When I taught high school, I attended seminars and read articles on how to cope with parents. It was the in-service topic of choice for many educators. There seemed to be an unavoidable tension between teachers and parents. While most of my interactions with parents were pleasant, I still cringed every time I got a message that a parent wanted to talk to me.

That same tension seems to exist between youth workers and parents. After all, if you put God first in your ministry and try to bring a child closer to God, parents will complain. I feel blessed that it's only happened once to me, though, because of the way my congregation views the church. Rather than a corporate model (like the church in which I was raised), our church ascribes to what we call the kinship model.

The Corporate Church

This is one that functions something like this: Parents and kids come to church. As soon as they enter the doors, everybody goes to their corners. Teens head to the basement for youth group, little ones head upstairs for children's church and the adults head to the sanctuary. There's a youth minister whose job it is to deal with everything youth-related. She, too, is disconnected from the adult population. When there's adult worship, she's in teen worship; when there's adult Bible study, she's teaching teen Bible study—two completely different worlds.

Certainly we want worship and study to be developmentally appropriate, but let's look at what else we're creating when teens and adults are always separated. The family—the most important unit for moral and spiritual development—is separated in worship and study. A parent, who's the most influential person in a teen's life, has his daughter being guided in conversations that he isn't a part of by a person he doesn't really know. Now this person wants to stretch the child's spirituality. Is the parent supposed to trust simply because of one's title? How can a parent trust someone with whom he or she's not familiar? Do your parents wait outside the door if youth group isn't over when they arrive?

None of us have time to invite all of the parents over for dinner so they can get to know us outside of our titles. We barely have time to do what we're required to do. Quite frankly, it's hard to do anything differently within the corporate church paradigm. I'm suggesting rethinking the corporate style of church. I'm suggesting not seeing youth group as a department of the church, but seeing it as a ministry within the church. Allow me to introduce a kinship model. It's not a perfect model, but it's something to think about.

The Kinship Church

This church model typically is seen in the African-American Christian tradition. It stems from a people who were forced to exist within a different kind of family. Because slaves often weren't allowed to stay with their biological families, the community assumed the role of family by necessity. The now clichéd "it takes a village to raise a child" was a reality. Everybody assumed responsibility for the youth of the congregation, so everyone was a youth minister. If you were a leader in the congregation, you worked with youth and other ministries. The head of the choir led the children's choir, and the ushers were in charge of the junior ushers. Some ministries consisted of people of all ages.