Two Great Articles on Youth Ministry

The White Horse Inn has posted two excellent articles on youth ministry by Michael Horton: Generation Me and Youth Ministry (Part One & Part Two). Please take time to read them. There is much wisdom not only about how we minister to youth but about our understanding of the church. We have much to re-learn.

Much of the ministry to teenagers in America needs an overhaul – not because churches fail to attract significant numbers of young people, but because so much of those efforts are not creating a sustainable faith beyond high school. There are certainly effective youth ministries across the country, but the levels of disengagement among twentysomethings suggest that youth ministry fails too often at discipleship and faith formation. A new standard for viable youth ministry should be – not the number of attenders, the sophistication of the events, or the ‘cool’ factor of the youth group – but whether teens have the commitment, passion and resources to pursue Christ intentionally and whole- heartedly after they leave the youth ministry nest...

Youth ministry is about 150 years old. Arising at first as a way of reaching out to troubled teens especially in highly industrialized urban centers, parachurch ministries like the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) sought to provide safe activities and education in basic reading along with evangelism. Throughout the nineteenth century, parachurch organizations mushroomed. Attempting to create a Protestant Empire that transcended confessional differences, the Bible societies and Sunday School movement increasingly supplanted the ordinary structures, resources, and content of particular church traditions. According to the movement’s leaders, it’s what all evangelicals profess that matters, not what distinguishes Lutherans, Reformed, Baptists, and other denominations. Of course, there had always been catechism instruction for the young and new Christians. Now, however, Sunday school increasingly isolated the younger generations not only from the older but also from the wider confessional tradition to which they belonged. The Sunday school curriculum shared by all Protestant youths, not the catechism, shaped faith and practice. The “youth group” emerged as its own “church-within-a-church,” distinct from the public ministry and worship.

And so it has become increasingly easy for one to go from the nursery to children’s church to youth group and on to college ministry without having actually belonged to the local church. Young people may still drive with their family to the church campus, but from the parking lot they scatter to their own target-marketed groups. For many, the church is more a cafeteria of ministry offerings than a communion of saints. So is it really surprising that a good local church doesn’t figure into things when deciding upon a college and many don’t even join one because, after all, they have their campus ministry? I know of some instances, in fact, of such groups holding their meetings during the regular time of Sunday services.

Michael Horton from the article Generation Me and Youth Ministry (part one)

Do not hinder them...

The church ought to welcome its children into its corporate worship gatherings. Of course it is a sign of our times that this has to be said. Not long ago, holding separate worship services for children, youth, singles, etc would have been unthinkable. Age segregated worship services have not been helpful to the church of Jesus Christ. It seems that more voices within evangelicalism are beginning to challenge this strange invention.

Jason Helopoulos has written two helpful posts on the subject of inviting children into our corporate worship services. In the first post he offers six reasons why this is a good thing:

1. Our children are members of the covenant community (the church): Corporate Worship on Sunday morning is the primary activity the covenant community engages in together (Acts 2:42; Ephesians 10:24-25). Therefore, our children as members of this community should be included in this crucial aspect of covenantal life.

2. Our children will be present in the midst of the means of grace: Our children benefit by being where the Word is preached (Romans 10:14), the sacraments are administered (Matthew 28:19-20), and corporate prayer is practiced (Acts 2:42-47). These are the chief means by which God pours out grace upon His people. Why knowingly rob our children of this blessing?!

3. Our children will be present in the midst of the entire congregation: Our children benefit greatly by being in the presence of Christians of various ages. They are able to see that the faith of their parents is not a faith that they own alone, but is a faith that is important to all of these people who are gathered around them on Sunday morning. This only reinforces what Mom and Dad are modeling and teaching when they see this incredible gathering of people reading the Word together, praying together, confessing together, and singing together (Deuteronomy 31:9-13). They need to see the body in action.

4. Our children will be present with their parents: Worshipping together as a family helps to counter the current trend in our society of fragmenting our families. If our children join us in worship from four years of age until they are eighteen they will worship with their parents in 780 Sunday morning worship services! Think about the cumulative effect of a family worshipping together, in the midst of the means of grace, meeting with God for 780 Sundays in a row.

5. Our children will witness their parents worshipping: It is the Biblical role of parents to disciple their children in the faith (Deut. 6; Psalm 78; Eph. 6). What a benefit there is when children witnesses their mother or father singing with conviction, praying in reverence, listening intently to the sermon, or receiving the Lord’s Supper in joy. In these moments a child witnesses the importance of faith and worship. There are few greater encouragements to a child’s faith then seeing their parents worship God with reverence and joy. (Exodus 12:1-28; Deut. 4:9-11; Deut. 6; Psalm 78; Ezra 10:1; Nehemiah 12:43; Joel 2:12-17; Acts 16:33).

6. Our children will learn the rhythms of church life: Teenagers in our culture often balk at attending corporate worship. But how many of our teenagers have we setup for this reaction, because we did not consistently include them in worship until they were a teenager? If attending church for years has always meant coloring Bible pictures, singing songs to a cd, playing games, and doing crafts—then we should not be surprised that our young people find worship to be odd, uncomfortable, and even boring. I love good children’s songs—they ring through my house. I love good children’s Christian crafts—they decorate my study. But if this alone is the rhythm of church life we have set up for our children week in and week out, we have done them a great disservice. They must see, know, and learn that the singing of the great hymns of the faith, the preaching of the Word, reading of confessions, corporate prayers, etc. is anything but boring. It is the gathered life of the community of faith. It is our weekly rhythm—appointed by God, designed by Him, established for the ages—this is what we want them to know, because we want them to know and worship Him.

Read the whole article HERE.

The second post is entitled "Children in Worship: Mom Tested Tips"

Why you should be bringing your children to "big church"

David Fitch has posted a great article concerning the reasons why parents should, indeed must bring their children to the corporate worship of God's people. To the complaint that "My children don't get anything out of the service," Fitch offers three responses:

1.) There’s an encounter with the living God here at our worship service. Your son/daughter need to be coached into that reality. They need to be prepared for the reality that we gather into His presence so that we might in turn know His presence in every area of our everyday lives. Let us join together then, we the church and the parents, to help our children become people sensitive to the encounter with the Almighty Forgiving and Saving/Renewing God in our lives and in our daily walk.

2.) But Discerning God is Rarely Immediately Obvious. God is hidden. So your son and/or daughter and our church need to learn and be sensitized to discerning the presence of God. If we put God into sound bites or hyped up worship experiences, then your child will learn instinctually that church is the only place he or she can find God. And this simply isn’t true. In our world, especially given the dominant educational and media frameworks, God has been framed out of our sightlines. God has become a privatized internal experience. Part of being in worship together is the place for all of us, including our children, to learn how to discern God. It takes subtle encouragement, asking questions, nurturing in the right direction, not pushing too hard. We the church and the parent must come together to help our children or else they will become moral therapeutic deists (I love that nomenclature J).

3.) Children Ultimately Will Follow/Imitate Their Parents and Adults They Can Respect – therefore one’s children and how they are progressing can function as an excellent diagnostic for our own level of engagement with God. I must be careful to not overstate this because children all develop differently. But let’s face it, eh? If we are forcing our children to do something we are ourselves are disconnected from, it ain’t going to happen. If we send our children to a more “passive” entertaining form of worship service, they will ultimately learn to become observers of the Christian faith not livers of the way of Jesus and His Kingdom. If they see our life with God as something we do when it offers us something pragmatically advantageous to the American life, it will become something to be used when helpful, put on a shelf when not, they too will do this. Any differential between what we do and how we live as a family could prejudice them for a lifetime against Christianity as a false form of ideological existence.

Read the entire article HERE.

Without the Word...

“…Without this transcendent Word in its life, the church has no rudder, no compass, no provisions. Without the Word, it has no capacity to stand outside its culture, to detect and wretch itself free from the seductions of modernity. Without the Word, the church has no meaning. It may seek substitutes for meaning in committee work, relief work, and various other church activities, but such things cannot fill the role for very long. Cut off from the meaning that God has given, faith cannot offer anything more by way of light in our dark world than what is offered by philosophy, psychology, or sociology. Cut off from God’s meaning, the church is cut off from God; it loses its identity as the people of God in belief, in practice, in hope. Cut off from God’s Word, the church is on its own, left to live for itself, by itself, upon itself.”

- David Wells, God in the Wasteland

Where are the children?

Look around the typical large or mega-church and try to find the children. Increasingly, they are disappearing from the church's corporate worship.

I know why we do it:
Kids can be noisy.
Parents need a break.
Kids won't really learn anything in "big church."

Ironically, the third reason which is the most frequently used as a justification for not including children in the corporate worship of God's people is by far the most dubious reason. I know that kids can be noisy. I know that parents need a break. But please do not tell me that kids don't learn anything in the corporate gathering of God's people.

Corporate worship provides parents with a unique opportunity in parenting. Where else are kids taught to listen and be still? that the world does not revolve around them? Where else are they exposed to the proclamation of God's Word. Where else are they exposed to the biblical substance and generations worth of wisdom that are reflected in the great hymns of the church? In what other venue are parents and children being taught the same thing and thus given the opportunity to work out the implications together? I remember at the previous church I pastored being asked by a visiting parent (who just discovered that we did not have children's church), "What am I supposed to do with my kids?" I responded as gently as possible, "parent them."

From Joshua at Creed or Chaos:

This division does more harm than good. It teaches children that they are not a vital part of the congregation, which in some churches is sadly true. However, my sense is that most churches value their children. The everyday church’s impulse to provide a place where children will connect with the church and stay with the church for many years to come is noble. But if ministers and parents want their children to connect deeply with the church, then they should stop allowing their children to be sent away during the most important part of the Christian life—the collective worship of the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I am glad that I gather in a church where all the parents are looking for a way to keep their children in the service and where a cooing baby is a blessing. In this environment, my children will grow up feeling important and my guess is that they will stay in the church much longer than they would if they went to Sunday School in lieu of assembling with the whole community. Besides, the gospel is for children too, and there should never be too few in pew.

Read the entire post HERE.