Despite knowing otherwise in my head, the way I actually lead my church’s youth ministry is mostly from the mentality that our youth ministry is a program or service we provide to families. It’s almost like I’m unintentionally feeding the consumeristic perspective by sometimes using language like, “We offer small groups…” and, “We provide connection points for your teens…” Since when was ministry ever supposed to be about what a paid staff member and a couple adult volunteers are expected to spiritually provide for teens and families?

Youth ministry should not be about how the church can serve the youth or even how we can provide programs that help them grow spiritually. That’s the parents’ responsibility. In fact, I don’t think youth ministry should even accidentally enable parents to outsource their God-given responsibility to us, something I know my ministry is all too guilty of. Support parents, yes, but enable them to outsource? No.

The Greek word for “church” is literally “ekklesia,” a community of believers who are “called out” to serve and edify each other and the people around them.

Instead of fueling the consumerism mentality of what a church “offers” or “provides” and which church in town does it best, youth ministry should probably be about helping teens use their God-given gifts to serve the body. It should teach families that youth ministry isn’t just about what the church does for them, but that they are “called out” to think beyond themselves with a servant’s heart. I bet teen church drop-outs would decrease if they actually served as a valuable and essential part of the local body of Christ.

Youth ministry should be less about us doing youth ministry and more about youth doing ministry.

I said that two years ago, but it’s just now starting to really sink in for me. It demands a pretty radical shift, one that I’m not sure I have the vision nor the guts to really carry out yet.

Our programs program people to consume from the church, and I’m programmed to just run programs.

Please note, I’m not necessarily anti-program — I just think that too often we end up serving the programs instead of using them as very dispensable tools to equip teen believers to serve the body of Christ.

What do you think? Should youth ministry be more about providing a service or creating servants? What if focusing on the latter causes all those with the consumeristic mentality of the former to leave the group? Is it okay for your youth group to shrink numerically if it’s for the right reasons?

Last Monday the youth pastor at NewSpring Community Church, Brad Cooper, joined us for LIVE YM Talk to discuss our topic of, “Leading a team of volunteer youth workers.” As a youth pastor who works with hundreds of teenagers and adult leaders, he shares from his experience about how to lead a team of leaders.

Some of the things we talked about:

• Setting expectations for adult leaders
• The process of “basic training”
• Helping leaders use their gifts and passions within the ministry’s vision
• Moving leaders through “Direction, Coaching, Supporting, Delegating”
• And a lot more…

You can listen to the whole conversation below or grab it in iTunes.

Play this episode

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Next Monday’s discussion

November 30: Next week we’re doing our very first MinistryQuestions.com episode where we’ll be answering recent questions and debates from MinistryQuestions.com. If you’d like us to discuss your question, post it at MinistryQuestions.com between now and then. The show starts at 2:00 PM eastern time. Call (724) 444-7444 and enter ID 19105#, or use the link on the LIVE YM Talk page to listen online and join the chat room.

Join our next LIVE Youth Ministry Conversation!

It’s been a while since I last updated. A lot’s been going on, but here’s the Cliff Notes version:

Youth group lock-in
The youth group lock-in last weekend took a lot of time to prepare and coordinate, but overall it was a success even though I’m still recovering from the lack of sleep. The video of the event is available if anyone wants to see. Sometime soon I’ll add all my lock-in materials to my free resources page in case anyone else can make use of them.

Bird died
When I returned to my apartment on Saturday morning after the lock-in, I found one of my birds on the floor of the cage with a limp leg. It eventually started twitching pretty badly and by the end of the day he was dead. I have no idea what happened, but at least the other bird is doing fine and seems to enjoy spending more time with people now.

Increased ministry hours
As most of you know, I started working at my current church while I finished up my education at Dallas Seminary. The position was offered as part-time, which was fine with me because of school hours. Shortly before school ended, I picked up another part-time job doing IT Administration for a company in Dallas since the church could not afford to increase my hours at the time. Well, apparently someone recently donated a sum of money to the church specifically for the purpose of increasing my hours from part-time to three-quarters time (20 hours per week to 30 hours per week), so I now have increased hours for youth ministry. :D My IT position will remain the same for now, but I’ll be shuffling my time around in order to be available for students after school more often.

Relationship growing with Dana
Dana and I continue to grow together and appreciate each other more and more. She lives less than a mile away, which has allowed us to see each other every day since her student teaching started. We weren’t quite sure at first how that would affect our relationship, but now we both agree that we’ve enjoyed the time spent together and appreciate living so close to each other. I’m looking forward to seeing how God continues to grow us and challenge us as we become the best individuals we can for each other. :)

Leadership lessons from Guild Wars
Most people will probably laugh at me for this, but seriously, I’ve probably learned more about leadership this year from playing Guild Wars than almost anything else. Being the leader of a guild that plays with people on different levels who come and go has certainly challenged me to lead by holding to a vision and accomplishing the goals therein by making decisions that are sometimes difficult to make. I don’t expect anyone else understand this, but just trust me, I’ve learned a lot and already see it making a positive impact on my real-life leadership over the youth ministry at church. Sounds corny maybe, but oh well. :P Maybe one day I’ll make a list of everything I’ve learned so far about leadership from the game Guild Wars and how it affects ministry. ;)