The Best Thing That Happened to Our Youth Ministry

Six years ago I began my journey as a Youth Director. I had never done anything like this before but God had called me to do it, so I stepped out in faith. I stepped into a church that was excited to see their youth program start up and they funded it accordingly. We had plenty of funds to buy curriculum, materials for students, equipment for games, etc… Since I had never been a part of another youth ministry or seen another youth ministry, I began to do the things that most youth ministries do. We spent money on curriculum for our Wednesday night program. We spent money on outreach events trying to draw in kids from the community. We spent money on equipment and materials for our youth area trying to give them an environment to hang out in. Things were going great and we watched our group grow in size.

At the peak of our excitement, something happened. The economy crashed and we watched our budget gradually shrink every year until it became zero. I still remember a conversation that I had with one our college students after that congregational meeting. He came running up to me red in the face screaming, “Why didn’t you fight this? Why are you allowing them to cut our budget?” At the time, all I could say is that our church didn’t have the money and there wasn’t much else we could do about it. Now looking back over the last three years, I have a completely different answer.

That budget cut forced our ministry team to look at the focus and the purpose of our ministry. We could have gotten angry and frustrated, but we chose to examine our ministry. We found that our focus had been all wrong those well-funded years. Sure we had been doing things that youth ministries do and sure our group was growing, but was it really growing? In reality, does growing in size really mean anything? We looked at the curriculum we were buying and noticed that it was extremely shallow.  We looked at our outreach events and realized that they weren’t very effective. We looked at our hang-out space and realized that kids just wanted a place to hang out. All of this brought us back to square one and left us asking the question, “What should our ministry be focused on?”

This time period marked a turning point in our ministry and we have seen God do major things through our group since then. As a result of the budget cut we stripped our ministry bare and brought it back to the basics. As silly as it may sound, we began to focus completely on God’s Word.  Most would assume that this is the focus of many ministries; however, I have seen and experienced that this is not always true. With the new focus we decided that we were no longer going to spend half the time playing games; instead, we were going to open with worship. We scrapped buying curriculum and I started writing my own messages. We began to bring messages with depth and theological truths to our teenagers and they loved every bit of it. On top of all this, we actually stopped doing outreach events. This raised some people’s temperatures but overall the results silenced their concerns. Instead of trying to draw youth into the church with fun events, we sent our youth out into the community as disciples of Christ and encouraged them to bring other youth back in.

The big questions that I am always asked are, “So how did all of this work out for you?” and “What have you learned through all of this?” The best way to answer the first question is to describe what our group looks like now. When I first started in this group we had seven youth and all of them had grown up in our church. Now we have close to forty teenagers showing up on a Wednesday night and over half of them are from outside of our church. On Wednesday nights we basically hold an hour long worship service with a half hour small group following it. Once all of that is over, we still have to kick kids out at 9:30pm. We hold two events a year and their primary focus is to push kids out of their comfort zones and deeper into their faith. We have to limit the number of kids that go on these trips because we don’t have space to hold them all. We just finished up our annual missions trip where we spend the entire week serving in our community and studying theology. At the end the week, we have the youth debate each other on theological topics. To most of the teenagers, the debate is a highlight of the week because it forces them to dig deeper into what they believe. It has been amazing to watch God use this ministry to transform teenagers into solid disciples of the Christian faith.

So, what have I learned through all of this? Teenagers are asking a lot of questions and they want them answered. When we spend most of our time playing games and having fun, we enforce the idea that their questions aren’t important. I have also learned that when we help teenagers understand solid theological truths, their faith explodes. They no longer are simply saying that they believe these things, but they hold fast to these truths and live them out. We have seen more teenagers passionately following Christ in the past year than we ever have previously in this congregation. Most importantly, we have learned that when we hold low expectations for teenagers, they will only rise that high, but when we raise our expectations, they will rise to meet them every time. Teenagers are ready to change the world, why isn’t the church encouraging that? We need to be raising up leaders and sending them out into the world.

The purpose of this article isn’t to encourage congregations to cut funding to their youth ministries. Ministries still need money to operate and the support of their congregations. The purpose of this article is to challenge ministries to cut through all the peripheral stuff that gets in the way and focus on God’s Word and making disciples. Let’s challenge our congregations and challenge our teenagers to be Disciples of Christ, all the while giving them to tools to accomplish it. Once we do that, we will be able to watch as the church begins to be the salt and the light of the world.  This mission doesn’t necessarily require a large budget. Primarily, it requires the Word of God and the Holy Spirit. Thankfully, both are given freely by God’s grace.