Post COVID affects on Youth Ministry

Can you believe it has been 3 years since we quarantined for COVID-19? I know that may bring back some crazy memories. Its the kind of memories we do not want to revisit. I heard one person say that COVID caused us all to time travel. And if you listen to Einstein they were relatively correct. Einstein would say that if we ever travel through time it will be in our relationship to a gravitational force. For instance, if I fly to Mars at a speed approaching light speed, I will experience time at a much slower rate than those people who are living on the the Earth. Which means when I get back from my crazy fast trek to Mars, my family will be 25 years older than my crew and me. They will have traveled at a much faster rate relative to the gravitational force of the sun and earth, thus a form of time travel that doesn’t make Marty McFly as much fun.

In all seriousness, gravity will make time flow at a different rate according to Einstein’s theories. So when my friend said COVID was like time travel, they were relatively correct. If COVID represented gravity I would argue that it was a force that changed us all. It changed our focus in several ways and before you knew it a year had passed leaving us to wonder what had happened. So no it wasn’t a physical time travel, but once 2021 came around we wondered where the year had gone because we were longing for “normal” again. We wanted things to back to the way they were in good ole’ 2019. That sounds crazy but when you take our cultural norms away from us it causes us to refocus our attention, the things we use to mark time are gone, then when you put them back, it feels like we lost a year — time travel.

In that lost time we were forced to take a hard look at our lives and started to reprioritize what was important to us. Which in turn caused a ripple in the church and a ripple through Youth Ministry. In the church we experienced between 30% and 50% loss in attendance which translated to the Youth Ministry as well. That acts like a magnifying glass as we look back on it. We always suspected that there were some people who attended our churches that had not bought into the community completely, it wasn’t surprising. What was surprising is how many people it was — 30 to 50 percent is troubling. That many people struggled to connect to our communities. Which tells us that either we are horrible at connecting with people or that our model for connecting with people is flawed in a major way.

For the most part I think we have concluded that our consumeristic lowering of the bar has caused more problems than its worth. Not many people are experiencing a community that keeps them connected, our leaders are running ragged trying to keep up with all the demands on them, many of us are are sitting around waiting on other people to fix it for us, then we are complaining when its not fixed fast enough, and probably most problematic we discovered that there have been some really bad people hiding a lot of tragic things inside of our houses of worship. COVID-19 magnified all the problems we are facing as a church and thrust them up in our collective faces. Then when we take away the magnifying glass (COVID) we know all those problems need our attention if we want to continue to do ministry.

Youth Ministry was no different. We found toxic leadership, kids questioning everything from belief in God to their gender identity to their need for community. This caused Youth Ministers, parents and church leadership to want to give up because we can’t figure out what has happened with our kids.

What has happened is that COVID acted like a magnifying glass on what we thought was a perfect world. When we looked closely it reminded us that kids are broken and a pizza party is not going to help them solve the issues they are dealing with. We want to yell at them to be better or yell at the leaders leading them because we think they’ve done a bad job. The issue is that kids have always been dealing with the issues that were thrust in our faces due to COVID but we hoped “taking them to church” would fix that, when in reality it showed us that we are broken too, which scares us to death.

One of the biggest problems is that the issues we thought were settled, like gender, sexual identity, race relationships, sexual abuse, safety of our churches, even the limitations of the substitutionary atonement theory, were magnified. There’s this sociological theory called Identity Theory that claims in moments of cultural change social groups will take a closer look at the already agreed upon norms (bias) in the culture so they can investigate the norm for any cracks or issues. COVID took the discussions of race, gender, sexuality, faith, and even community from hovering in the background where we all agreed to what they meant and thrust them forward asking us all to question what they mean to us. Those discussions were happening before COVID but the pandemic caused us to focus on them with more intensity. While we are over here worried about church attendance, offering, and how many kids are not going to camp this year the rest of the culture is rioting over George Floyd, BLM, and, Election Results. Our students are being forced to decide not only their faith, but their sexual identity, their gender identity, are they being racist, and their mental health status. They could care less if we have 100 kids at Youth Group or if our silly games are “cool” or not.

What that means for us as Youth Ministers is that we may be finding that our students are not interested in what we are doing at church or our Youth Groups. They are wondering about its relevance and even questioning the relevance of faith all together. All you have to do is pay attention to the amount of kids “deconstructing” their faith. They are wanting someone to help them deal with the things that they are facing day in and day out, even if it is to help them escape it for a moment and just be a kid.

On top of that they are committed to so much and when COVID was over a lot of organizations doubled down on their need for the students to commit to what they are doing. Everything from soccer clubs, to marching bands, to chess clubs, and karate classes all want more from our students. The crazy thing is that parents want these things for their kids, so they can have the good life, be well rounded, and pad their college applications. Which means they are finding community in those places and don’t need Youth Group nearly as much as they once needed it. The issue is that those places are the very places where they are being asked to decide on things like gender, sexuality, or belief systems.

That may mean our event based weekly party Youth Group may be over, or at the very least suspend until we start embracing the fact that our kids need a safe place and safe people to show them the love of Jesus more than they need the next laser tag event or the next pizza party. Now that doesn’t mean we don’t have fun, in fact the more we create the safe place the more we might find out that our kids need to blow off a bit of steam. What we can’t do is be the place that puts pressure on the kids to be something, they have enough of that, we need to be a place where its safe to just be for a minute. We can’t assume that just because it worked for a big national speaker or even the Youth Pastor down the street that it is good for your group. COVID has shown us that there’s a lot going on under the surface, the more we make space to help our students see God at work in those things the better we will serve them, and what you will find out is that this is the place where discipleship starts.

All this means that we need more people who will take time with students and walk with them through whatever life is throwing at them. We need to meet our students in the messy parts of life so we can help them navigate all the craziness they are experiencing. We need to show them how to walk with Jesus in the real world. None of this is revolutionary, I would argue its historical biblical Christianity. The question is: will we make time for it in our Youth Ministries? Will we stop pushing our kids to attend events and encourage them to find things that help them be followers of Christ? Will we disciple them if they don’t attend our church? Will we suspend the pizza parties and laser tags in order to make space for our kids to process life? I hope we will, because this is the future we have traveled to through the COVID time tunnel.