Part of a series ‘Raising the Bar on Youth Ministry’.
From 2000 to 2002 the LA Lakers won three NBA championships. An incredible three seasons back-to-back. Sure, they had Kobe and Shaq. But they weren’t their only weapons. They also had a coach named Phil Jackson. In 2004 Jackson stopped coaching, and consequently their championships also stopped. Even with the great Kobe Bryant, they couldn’t win. That’s until Phil Jackson returned. And when he returned the Lakers won back-to-back championships in 2009 and 2010. Even with generational talent like Kobe Bryant, the LA Lakers needed a strategy.
We all want to be the Kobe of youth ministry, but what our churches really need are Phils. Successful youth ministry needs a strategy. In this article I want to give an example of what a youth ministry strategy could look like—by all means make adjustments to suit your local context.
Purpose: Why Do We Exist?[1]
The Bible gives us two institutions for raising disciples of Jesus and youth group isn’t one of them. That doesn’t mean it’s not important, but it does mean it’s not primary. The purpose of youth group is to serve the two institutions he has given us: the family and the church.
The family is the primary place of discipleship for our children.[2] However, as youth transition into young adults, we should begin to see the influence of their immediate family and household drop, and the influence of their church family grow.
Youth ministry exists to be a bridge between home and church. It doesn’t exist for its own sake, but to help connect our youth into church. Youth group ends after school, but church is God’s gift to us for the rest of our lives.
Vision: A Postcard from the Future
The vision we propose for youth ministry is that by God’s power it might create a community of young adults who are faithful disciples of Jesus.
A long-term vision like this can save your team from those relentless feelings of failure and hopelessness. As you already know, youth ministry can be slow and patient work. Each week our leaders say things like: “No one was listening,” “They didn’t like the game,” “Nothing’s getting through to them.” But if our youth keep coming back, we can continue slowly and patiently investing in them.
This vision allows us to think of youth group less like an emergency crash course and more like school. We should play the long game, aiming for healthy young adults not perfect teenagers.
Mission: The Compass to Keep You on Course
Our mission introduces the things we can measure now to keep us pointing in the right direction. A local youth group copied the mission of their church—a good way to ensure alignment. Their youth ministry strategy is:
We want to make sure our youth are positively experiencing these five things:
1. Thick Community
2. Christian Maturity
3. Joyful Worship
4. Deliberate Service
5. Patient Mission
Thick Community: An Enjoyable Place of Belonging and Accountability
Ideally, youth group is one of the highlights of our youth’s week. A place where they can relax, and feel spiritually encouraged and sincerely valued by those around them. This requires a culture of welcoming and inclusion. We want all the youth to experience the love that Jesus has for them through the love, joy, and warmth of the leaders and our core group of members.
Christian Maturity: Transformation Over Information
We want to see our youth continually growing to be more like Jesus—even when it’s tough. To do this, they need a strong foundation. We need to be drinking from God’s word at youth group and equipping them to read it for themselves during the week. They also need to daily submit their requests, sorrows, doubts and joys to him in prayer. It’s important that we aren’t just teaching them facts. Our youth need to believe in the risen Lord Jesus, to love him, submit to him, and live as his disciple each day.
Joyful Worship: Worship Is Our Response to God
We want our youth living their entire lives devoted to Jesus, in response to his word, by the power of his Spirit. Their worship should be expressed in everything they say and do: in the way they avoid sins of thought, word and action; the way they are hospitable to other kids at church and school; the way they are kind, including to their parents, brothers and sisters. We don’t just want church kids, we want kids who love Jesus in all contexts—school, sport, family, work and church.
One of our primary responses to the gospel is joy. In church community, this means singing with gusto, praying with heart, and coming alongside each other with sincere words of encouragement. I think we should encourage their worship of God to be enthusiastic. If anything should engage their enthusiasm, surely the worship of God should? I’m not saying that we should set the expectation of constant, visible enthusiasm. But, for my youth at least, their default is low-to-no enthusiasm. They’re so far from being overly enthusiastic, overly expressive and overly delightful in their worship of God that my goal is to at least get us to a 5/10.
Deliberate Service as Members of the Body of Christ
God has given everyone unique skills and gifts to build the church. Youth leaders should aim to identify those gifts in the youth and invest in them, building pathways for them to serve. Serving grows the individual while also building and equipping the church. Furthermore, it establishes relationships with others, provides a sense of ownership in the church, and grows their competence. Serving gets our youth thinking outwardly, instead of inwardly, looking to the ways they can benefit others, rather than fulfil themselves.
Patient Mission: Jesus’ Great Commission Isn’t Just for Adults
We can be so focussed on growing our youth in maturity, we forget to send them out on mission. Our goal is to send our youth out equipped to tell their friends and family about Jesus too. This requires pulling on many of the categories above. They have to know, believe and be confident in who Jesus is; they need to be committed to prayer; and they need a supportive community who are sending them out and welcoming their friends in.
Furthermore, our youth groups are a mission field in themselves. As Steve S. Chang writes: “One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen among those who have a heart for the lost is that they don’t see the children in their own church as lost.” Our leaders are missionaries in our youth groups, but why not get our youth to think in this way too?[3]
Working Your Strategy
A clear strategy informs everything you do. It should be used as a framework for evaluating and improving your ministry. A strategy also gives you a rubric to weigh new suggestions. It keeps you focussed and on track, refreshes you by reminding you of the big picture. It enables you to report on the progress of the youth ministry to parents, other ministry teams and the wider church. It helps you recruit new leaders.
Do you have a youth ministry strategy in place? I encourage you to write one. Do you have one, somewhere in the youth ministry shared drive? I urge you to track it down, revise it and use it.
[1] See Jon Coombs, ’Review: A Biblical Theology of Youth Ministry by Michael McGarry’, The Gospel Coalition Australia, September 5, 2019.
[2] Cultural, economic and circumstantial differences lead to many manifestations of household and family beyond the nuclear family. For some of our youth, their immediate family or household is not a context for discipleship. For others, their household is not made up of many or any blood relatives, and yet is a wonderful place of discipleship.
[3] This quote is more hyperbolic than a theological statement on the status of second-generation Christians. However, I think it brilliantly captures the posture we should adopt in youth ministry, regardless of our views.
