Recently, I was sitting in my office with Nich, one of my students, having a conversation about our high school youth group. This year has been a bit of a rebuilding year in our ministry after graduating 23 seniors (about 80 percent of our group, the year before. As part of the rebuilding process, we have been challenging kids to bring friends to our meetings and coming up with different strategies to help our youth feel comfortable doing so.
To help with ideas, we regularly would ask our students one question: “What can we change about our youth program to make it more comfortable for your friends?” The answers were all over the place and many seemed to contradict one another. Some suggested adding more music and others more games. One person suggested shorter teachings, then someone else suggested deeper teachings.
My student leaders and I did our best to work with the many ideas we were given, but what we found was that none of the ideas seemed to work. Even worse, some of the kids we asked that question stopped coming. Eventually our high school program had dwindled down to a core group of about 10 kids. Week after week, it seemed we’d have the same handful of kids at group having great conversations and deep discussions, but hardly ever with their friends.
As Nich and I talked, he helped shed some light on our issue by sharing two really valuable insights with me.
First, he explained that although the question of how to make changes to our program was not a bad question, it made some our kids feel used. They didn’t feel like we as a youth ministry were caring for them as individuals, but instead as a means to building a bigger program.
Second, he shared from his own experience that his friends simply lived too far away from the church for him to invite them. They just were not going to come from an hour away to go to youth group. This made me think about some of our other students who were coming from other towns almost as far away as Nich’s friends were. It made me feel that growing our ministry would be impossible.
As I shared this frustration, as well as my heart to help kids reach their friends, Nich challenged my thoughts and actually flipped the whole conversation around. All this time we had been focusing on getting our kids to bring their friends to our program to share Christ with them; but because of our conversations, Nich had the opportunity to have some great conversations with his friends around the lunch table and in the classroom. Nich had brought Christ to them, which we realized really should be what the church and evangelism is all about.
This small conversation ended up completely challenging our view of evangelism and what role it plays in the church.
Typically, if you explore the Bible on this topic you tend to find actions words such as share, send and go. You think about Paul’s missionary travels or Peter going and preaching in city centers. You think about Jesus going to villages, going to the people He was trying to reach with the Good News.
It seems that our ministries tend to miss this point. Rarely it seems, are churches and youth ministries going out into their communities or teaching their students how to share their faith at school, with friends or with their families. Instead, we create special events or services where we encourage people to bring a friend. We even offer incentives if our students bring enough friends: cutting our hair, ice cream parties, swallowing goldfish…
This flips the biblical idea of evangelism on its head. Instead of share, send and go, we turn a 180-degree and focus on come, bring and stay. Nich and I discussed how this has been taught to students and how subconsciously it could damage their faith development at the same time.
1) Evangelism should be left to the professionals.
Rather than challenging our students to share about Jesus at the lunch table, on the athletic field or at home, we tell our students to bring a friend to church (which isn’t even a theologically correct statement). By focusing so much on bringing friend to youth group and creating outreach events where students can bring their peers to hear about Jesus, I wonder if we are subconsciously teaching our students that sharing about Jesus should be left to the trained professionals.
2) Students don’t know how to share their faith.
My favorite teacher growing up, Mr. Keeney, who was my math teacher for three years in high school, always used to tell us, “Hear it, learn it once. Do it, learn it twice. Teach it, learn it for good.” That was how he ran his classes. He taught it to us as we listened. Then we would do a worksheet and practice it ourselves. Then he would put us in groups where we explained the math processes to each other. Math was the only subject in high school in which I got straight A’s every year—and a lot of that was because of Mr. Keeney and this model.
When it comes to the church, we tend to do really well with the first step. In most cases, our students hear all about Jesus and the Bible. In some cases, the second step is carried out, as well, especially during the past decade or so as service opportunities, social justice and mission trips have gained more and more importance. When it comes to the third step, though, in my experience most faith communities drop the ball. When it comes to evangelism, by putting so much of an emphasis on bring friends, I think we take a huge part of the faith learning journey away from our students. Our students don’t know how to share their faith, because we rarely let them have the opportunity to do so.
3) Students don’t get to experience the joy of being used by God.
Lastly, I think the church has done a cruel thing to our students, because we steal the joy of sharing Jesus with other people. We, as pastors, get to celebrate with our staff and volunteers how many kids responded to the gospel. We send out email reports to our senior pastors and boards with those numbers. We go home to our spouses excited about what God has done through our talks. Our students should get to celebrate this joy, rather than just being happy to have brought a friend to church that Sunday. They should get to experience the satisfaction, the growth and the deeper purpose of doing God’s work.
Instead of focusing on getting students to bring a friend to church, let’s instead focus on getting our students to bring Jesus to their friends. Rather than trying to entertain students so they’ll come to an event so we can share Jesus with them, let’s create ways to allow our students to share Jesus with their friends wherever they are. Let’s challenge our students not to stay in our churches or programs, but to go out into the world and be the church God is calling them to be.
