| For Pastors |
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| Written by Admin | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Wednesday, 16 May 2007 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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High school life is really in a bubble. It is in it's own world tucked away from the real world. It is an entire existence, an entire culture, that has little to do with real life. Yes, it is all about preparing adolescents for adulthood but the culture, or subculture, has overtaken. Watch any sophomore learn and strain to learn a geometic formula, struggle to get that earned C, and never have a use for it again. Or watch a junior girl spend hours (and too much money) for a prom date with a guy she's "just friends" with only to have no conversation at dinner and a few dances at the prom and think this was a grown up experience. Or checkout the friends teens have and are loyal to, often to the point of breaking the law, but who do not become groomsmen and bridesmaids at their weddings. True, teens do experience real life. Pregnancies, addictions and empty homes are experiences all too real to teens. So real they affect them for the rest of their lives. The affects are so large because that bubble burst. Bubbles are good for protection. Bubbles provide a safe environment to learn that geometric formula just in case its use ever comes up in the future. Bubbles provide a safe environment to ease into adulthood responsibility. But life, adolescent life, shouldn't always be in a bubble. Youth ministry has turned into a bubble also. We have our youth programs, youth rooms, and most currently, some churches are even running their own youth worship services. What inadvertently has happened is our youth are growing in their faith but it is often outside of the church family. When these youth grow into adulthood, very often the transition into the church family doesn't happen and these now young adults are lost to the church. Maybe you too have heard other ministers describe youth ministry as "orphaning structures." Why do your youth disappear after graduation? It is not because the church has a weak college and career program. It is because the now young adult's only connection to the church has been outgrown. This is not what was intended. You created and support a youth ministry in your church because you really want your teens to have the best and to grow their faith. Sixty-plus years ago the Church saw the success from Youth for Christ and Young Life and adopted their ideas because teens were getting saved. This is how today's youth ministry was born. It is generally called Relation-Based Youth Ministry. However, Youth for Christ and Young Life were never meant to be church models of youth ministry because you have the blessing of a church family that is not available to para-church ministries. If you have studied postmodernity at all, you know that postmodern youth have a need for community. The youth group your church offers certainly does provide community. It is a community of teens. But teens know how two-faced teens are because they are also. Teens need community larger than their peer group. Your youth leader and volunteer staff (if you have any) are not enough. You have a ready-made community in the church family to offer your youth. Barna Group did a large study on teens and their faith. When teens were asked who has "a lot of influence" over their lives, parents came in at 78 percent. Friends were the next closest at 51 percent. That is a large difference. Can you guess where church pastors and priests came in? This will hurt our egos. It was 27 percent. (George Barna, Third Millenium Teens.) Barna goes on to say, "Many of the church leaders talk about the importance of the family, but in practice they have written off the family as an agency of spiritual influence. Their assumption is that if the family (including teenagers) is going to be influenced, it is the organized church that will do the influencing, primarily through its events--worship services, classes, special events, etc. This philosophy causes the impetus behind youth ministry to be fixing what is broken--that is, to substitute the efforts of the church for those of parents since most of the latter do not provide the spiritual direction and accountability that their children need. But there is a procedural problem here: kids take their cues from their family, not from their youth ministers. God's plan was for the church to support the family, and for the family to be the front-line of ministry within the home. Teenagers may glean some truths and principles from youth leaders, but the greatest influence in their lives will remain their parents." Then Barna asks the question, "What are youth ministries doing to serve families rather than usurp them?" (Third Millenium Teens). Family-based youth ministry is a model (of many different forms) that doesn't usurp the parents and their God-given role. It helps your youth take the cues from whom they are most influenced by. Have you had parents who feel intimidated by your talented youth worker so they only drop their youth off for the youth meetings and do little else in the area of spiritual training? Or have you had parents complain about the talented youth worker because he/she is not teaching their children the way they would like? Or have you had parents come to you feeling inadequate in how to raise their teens? It is time to bring the parents back into youth ministry. It is also time to bring the entire church family back into youth ministry. How you do this can take many forms. This is a working resource adding new ideas and new resources from people who are trying out this new youth ministry model. Bookmark this page. Visit often. Submit material. Try an idea or two or make a decision to completely overhaul what you have been doing. We are here to help and inspire.
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3.21 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved." |
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