How can we better engage more youth in the faith? What can a youth ministry do to engage more youth in the faith that helps their faith stick after high school? There are lots of potential answers but I think we can start with these two: hire older youth pastors and focus on discipleship.
There’s a statistic, a dreaded statistic, a statistic that keeps youth pastors up at night (at least the good ones). Various numbers have been tossed around over the years, but the percentage has hovered around 50-66% since I started youth ministry in 2006. That statistic, that dreaded number is the teen church dropout rate. By their early 20s, only 1 in 3 young person who attended religious services as a teen will still have active faith involvement.
Various strategies and studies have been done over the years to combat this reality but the transition from high school to college or career has proven to be a significant barrier to our youths’ faith. Major transitions in life for all people tend to shake up their religious involvement but graduating high school and moving out into the world on their own has the biggest consequence for a person’s faith journey.
The question we must ask is how can we engage youth in the faith while we have them in such a way that helps them retain that faith once they make that post-high school transition? What can we do to prepare them for the next stage of not just their educational or vocational life, but their spiritual life as well?
In Praise of Old Youth Pastors
I began my first youth ministry when I was 22 years old. At that age, I was not much older than my older students and had just a bit more life experience than they did. I can’t even begin to tell you how much better I would be as a youth pastor 28 years later than I was then.
I was not alone in being a young youth pastor. Most youth pastors are young, fresh out of college or seminary. Most are no more than a decade older than their students. More importantly, they are in a similar stage of neurological development as their teens are. They share many of the same fears and anxieties that teenagers feel.
Furthermore, they can’t at all relate to their students’ parents. How am I going to give advice as a 24-year-old kid with no kids of my own to a parent with three teens? I couldn’t, not in good conscience at least.
And I haven’t even gotten to the most difficult issue raised by young youth pastors, yet. There are countless stories of young youth pastors getting romantically and sexually involved with a student. It’s not unthinkable for a 22-year-old youth pastor to fall for a 17-year-old student in his ministry. I don’t want to link to any of the articles discussing sex crimes committed by youth pastors. It is depressing. But it is real.
What Do the Students Need?
Churches tend to think that if they get a young, energetic youth pastor that the kids will relate well to them, and he or she will attract more students to the ministry. More kids in the youth ministry is what the church needs. But what do the students need?
The students need an older youth pastor. One who has survived adolescence and early adulthood. A youth pastor who can relate both to them and to their parents. One who is steadier, more confident, more certain of him or herself. They need a youth pastor who is a calm, non-anxious, steady presence for them in the turbulence that is adolescence.
I could never be that for my students when I was a youth pastor because I was going through radical changes in my own life just as they were. At that stage of my life, I was getting married, having children of my own, buying my first house, etc. My life was not settled, and I was very much still figuring out who I was, what my philosophy of ministry was, and what I felt was truly important in youth ministry.
I was still growing, learning to be an adult, a husband, a father. I did not possess the self-confidence I needed to steer my ministry in the direction I believed it needed to go and tried to appease all constituencies. That is not the youth pastor my students needed.
I would be an amazing youth pastor now. So much better than I ever was when I was a youth pastor. Much wiser, much less anxious, much more settled into who I am. I would have the self-assurance to commit my ministry to a direction, to invest more heavily in the students who we already had so prepare them for a lifetime of Christian discipleship. I would be able to resist the pressures that saw teenagers as a means to an end, a means to get their parents to attend church and become giving units.
The Balancing Act of Youth Ministry
The pressure I always felt was to get more butts in the seats in my youth room so our church could get more butts in the seats in the sanctuary. And so, the balancing act I was always performing was helping the kids who were already there grow in their faith and reaching out and getting more students to attend. In 1 2-hour program every week, I had to nurture students at various levels of spiritual growth in their faith while simultaneously producing a compelling program for teens with no spiritual background whatsoever.
The upshot of such a design is that I could do neither thing well. I could not invest in the students I already had to the level they would need to make the transition from high school to college with their faith intact. Nor could I put on a program that was interesting enough to attract non-churched kids. I did not have the time (or permission, to be honest) to engage my youth in more activities that would benefit them later in life.
The Wrong Focus in Youth Ministry
I do remember once when I tried to focus our program on activities that would help students grow in their faith and prepare them for life after high school. After about a month, a group of parents ambushed me to tell me I was doing everything wrong. Their biggest concern: their kids’ friends wouldn’t want to come anymore. Youth group wasn’t “fun” anymore.
I could not push back against those parents. I had no credibility, and I was too young and insecure to stand up for what I believed was the right direction for my ministry. So I went back to the balancing act, of trying to do all things for all people within a two-hour youth group meeting. I had to balance fun with discipleship and outreach with inreach and the basics of the faith with deeper teaching for the more advanced students. It was not fun, to say the least.
Again, I would be an amazing youth pastor today. Much better than I was in my 20s and early 30s. I would have more credibility to push back against that group of parents and I would be able to relate to them so much better. I would have more backbone to stand up for what I thought was best for the ministry and for our students.
The problem is that I could never be a youth pastor now. I couldn’t afford to. Youth ministry simply does not pay enough for older pastors to continue to focus exclusively on ministry to teens. So how could we engage our youth in ways that will be continuously formative to their faith?
A Couple of Solutions
First, hire older, more experienced youth pastors or invest in the young youth pastor you have so they can grow into a more mature leader who can be that steadying influence that students need. Also, pay them. Second, focus your ministry on the students who are already there and engage them in activities and relationships that will benefit them post-high school. And stop using them to get to their parents.
Let Your Youth Pastor Cook
Hire (or retain) and pay older youth pastors, pastors in their late-30s and early-40s and let them cook. Let them engage youth in ways that will prepare them for life after they leave the nest. Involve the youth in ministry, not just with teens or kids, but in the worship service and the church at large. Have them connect with parents and bridge the divide between home and church. Let them facilitate relationships between teens and seniors. Hire youth pastors who can be a steadying influence on students, a non-anxious presence who can show them what a mature Christian adult looks like. All of these contribute to growing a faith that will stick after high school.
Treat Teens Like People
Churches must stop treating teens like bait to get their parents to attend their church. Churches need to treat teens like people. Focus on formational ministry that will help students know who they are in Christ, know what they believe and (importantly) why and how they can develop habits that will help them grow on their own once they leave the safety of youth group and their parents’ house.
It makes no sense to sell out the ones you got for the ones you don’t got. If churches genuinely care about reaching teens with the Gospel, then partner with a campus organization like Youth for Christ or Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Work with them to bring the Gospel to the teen rather than trying to bring the teen to church. But if we are losing 66% of our teens post-high school, it makes much more sense to invest in them and engage them in ways that will reduce the percentage of students leaving the faith.
If you liked this article, try out my latest on parenting three daughters.
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