This is a post that I have started to write, stopped, deleted and rewritten a few times over the past year. The reason I’ve been so hesitant to finish it and share it with the world is because I wanted to get it right, and I didn’t want to say something I never intended to say. So before I dive in, I want to clearly affirm something:
The responsibility of discipling a child—whether a preschooler or a teenager—lies primarily (although not solely) on that child’s parent. I think that’s pretty clear in Deuteronomy 6, among other places in the Bible. It’s a responsibility that I take seriously as a dad, and one that I want the parents in our church to take seriously, especially the parents of teenagers that I work with.
So now that you know that, let me dive into what I think of a family-based approach to youth ministry. There are many different ways to implement a family-based approach to youth ministry, but the general idea is that most of the resources (staff, budget, volunteers) are spent equipping and building up families of teenagers so that parents can disciple teenagers, rather than focusing programming to connect with teenagers directly.
In some ways, it’s a great approach to ministry. It’s biblical in that it places the emphasis on parents being the primary disciplers of their kids rather than the youth pastor. That’s a really good thing. It’s empowering in that pushes parents to take responsibility for their role as parents in a culture where parents tend outsource the moral, intellectual and spiritual development to “professionals” such as educators and youth pastors. I love that, and I try to do that myself: A couple of months ago a dad asked if I could come to his house lead a weekly Bible study for his kids, because their schedule wouldn’t allow them to attend youth group. I encouraged him to perhaps be the one to lead the study, and pointed him toward some resources that would help him do that. Empowering parents is really important. However, there is a major flaw in a family-based approach to youth ministry:
It focuses primarily on church insiders rather than those who don’t yet know Jesus.
Think about it: A big assumption of a family-based approach to youth ministry is that the parents want to be involved in the spiritual lives of their teenagers. I would love to live in a world where families are intact and teenagers have two parents who only need a nudge in the right direction to be the spiritual leaders of their home God created them to be. But that’s not the reality I minister in.
Most of the guests who are invited by friends to our church don’t have parents who are interested in Jesus—some are antagonistic toward him! I’ve had to drive students home because their parents were angry that they came to church in the first place so they wanted to make them walk the four miles back to their house. In the high school I’ve tutored in for the past four years, I met plenty of students with parents to whom it made no difference whether their teenager was at school, at church or at a party with plenty of drugs. Sure, those are some of the more extreme examples, but the point is that for many teenagers in our communities, the parent-discipling-the-teenager approach isn’t a viable option.
The problem with a family-based approach to youth ministry is that the majority of teenagers who have parents that are available and even remotely willing to disciple their teenagers are insiders. And Jesus did not instruct his church to focus primarily on insiders. He was very clear that we are to make disciples of people who exist outside of our current, tight-knit church circles (see Matthew 28:18-20 for starters). Yes, the teenagers currently in our church are a part of our endeavor to make disciples, but we can’t use that as an excuse to build programs that focus primarily on insiders. When we spend the majority of our efforts on the people who are already a part of our community, we become insider-focused instead of mission-oriented.
By all means, we need to encourage the families we know and who are present to spiritually lead their teenagers. Shout that vision from the rooftops of your church until you’re blue in the face. Don’t let parents abdicate the responsibility they have to lead their teenagers in a relationship with Jesus. For teenagers with those kinds of families, I would much rather see them around a Bible at their kitchen table or at a homeless shelter serving together than in our youth room. But when it comes to the teenagers who don’t have parents who will ever open a Bible with them (barring a miracle, which God is certainly in the business of doing), go to where they are, tell them about Jesus, put your arm around them, teach them at youth group, put them in a small group, and introduce them to caring adults who will point them to Jesus. It’s the best gift you could ever hope to give them.
