal vision, direction, and clarity to an ever-changing and living organism.

This is one reason why it’s important to understand that the three elements you will find in this book are not just another ministry strategy or formula. They are specific enough to provide direct application, yet general enough for you to be able to fit them into your own ministry context. As your ministry strategies change and adjust to the ever-changing world of student ministry, this is a target that will remain constant for you.

All three ministry elements are necessary because you can’t have a healthy student ministry without all three being present and working together. At this point you may be skeptical. “Did he really say a ministry couldn’t be healthy without these three elements?” I believe that strongly because I’ve seen it work. I’ve led in student ministry according to these three elements (using different language, but the same principles) and have seen a ministry turn from unhealthy and dysfunctional to healthy and thriving. We experienced both explosive growth and steadily climbing growth. We saw students come to know Jesus and students surrender their lives to missions and ministry. The ministry is still growing and thriving long after I’ve been gone.

This didn’t happen because of me, or my team of staff and volunteers, even though they were awesome and we worked extremely hard. It happened because God blessed the ministry when we were aiming at the right target. We’re not the only ministry to experience what it’s like to be part of a healthy student ministry. As I’ve talked with thousands of student pastors and volunteers over the past few years, these three elements have continued to rise to the top as the driving factors influencing student ministry health. With these three elements as your target, you will have a healthy student ministry. It will only be a matter of time.

So what are the three ministry elements?

They are:

1. Kingdom Expanding
2. Character Transforming
3. Culture Shaping

What I found on my personal journey to leading a healthy student ministry was that it’s the basic things that are often overlooked yet are the most important. In student ministry it’s easy to get lost in the hype and activity. If you get stuck here, it is the quickest off-ramp on the road to student ministry health. Steve Jobs, former co-founder and CEO of Apple, was known for his commitment to focus and simplicity. He said, “Simplicity can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”3

The way that you move mountains in student ministry is by mobilizing a team of people around a simple idea that they can easily articulate to you and to each other. Remember that whatever level of leadership you have in student ministry, you are a leader of other people. Student ministry isn’t meant to be done in isolation. Because of this, it isn’t enough that you alone are aimed at the right target. You need to ensure that your students, volunteers, and staff team are aimed at the right target as well. That kind of synergy doesn’t come from complexity or a clever gimmick. The three elements become the tool of simplicity that can help you lead your student ministry to a place of greater health and effectiveness.

As a side note, if you aren’t reading this with your volunteer team, I highly recommend that you do. A healthy student ministry isn’t led by one person, but by a team of people who all desire a healthy student ministry and know how to get there together. There will be questions at the end of each chapter moving forward that will help you guide discussion with your leaders as you enter into this journey together. There is great power in your ministry when you as an entire student ministry team operate together as one body with the same language.

Discussion Questions

1. At this time, is there one element that our ministry does better than the others?
2. Is our ministry currently structured for short-term results or long-term health?
3. Are there moments in the recent past when we have become stuck in the hype and activity of student ministry? How can we move more toward simplicity?

Kingdom Expanding

Chapter 2

Element #1: Kingdom Expanding

Healthy student ministries are Kingdom Expanding. They are evangelistic. In a healthy student ministry there will be students who meet Jesus and are rescued from their sin. You’ve heard this statement before: “The majority of people who meet Jesus do so before the age of eighteen.” It’s heard so frequently that for many it’s become cliché and even ignored. This is unacceptable. The reality of student ministry is that you are called to one of the most fertile mission fields in the world as you minister to students and their families, and evangelizing this mission field is directly linked to the overall health of your student ministry.

I learned early on in student ministry that words have to be defined. Students need to know what you mean when you use words like evangelism, sin, discipleship, and God’s Kingdom. It is in that spirit that I want to help you with some definitions related to this element. When I refer to “Kingdom” here, I am referring to God’s Kingdom of people who have placed their faith in Him. Others have called it the universal church. In its most basic definition it simply means all believers everywhere. To expand God’s Kingdom then means that your student ministry will be involved in adding people to God’s Kingdom.

Throughout history this process has been closely linked to evangelism. In the Bible evangelism is presented in terms of giftedness (Eph. 4:11) and as an instruction for all believers (Matt. 28:19). It’s important to note that while God gifts some people more than others in this area, not having this giftedness doesn’t remove us from the responsibility of being evangelistic in both our personal lives and as leaders of student ministry. The very definition of evangelism lends itself to both a leadership form as well as a personal form: evangelism is the spreading of the gospel through public preaching or personal witness.

For a student ministry to truly embody this element, it must fulfill both aspects of this definition. A healthy student ministry will share the gospel through its preaching as well as train its people to share the gospel in a personal setting, which we will talk about more in the next few chapters. As the story of Jesus is shared in these public and private moments, people will have an opportunity to respond to that message by placing their faith in Jesus. Through the work of the Holy Spirit and this action of faith, people are added to God’s Kingdom. Being a Kingdom Expanding ministry cannot happen if the ministry is not evangelistic. There’s only one problem: student ministries in general are far less evangelistic than in years past.

I’ve noticed throughout the years that student pastors have developed adverse feelings to the following words: evangelist, evangelistic, numbers, and invitation. At t...

Table of contents

• Foreword by Eric Geiger
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Three Elements of a Healthy Student Ministry
• Kingdom Expanding
• Character Transforming
• Culture Shaping
• Conclusion: Why Did I Get into This?
• About the Author
• Notes