Notes from Parents' Meeting (Part I)

Our church recently had a Parents’ meeting for the youth ministry. The purpose of the meeting was to lay out the new philosophy/direction of the youth ministry and to answer any questions the parents or their teenagers might have had. Some of the parents and students, however, were not able to attend and I have therefore decided to post my notes from the meeting here. Many of the statistics, ideas and some of my main points were taken or adopted from Family Driven Faith by Voddie Baucham.

I want to begin our meeting with a question, what is your plan for the spiritual training of your child? Or even more challenging, do you have a plan? Of course, we have plans for everything, don’t we? In getting ready for church this morning, you had a plan. In order to be here by 9:30 am, you had to leave your house by a certain time, which meant you had to get the family ready by a certain time, which meant you had to wake up at a certain time, and all of this was planned out before hand. When we go on vacation we do the same thing. Working out our kids’ extra-curricular schedules…same thing What’s for dinner? Same thing. We plan out almost every aspect of our lives, yet when it comes to the spiritual raising of our children, we usually have no plan or our plan is simply to take them to church. But this is not the way God intended it to be.

Listen to some alarming statistics.

“The overwhelming majority of the people who make professions of faith and are baptized do so before age 18. Thus, youth ministry is the force that fills the pool. Never mind the fact that the overwhelming majority of those whom we have baptized know neither the gospel, nor the Christ of the Scriptures, and have a worldview that is more closely aligned with Marxist Socialism than it is with Christian Theism…(Baucham, http://www.voddiebaucham.org/Blog/A7079AA4-3391-4820-9A22-D957B055C852.html).

A recent poll shows that between seventy and eighty-eight percent of “Christian” teens stop attending church by their second year in college (Baucham, Family Driven Faith, pg 10).

In one Barna poll, eighty-five percent of “Christian” teens do not believe in absolute truth, and over half believe that Jesus sinned during his earthly life.

So the majority of people who make professions of faith and are baptized do so before age eighteen, yet (using optimistic numbers) seven out of every ten stop attending church within a few years of leaving the youth ministry. Eight out of ten don’t believe in absolute truth, and half don’t have a foundational understanding of who Jesus is. They’re making professions of faith. They’re getting baptized. But they don’t know biblical truth and they abandon it a few years later.

Why is this? Why is there such a catastrophic failure when it comes to youth ministries? I say ‘catastrophic’ intentionally, by the way. An eighty percent failure rate is a catastrophe. But why is this happening? A very brief look at the history of youth ministry is somewhat beneficial here. Youth ministries are relatively new to the church (within the past one hundred years), and their practices, at least for the past forty or fifty years or so have mainly been trying to answer these questions:

What can we do to get kids to be excited and want to come to church?

What can we do to keep them here?

How can we make them act like a Christian is supposed to act?

A look at the current state of things and we can see that something is clearly amiss. “Could it be that we have established systems designed to meet the wrong needs and attack the wrong problems (Baucham 176)?” Youth ministries, trying to answer these questions, in their current context, simply does not and will not work. They may get a hundred kids to come on a Wednesday night, but these kids are not learning biblical truth and are abandoning the faith when they graduate high school.

So, in working out what our youth ministry is going to be and do, I did not simply want to do what has always been done, and I didn’t want to follow the popular trends of the day. I didn’t want to take what we have and improve upon it. I instead wanted to break everything down to it’s beginning and ask, “what does scripture say.” Here are a couple of main things that I found.

Deuteronomy 6:1-9, 20-25 1"Now this is the commandment, the statutes and the rules that the LORD your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over, to possess it, 2that you may fear the LORD your God, you and your son and your son’s son, by keeping all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you, all the days of your life, and that your days may be long. 3Hear therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly, as the LORD, the God of your fathers, has promised you, in a land flowing with milk and honey.
4"Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 8You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
20 "When your son asks you in time to come, 'What is the meaning of the testimonies and the statutes and the rules that the LORD our God has commanded you?' 21then you shall say to your son, 'We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt. And the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. 22And the LORD showed signs and wonders, great and grievous, against Egypt and against Pharaoh and all his household, before our eyes. 23And he brought us out from there, that he might bring us in and give us the land that he swore to give to our fathers. 24And the LORD commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the LORD our God, for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as we are this day. 25And it will be righteousness for us, if we are careful to do all this commandment before the LORD our God, as he has commanded us.' (emphasis added by me)

Ephesians 6:1-4 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 2 "Honor your father and mother" (this is the first commandment with a promise), 3"that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land." 4Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. (emphasis added by me)

What does scripture say about the spiritual raising of children? It’s the parents’ responsibility. The church has a role, yes, but it is different than we think. The church’s job, when it comes to the spiritual raising of kids, is to equip parents to be the main teachers, disciplers, and instructors. You see, most people think of the church as a hospital. My kid is spiritually sick or malnourished, so we go to the spiritual hospital – the church. In actuality, the church is more of a medical school, where parents come to be trained so that they can take care of their patients (kids) on their own turf.

So, if the parents have the main responsibility of spiritually training their kids, and the church has the responsibility of training the parents, then what role does the youth ministry play? We are here to assist the parents. And we will do this in two main ways. First, we will teach and preach the word of God, reinforcing (not replacing) what you, as parents, are already doing on a regular basis at home. Second, we are here to provide you with resources, helps, and aids to assist you. Whether it be daily devotionals for your family, thoughts and ideas to help with family worship, or outlines of what Pastor Matt and the other teachers are going through in weekly Bible Study, we want to make sure you are physically equipped to do what needs to be done.