Wildfrontier.org » New Pair of Cleats

Church Youth Ministry: The Long Transition to Church Family-Based Youth Ministry

Admin — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:59:01 +0000

Maybe by now you are becoming more and more convinced from the now many blog writers and resources (like from Wild Frontier!) encouraging you to include parents and your church family into your youth ministry in a greater measure. Certainly you’ve been swayed by the great amount of statistical research that backs this up. We continue to compile these numbers at Support Statistics.

But you still may have questions as to how to incorporate this new practice of youth ministry into your local church situation. This may be true especially if you’ve been at your church for some time and the youth ministry is clicking along well. This change would come easier if there are apparent problems in the youth ministry or if you are already in a transitional season. No matter what stage the youth ministry is in, you know that you know that you need to make this transition. There is this Holy-Spirit nagging that you must listen to. So here are some tips.

After beginning the discussion about the role of parents in youth ministry since 1994 when Mark DeVries challenged us to rethink this, three separate models of family ministry have shaped up. Those three are briefly:

Family Integrated – All age-segregated ministries are eliminated. There is no youth group, no children’s ministry, nothing age-graded. The generations learn and worship together with parents bearing primary responsibility for the evangelism and discipleship of their children.

Family Equipping –Most of the age-segregated ministries remain intact but the church leaders plan and organize their ministries so that they champion the place of parents as the primary faith trainers. Often parents are required to serve.

Family Based – No radical changes occur in the church’s internal structure. The church family still maintains youth ministry, children’s ministry, singles ministry, etc. Teens may still experience worship and small groups in peer groups, separated from other generations, but each ministry sponsors events and learning experiences that are intentionally designed to draw generations together.

When we refer to CFBYM, we refer to a mix of Family Equipping and Family Based that also intentionally includes the church family. What you do at your church will most undoubtedly be your own combination and have your own flavor. Go as the Holy Spirit leads.

No matter what flavor your form of CFBYM grows into, there will be a long and intentional season of transitioning. Stay with it. There will be some intentional transitions which you can lead with. But honestly more of this practice will be caught than taught. Stay with it.

Before we talk about the intentional transitioning you can do from your youth leadership position, I must mention the importance of your senior pastor, elders, leadership committee, etc., being on board with you and this new practice of youth ministry. The youth ministry is not an island. You are making this transition because you desire to intentionally bring youth ministry back into the center of the church family. To succeed all of the church’s leadership needs to be on board with this transition.

If they are not yet on board, this is where you must start. CFBYM.org is full of helps to do that.

There are some roles you can play and some practices you can incorporate from your role as youth worker that will help you lead during this transition. The following is a starter list:

The youth ministry plans and calendars are under you and your leadership team’s direction. You can purposely plan in events to introduce these ideas to the teens as well as the parents and other adults in the church. I’ve used this picture description many times to explain this. A CFBYM youth leader is the master of one big chess board with the prize being the faith and formation of the teens. In this role you are moving all of the pieces of the church to interact with the teens. Every person from the widows to the nursery workers are your beloved pawns, rooks, and queens to set up opportunities to pass on their faith experiences to the teens. Brainstorm with your leadership team how you can intentionally incorporate the parents and church family into your calendar.

This is more than just creating CFBYM events. A common leadership mistake in bringing about change is to try to get people to buy into programs. While you may schedule through programs, it is more important for you to have the church family embrace the principles. This is where the time of transition becomes lengthy. People quickly adapt to programs but may or may not experience change. To adapt to principles takes purposed time.

You will need to let go of some youth group favorites to make this transition. Another problem which arises from just creating CFBYM events, especially those more in the Family Based style of youth ministry, are when these events are added into the already existing youth ministry plans. These well-intentioned plans tend to be yet another meeting or yet another activity squeezed into the already full youth ministry schedule. Most family schedules cannot handle yet another meeting to attend, so too often these new added meetings will get skipped in favor of what is already scheduled. In this transition, it will be very likely that something you’ve done before or have done traditionally may need to be dropped.

And remember, a CFBYM event is not a parent meeting where you bring everyone together to present your agenda.

Not all of your intentions need to be events. Use the church bulletin, church newsletter, church website, etc., to inform and educate your church family. Do a short devotional on a Scripture that values the family (there are more of those than Scriptures that support traditional youth ministry). Include nuggets of research from the collected Support Statistics. Also use those mediums to report true testimonies of the good things that happened at a CFBYM event. Maybe have that influential adult write his/her own report of his/her experiences of mixing with the teens.

The definition of youth ministry success will have to be changed. The previous measure may have been numbers or something better like teen faith commitments. It may have been simply the energy that the youth ministry created in the church. The new definition of success should become the numbers of lives who will be in Church (not necessarily yours as there are life transitions) ten years from now. That is an entirely different measurement but one that is more life changing for the teen and for the life of the Church.

Last month we mentioned in “A Youth Ministry with Staying Power”, another intention may be to arrange a mentor relationship for one of your teens with a specific member of the church family. It’s not an event but you’ve moved yet another chess piece towards the prize of the faith and formation of that one teen. By the way, this is a busy role for you.

Another area of transition will be what you do with your “youth space.” For many years we’ve all fought to have our sacred space for the teens. A space we could decorate and create an environment that helps teens feel comfortable and thus more open to faith ideas. To transition doesn’t necessarily mean you have to give up your space but you certainly will want to open up your space. Not only by inviting parents and church family members through your doors so often that the door may not be necessary but to also purposely open up the entire church building to be “youth space.” You and all of the church leadership can strive to create the atmosphere that the teens are comfortable and feel wanted in the worship center, hallways, nursery, kitchen, and maybe (gasp) the church parlor.

I do not believe these practices are inclusive. Are there purposed transitional moves you have made that you would like to share here to complete this list? Submit these to Amanda@wildfrontier.org. We are actively seeking 150-word submissions for our new interactive digital magazine, YM Shorts. What you have tried is exactly what we are looking for so please submit so others can find success as they make this transition.

Pair of Cleats: Use Debate as a Creative Teaching Style

Admin — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 16:00:28 +0000

A paraclete is someone who walks alongside someone. We’ve got our cleats on to walk alongside you.

In Pair of Cleats, we have often encouraged you to stretch your teaching to new creative “frontiers.” We strongly believe in the use of many different creative teaching methods and leaning less on “speaching” methods. So I was encouraged to read this quote from Richard Ross, someone I respect, in the current Group Magazine (January/February 2010): “A strategy I have grave concerns about is one that places students almost always in a passive, listening mode while leaders speak or talk to them about spiritual things. I think brain research is just confirming what we already intuitively know and is clear in Scripture—that students who are not engaged deeply in conversations about faith, who are struggling with issues of faith, who are not closely observing faith being worked out in the life of an adult, they’re not growing that much. We tried that strategy for 50 years, and the experiment didn’t work. But people are still doing this every week.”

We believe that you are not doing this every week which is why you have subscribed to Pair of Cleats. Some ideas on creative teaching methods that you’ve received from us over the past 20 years are:

Using story
Using testimonies
Removing the stage set up
Ask questions, whether it is in small groups or in the middle of the message
Using food and your church kitchen
Using creative writing challenges

I’d like to introduce to you yet another creative teaching method—using debate. Don’t conjure up a nerdy picture of a high school debate team. This is a real teaching method, often used in the school classroom. The reasons why this method is encouraged for school teachers to incorporate are: (These are compiled from many teacher resource websites and I’ve added my twist to how they apply to a youth meeting.)

Develops abstract thinking (We also want to move teens from concrete thinking such as “God will never leave me” to abstract thinking of “Why God doesn’t answer our prayers when our needs are now.”)
Develops analytical thinking (We also want to develop analytical thinking so our teens know what they believe and why.)
Develops citizenship/ethics/etiquette (I’m all for etiquette in our communication with each other.)
Develops cross-examination/questioning (Questioning is a factor for a growing faith and youth meetings provide a safe place to do that.)
Develops personal point of view (So one can own his/her own faith.)
Helps distinguish fact from opinion (So one can know the Truth.)
Helps identify bias (Or faulty thinking that may have been inherited or from another negative influence.)
Helps students organize information (Another plus which can help them share their faith.)
Develops persuasion skills (Yet another plus which can help them share their faith.)
Develops public speaking skills (This can also help with their school work.)
Develops research skills (Tying school life to their faith yet again.)
Develops teamwork/cooperation (As well as community for your group.)
The subject is better comprehended over time (So one can own his/her own faith.)
Another bonus is that research is finding that this is a method that is more effective for the learning style of boys. (Yes, boys and girls do generally learn differently.)

Honestly, that last point alone convinced me to try this teaching method. I have lots and lots of boys in my youth group.

Hopefully I’ve convinced you to try this teaching method in the near future. Here are some helpful tips on how to try this in a youth meeting. The first thing you do is identify the subject. You don’t want to choose a subject such as “Is the Bible Real?” because you wouldn’t want your teens to take the time to find resources to prove the Con side that the Bible isn’t real. Stay away from the non-negotiable Statement of Faith your church adheres to. But such subjects as “How Does God Answer Prayer?” or “Does Your Bestfriend Also Have to be a Christian?” or “Is Cussing a Sin?” do work. As you can guess, these are issues which your teens already struggle with so inviting them to debate either the Pro or Con side moves their struggle to front-and-center and to an open forum to hopefully help them find an answer with enough conviction to live by.

Second, decide if you want to have one person prepare the Pro side of the debate or a small team or half of your group. The same size group, of course, prepares the Con side of the debate. You know your group and the size of your group to decide this. As you are assigning each side, someone may not like the side they were asked to debate. Challenge him/her that learning the opposite side of his/her belief is also a learning process.

Third, decide how much time you want to give your team to prepare–just the evening, a week, or even several weeks. Obviously, the more time you give the group the better the debate. However, you may simply want to incorporate a “quicker” debate as the conclusion to your message and give the group just a few minutes to present their thoughts.

For the actual debate there should be some simple ground rules. Some of those rules are:

No put downs.
You must raise your hand if it’s not your time to speak.
Standard and structured times to speak:

Opening statements for both sides = 3 minutes each

Arguments for both sides = 3 minutes each

Rebuttal conference = 1 minute

Rebuttals = 2 minutes each

Closing statements for both sides = 3 minutes each

If a debate is done poorly it breaks down to a mixed bag- people yelling at each other, not listening to each other, and/or students reading from scripts that they didn’t write. But if done right, the potential for remembering and personalizing a conviction are too great to not give this creative teaching method a try.

Another method of debate is called The Silent Debate. Divide everyone in the group into pairs. Assign one person in each pair the Pro side and the other the Con side. Also give everyone pen and paper. The debate happens silently by writing on and passing the piece of paper back and forth for 10 to 12 minutes with no talking during that time. When the debriefing time comes to an end, have the pairs present the end results of their debate to the entire group. This is yet another way for conviction and truth to come to the surface.

We as youth group leaders always feel more comfortable with the tried-and-true. This is what Richard Ross was admonishing. I hope to challenge you to try new ideas and new ways to teach, to push your comfort zone a bit but that is just a part of Wild Frontier living. So continually pray and ask God how best to present “His Story” to the teens He has entrusted to your care, even if the ideas push you out of your comfort zone because the Wild Frontier is where the action.