Family-Based Youth Ministry

Mark DeVries

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780830832439
• eBook ISBN: 9780830868056
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Have you tried all the new youth programs? Have you planned one too many wacky activities? Are you frustrated about the size of the youth group? Here's an approach to ministry that takes youth work seriously.Family-based youth ministry is about adults discipling teens one-on-one and in groups. It is about involving not just the nuclear family but the whole church family--from singles to older adults. More important, it's about incorporating youth into the life of your church.So stop worrying about the size of your youth group or your budget. Mark DeVries's refreshing approach to youth ministry will show you how your church can reach today's teens and how you can keep them involved in the life of the church. Whether you are a parent, a youth pastor or a church member who cares about teens, you will find in this book an entirely different approach to youth ministry that will build mature Christian believers.

1 SOMETHING’S WRONG

The Crisis in Traditional Youth Ministry

Traditional” youth ministry. It sounds like an oxymoron in a day when youth ministries pride themselves on being outrageous, wild, out of control—anything but “traditional.” But as we stand on the backside of the turn of the millennium, such a clear pattern for youth ministry has emerged that no term describes it quite so well as “traditional.”

What I am calling “traditional youth ministry” has little to do with style or programming or personality. It has to do with the place of teenagers in the community of faith. During the last century, church and parachurch youth ministries alike have increasingly (and often unwittingly) held to a single strategy that has become the defining characteristic of this model: the isolation of teenagers from the adult world and particularly from their own parents.

This traditional model has its roots in the turn of the century with the rise of the Christian Endeavor Movement, a church-based, interdenominational program created especially for youth. Undergirded by a culture in which teenagers had frequent interaction with adults and with their own parents, Christian Endeavor (and church imitations that followed it) flourished. Using a Sunday-night meeting format, these Christian Endeavor-type programs had uncovered a creative and quite effective model for reaching teenagers for Christ.

But when the popularity of the Sunday-night, church-based format began to wane in the 1940s, a new style of youth ministry appeared on the scene, a style popularized by Young Life and Youth for Christ. These organizations hit on the strategy of reaching young people apart from the traditional church setting. And during the next few decades these ministries expanded with explosive energy, reaching thousands of teenagers whom the institutional church seemed to be missing.

With the help of such resource groups as Youth Specialties, the cuttingedge creativity of these parachurch ministries became available to local churches. And in the last twenty years, hundreds of youth ministry resource organizations have been launched, making youth ministry more creative than ever, with an exceptional menu of products designed to reach teenagers more effectively. But despite the external improvements, youth ministry today is in crisis.

The things I did ten months ago aren’t working anymore!

I was speaking at a conference not long ago and was asked to give a thirty-second explanation of family-based youth ministry. I reported simply what I have heard from many youth workers over the past five years: “What used to work ten years ago with teenagers is just not working anymore.” I wasn’t surprised to see the nods of agreement from this room full of experienced youth workers.

Later that evening, one of the conference participants pulled me aside and made a telling remark: “I agree that the things I did ten years ago don’t work anymore,” he said. “But the real shock for me is that the things I did ten months ago aren’t working anymore either!”

SUCCESS: MATURE CHRISTIAN TEENAGERS?

The stereotypical guitar-playing youth leader with a set of idea books and a floppy Bible is no longer enough to attract the attention and enthusiasm of our youth. Long-term youth ministers who have followed the futures of their youth group members have begun to sense intuitively that something is wrong. Most veteran youth ministers I know have a busload of stories like my story about Jenny.

As a seventh-grader, Jenny began visiting our youth group with a friend during church basketball season. Quite honestly, I expected that she would disappear after the ten-game season was over. But was I ever wrong! At some point during that first year, Jenny responded to the claims of Christ and became a model youth group member. She was a regular fixture at our Sunday-morning, Sunday-evening and Wednesday-night youth programs. She sat in the youth section in worship and even showed up when missionaries gave their slide shows (“This is India—Land of Contrast [BEEP]”).

Jenny came from a family in which the Christian faith was irrelevant at best. Her parents were supportive of her involvement in the church, but they made it clear that Jenny’s spiritual priorities were not for them.

Whenever I had doubts about whether our ministry was having any impact, I would remind myself of Jenny and her amazing story. If anyone bore the marks of the success of our ministry, it was she. Like most youth ministers, I had trouble evaluating the success of our program strictly on the basis of how large a crowd we could gather for youth meetings. But Jenny’s story gave me something to hang on to. I could point to her when I needed assurance that I was actually doing something right.

As Jenny grew older, I became more enthusiastic as I watched her precocious spiritual maturity develop. By the time she was a high school sophomore, she was a part of our student leadership team and someone I held up as a model for the younger members of our youth group. By anyone’s standards, we had succeeded with Jenny. She was a mature Christian teenager, well ahead of most of her peers who grew up in Christian homes.

I left for seminary just before Jenny’s junior year. That same year she moved away as well. I lost touch with her for several years; so when one of our mutual friends mentioned seeing her, I was anxious to hear how she had grown.

But I was deeply saddened by what I heard. Apparently, after leaving our active youth ministry, Jenny couldn’t find a church she liked as well as ours, and gradually she gave up the search altogether. She has graduated from college and, after living with her boyfriend for a while, eventually moved on to a fast track in her career. Although she looks back on her youth group experience with nostalgia, she has shown little interest in pursuing her faith as an adult.

Jimmy, on the other hand, never quite connected with our youth ministry. We really worked to get him involved with our youth programs. He had no interest in retreats or mission trips; Sunday school bored him; and youth group seemed a little on the silly side for his taste. He sometimes attended another church across town. On my mental scorecard of kids we had been effective with, Jimmy was on the “loss” side.

But Jimmy had one thing going for him: Every Sunday he was in worship, either with his parents at our church or with his friends at another church. Jimmy didn’t need our outrageous and creative youth ministry to lead him to faith maturity. For Jenny our youth ministry was her only Christian family. But unlike a real family, this one forced her to resign from the family when she was too old to fit the requirements. She now looks back on her youth group experience like she does on her high school Farrah Fawcett haircut—as a fun, even laughable part of her past, but as something that belonged exclusively in the realm of her teenage years.

I haven’t closed the book on Jenny’s story, but if it’s shown me anything, it is that something was wrong with the way I was measuring success. We had succeeded in leading her to become a mature Christian teenager, but somehow we failed to place her on the track toward mature Christian adulthood. We were shortsighted, focusing on the short-term objective of keeping her involved and growing but forgetting the long-term goal of laying a foundation that would last for the long haul.

WHAT IS THE CRISIS?

For almost two decades now I have maintained the somewhat controversial position that youth ministry today is “in crisis.” When I use the word crisis, many are quick to point out all the positive signs in youth ministry today. They point to the many churches that are reporting record numbers of young people active in their programs. They remind me of the parachurch organizations and national church ministries that have found ways of attracting unprecedented numbers to their events. And they document the staggering number of youth ministry practitioners who are drawn to national youth worker training events.

But when I speak of the crisis in youth ministry, I’m not suggesting that our traditional youth ministry models have failed to get students and their leaders to attend meetings. I readily admit that we have become quite proficient at that process. But I still insist that there is a crisis.

There is little doubt that there are more successful youth ministries today than there were twenty years ago. But take a look at the long-term, cumulative results of youth ministry:

• George Barna, in his Index of Leading Spiritual Indicators, documents that when thousands of believers were asked to rate what churc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 - Something’s Wrong - The Crisis in Traditional Youth Ministry
• 2 - Is Anybody Out There? - The Growth of Teenage Isolation
• 3 - The Developmental Disaster - The Impact of Teenage Isolation
• 4 - Sitting on a Gold Mine - The Power of the Nuclear Family
• 5 - The Critical Care Unit - The Peculiar Crisis in Today’s Christian Family
• 6 - Stacking the Stands - The Power of the Extended Christian Family
• 7 - It Only Makes Sense - The Vision of Family-Based Youth Ministry
• 8 - Beyond the Cleavers - The Challenge and Opportunity of Ministry to Nontraditional Families
• 9 - Walking the Tightrope - Family-Based Youth Ministry and the Developmental Need for Independence
• 10 - A Different Gospel - Youth Culture Comes to Church
• 11 - God Calling - Thinking Theologically About Youth Ministry
• 12 - Making It Work - Implementing a Family-Based Youth Ministry
• Appendix A: A Matter of Perspective
• Appendix B: Has the Traditional Family Really Died?
• Appendix C: 19 Models For Youth Ministry
• Appendix D: 122 Family-Based Youth Ministry Programming Ideas
• Appendix E: Bridges: A Family-Based Curriculum
• Notes
• Praise for Family-Based Youth Ministry
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright Page