Home Youth Leaders Articles for Youth Leaders The Biggest Reason Parents Don’t Think Your Ministry Is Important

The Biggest Reason Parents Don’t Think Your Ministry Is Important

You do youth ministry because you believe that it matters eternally.

If every parent in your ministry shared that belief, your job would be a breeze.

Students would show up every week right on time and communication would be so much simpler.

Finding volunteers would barely be an annoyance.

But since that’s probably not the precise DNA of your congregation and ministry, it’s time to figure out how we can make it better …

… and that starts by figuring out the way we just might be making it worse.

Youth ministry is eternally important and we need to keep that idea front and center for parents in our congregations.

Imagine for a second that you’re planning a Nerf War at Sunday’s youth group. It’s trendy, it’s fun, students will like it. How would you promote that event?

Think about that for a second.

We might send an email, make flyers, post something on Instagram.

We’ll include an extreme picture of Nerf guns in action, the words Nerf Wars in a super big block font, and include date/time details. Maybe throw in the word FREE in big letters and also write that there will be pizza.

Include several exclamation points, and we’ll have something that will really be attractive to teenagers. It’s the perfect advertisement, right?

Not so fast.

Because while we might have succeeded in communicating to teenagers that youth group will be fun, we’ve failed to communicate to their parents that it’s important.

Therein lies the problem:

In youth ministry, we often need to persuade parents differently than we do teenagers.

I’ve seen youth ministry event marketing thousands of times through social media:

Come to youth group! It’s taco night!
Come to youth group! We’re playing dodgeball!
Come to youth group! There will be s’mores!

Let me be 100 percent clear: Those are not bad things to do, nor are they bad to advertise.

There are always going to be students on the fence about coming to youth group and it doesn’t hurt to sweeten the deal for them.

But at the same time, we can’t vilify parents for not making pizza, dodgeball, s’mores and Nerf guns a bigger priority in their life.

Too often, I’ve been guilty of emphasizing the things that didn’t matter and then getting frustrated with parents for failing to read between the lines to figure out how important my event really was.

Just about the most important thing you can do is look at your ministry through the eyes of a parent. Do they see the important Kingdom work that you do?

It sounds tough, but it’s actually really easy:

How to see your ministry through a parent’s eyes:

Look at the last seven pieces of information that a parent would have seen from your ministry. Those might be tweets, snail mail letters, Facebook posts, emails or a video announcement in a service.

Don’t cheat. Take the last seven and only the last seven.

Now, looking ONLY at those things, try to figure out what seems most important to your ministry. That’s probably a decent approximation of what your ministry looks like through the eyes of an uninvolved parent, too.

So, what did you see when you gave this a shot? Any changes coming your way?