The Future of Youth Ministry - Today's Tom Sawyer

Youth ministry has been a fixture in American churches for over 50 years. That isn't to say we have only been ministering to teenagers for 50 years, there has always been a form of Youth Ministry in the church, but for 50 years we have seen churches embrace the "need" for a specific ministry directed at the teenagers of our churches and communities.

A brief history lesson may be in order here. Ministry directed toward the kids of a congregation can find its roots in the Sunday School Movement, which has been around since the early 1800s. If you recall the scene from Tom Sawyer where Tom had devised a plan to win all the prizes at Sunday School for scripture memorization without memorizing scripture at all, then you know Youth Ministry has been around a while. Mark Twain penned that book in 1876 and by that time Sunday School was a staple of the church environment, so much so that no one needed an explanation as to what it was or how sly it was for Tom to concoct such a scheme. Samuel Clemons (Mark Twain) who wrote Tom Sawyer almost as an embellished auto-biography was born in 1835 and grew up surrounded by Sunday School. As you can see ministry to kids in church has its roots somewhere in the early 1800s.

Modern Youth Ministry, we might call it, was birthed out of an attempt to do two things, address the Baby Boom of the mid 1900s in the United States and utilize the styles of the Para-Church movement on campuses and cities prior to World War II. Many churches had seen the success of organizations like The Navigators, Youth For Christ, and Campus Crusade for Christ and wanted to know how they could have the same success with the baby boomer kids now populating their churches. That was when they began to hire some of the young missionaries who ran these local clubs and gave them the titles of Jr. Ministers or Youth Pastors, asking them to build the same sort of ministry with the resources and stability a local church brought. For many of these young leaders this was an offer they could not refuse. Thus was born the Modern Youth Ministry movement. It was a chance to address youth culture in the local community with the good news of Jesus Christ using para-church techniques that had already penetrated the campuses.

Believe it or not that was also the birth of the Mega-church movement. Many people claim that Bill Hybles and Willowcreek Community Church are the early architects of the Mega-church movement. Bill Hybles was one of these young youth leaders that a local church asked to lead their Youth Ministry which blossomed into a fully functional church and by the 1980s had been planted in the northern suburbs of Chicago.

In the last few years the Mega-church movement has been exposed as a short sighted experiment who's results showed us our corrupt nature and our sinful dance with power. That means we have to ask the question, has Youth Ministry gone the way of the dinosaur and the dodo bird? Will it be a stuffed memory found in the Natural History Museum like the Carrier Pigeon? Have all the young leaders who once gravitated towards youth ministry started planting churches or roasting coffee beans because they see the hand writing on the wall? Is Youth Ministry over?

The easy answer is, "in part." When it comes to youth ministry, that feeling of excitement and edginess has been lost. Partially, because like a Christmas toy in July, it has lost its luster. We have been doing it this way for so long and reaping little rewards we are starting to question its validity. With questions like, "Do short term mission trips matter?" Or Blog posts about the "indoctrination" at summer camps Or the unrepentant churches covering up their sexual abuse scandals, we begin to wonder has all this been worth it? Are we making disciples? Are we just entertaining the kids while Mom and Dad go to church and sign the big checks? Are we being asked to just be the counselors of fun, instead of the Rabbis of old? Have we been teaching kids to be good American consumers or citizens of the Kingdom of God?

The reason I say "in part," is because we seem to have lost the plot in a lot of our attempts at Youth Ministry. We aren't sure why we did Youth Ministry in the first place and struggle to answer the question Andrew Root directed us to in his book, The End of Youth Ministry? "What is Youth Ministry for?"

Root thinks that we have been pushing our students, culturally to seek their identity. That means that parents are seeking out all sorts of activities to get their kids plugged into that will give them an identity. Traveling sports teams, music programs, academic pushes, and after school jobs are all promoted by parents with money and effort, hoping to give their kids a community that will mold their identity. Which means youth ministry is no longer the place to keep them off the streets and give them a good family friendly alternative to hanging out with their "sinful" friends. So kids are faced with the choice, become an "evangelical" Jesus-freak or "_______" (you fill in the blank.) Most of them choose to fill in the blank with what they are passionate about.

This environment gives Youth Ministers one of two options we either become the counselors of fun, making sure all the kids are having fun and all the parents are happy because the kids don't fight them to go to church. OR we fight with the culture and guilt kids into thinking the only good thing they can do is sacrifice their "worldly" community for the church community. If you are keeping score, neither of these ways produce the disciples Jesus asked us to multiply.

Making things all fun, leaves little room for teaching scripture or discipling students to be like Jesus. Once all the fun things are done, or an activity is deemed "boring" kids drop like flies. Their community is not the church its with their team, band, or friend group, so they gravitate back to those communities, telling everyone "church is boring."

Making students feel guilty for not choosing church over their other communities might be worse. Simply because it flies in the face of the good news that Jesus came to redeem all the parts of our world, not just the church parts. Plus forcing guilt on an adolescent is a low key abuse of power. They are looking for wisdom and peace, but we are giving them shades of Michael Scott. If you've ever felt that cringy feeling while watching The Office when Michael Scott tries to make everyone be friends, then you get why this is so wrong.

So what are the answers? What is the future of Youth Ministry? What if we took Jesus serious at his words and instead of trying to make a group that is isolated from the world, with their own inside jokes, and fear of outsiders, we centered his words in Matthew, "Go into all the world and make disciples...?" The future of Youth Ministry is post-youth group, its less about building a community that keeps our kids "safe" and more about offering them tools and relationships that will help them navigate the world they already inhabit and create safe places.

Imagine a Chick-fil-a or Taco Bell franchise that was a place where adult Christians mentored young adults to live lives like Jesus would live them? Instead of teaching students to worship commodity and the market, we taught them how to love their neighbor and make money to be a blessing to the world that is broken.

Imagine a High School band director who taught discipline, order, and integrity through the love of music shared by the students. Instead of forcing the students to only value the competition, we taught them how to be a team member, how to encourage our neighbors that are struggling, and invited the marginalized in to a safe space where they could build their talent for music.

Imagine a baseball coach that took kids under their wing not only to love the game but to show them how to follow Jesus with all the aspects of their life. Instead of trying to build their personal stats and show everyone how amazing they are, we taught them how to rest well, lead by loving our neighbors, balancing their lives, while helping them become better baseball players.

Imagine a youth pastor that was trained in Trauma Competency, Crisis Intervention, and discipleship techniques offering practical seminars and workshops for parents and student and professionals. This would give them the tools they needed to be disciples in the world where they live every day.

This is the future of youth ministry. We don't call people to gather with us at church to keep them safe. Instead we train them how to be safe places where they live every day. Sure we have fun at times, everyone needs a space to get away, to rest, to find some solace, but we don't make that the end goal. The future of youth ministry is the chance to help students stop consuming the content we produce and help them be the producers of content that brings Jesus glory where they live ever day.

Root says that the goal of Youth Ministry should be Joy. To look for and find the work God is already doing in the world where we live and learn to rejoice in that and join him there. When we do that we find our identity is in Christ and find out that Christ wants to retell our story in such a way that it brings him glory and honor.

Youth ministry is going to look different in the future. We will have to unlearn our roles as "counselors of fun" and embrace the role of Rabbi, teacher, and mentor. May we do so with integrity and passion as we move into the future. Who knows, we might actually be pioneering a new work that in 50 years will have produced a crop, 100 times more than we can imagine because we were faithful to Jesus' words.