Our ministries should transmit what has been entrusted to us: The saving grace of Jesus Christ.

By Steve Games

Making Youth Ministries Relevant
To do youth ministries responsive to our day, we need to make some basic commitments:

• Practice active listening to and with youth.
• Introduce more settings for youth and adults to share what they’re hearing and seeing in their community.
• Find new ways for youth to participate in leadership and in design of new youth ministries.
• Recognize the capabilities of youth to draw on their interior resources to solve difficult situations creatively.
• See the “big picture” that includes family and community by involving youth at every stage of youth ministries.

Making these commitments causes a kind of transition, that richly human experience of saying goodbye to what we have known in the past while saying hello to new realities. We may not be able to clearly see the new, but we feel compelled to embrace it and greet it as an emerging part of our lives.

The framework, or model, that begins to set that new direction and effect the needed transition is described on the following pages. Note our “top dozen” characteristics of such youth ministry. The list is not exhaustive; it’s just a beginning set of ways to define more effective methods for connecting with youth.

Previous Patterns New Patterns

• Youth Group to Youth Ministry

• Congregational Orientation to Family/Community Orientation

• Participation as Evaluation to Transformation as Evaluation

• Homogeneity in Community to Diversity

• Program “Hums”

• Youth Involved in Congregation to Congregation Involved in Lives of Youth

• Youth Come to Church to Church Comes to Youth Settings

• Task Meeting Oriented to Relationally Oriented

• Celebration of Intention to Celebrate Life

• Program Presentation to Spirituality

• Adult Led to Youth Led

• Actively Driven to Purpose Driven

New-Model Youth Ministry

1. Moving from the youth group to youth ministry: “youth group” can imply a closed set of youth (we usually don’t realize how closed we’ve become)—while “youth ministry” indicates a set of initiatives and settings designed to meet the needs discovered in conversation and planning with youth.

2. Moving from a congregational orientation to a family/community orientation: We can no longer conceive of youth ministry as being only for those youth who come through our doors. Reaching unchurched youth in our communities is our mandate—and a rich opportunity.

3. Moving from participation to transformation as the evaluation factor: Evaluation success based on numbers discounts what’s fundamentally important: the transformations that take place in the lives of youth.

4. Moving from a perspective of homogeneity to one of diversity: Imagining new possibilities for youth ministries means taking a more comprehensive view of the youth we serve and of the wide diversity of youth who need the life-giving ministries of the church.

5. Moving from making sure that programs “hum” to expecting them to encounter “bumps” along the way: Our insistence on “program perfection” can keep us from allowing youth to experience “bumps” or meet unforeseen challenges in the course of meeting new people, solving dilemmas, or claiming new possibilities.

6. Moving from youth involved in the congregation to the congregation involved in the lives of youth: This shifts our efforts from getting youth to serve on committees in the congregation, with a too-frequent result of frustrated adults and disappointed youth. We can find ways for congregation members and groups to discover the issues of youth in their community.

7. Moving from youth coming to youth settings: This is a transition from opening the doors for interested youth to enter our world of strange vocabulary and behaviors to opening the doors for the congregation to take the initiative of connecting with youth in their community in settings like mall, parks, and special events.

8. Moving from task/meeting-oriented youth programs to relationally-oriented youth ministries: An emphasis on relationships describes how we plan, implement, and evaluate all that we do. What we do can build relationships.

9. Moving from celebrating our intentions or efforts to celebrating life This sifts us from considering what we hope to do and celebrates the life we feel when we connect with youth and their possibilities.

10. Moving from program presentation to facilitating processes of spirituality and faith formation:. We’ve got to learn new roles in leading youth. Our job is twofold: we present the definable body of values, biblical/theological commitments, and societal concerns that form our distinctive identity as disciples of Jesus Christ; and we implement learning that supports and encourages spiritual and relational growth. We transmit what has been entrusted to us: the saving grace of Jesus Christ.

11. Moving from being adult led to becoming youth led: This movement manifests Christ’s Church. We define our respect and regard for the gifts of youth when they are full participants in planning, implementing, and evaluating youth ministries in their communities.

12. Moving from being activity driven to being purpose driven: This movement reshapes everything that we do and how we envision our future. Our aim is not to invent lots and lots of busyness. Whatever we do needs a clear articulation of how it contributes to our accomplishment of our purpose.

Celebrating Possibilities
These twelve transitions can be incredibly dynamic in setting the direction of contemporary youth ministries. Even in the initial stages of considering new ways of doing youth ministries, let’s begin the habit of reminding ourselves of a deeper reality: unless we love God and love youth, no conceptual framework or tool will matter.

Orthodox monk Anthony Bloom offers a wonderful description of celebrating the gifts of youth and looking for the beauty often hidden under loud voices and trendy clothes:

Unless we look at a person and see the beauty there is in this person, we cannot contribute anything to him or her. One does not help a person by discerning what is wrong, what is ugly, what is distorted. Christ looked at everyone he met, at the prostitute, at the thief, and saw the beauty hidden there. Perhaps it was distorted, perhaps damaged, but it was beauty nonetheless, and what he did was to call out this beauty. . . . This is what we must learn to do with regard to others. But to do so we must first have a purity of heart, a purity of intention, and an openness, which is not always there so that we can listen, can look, and can see the beauty, which is hidden. Everyone of us is in the image of God, and everyone of us is like a damaged icon. But if we were given an icon damaged by time, damaged by circumstances, or desecrated by human hatred, we would treat it with reverence, with tenderness, with broken-heartedness. We would not pay attention primarily to the fact that it is damaged, but to the tragedy of it’s being damaged. We would concentrate on what is left of its beauty, and not what is lost of its beauty. And this is what we must learn to do with regard to each person. 1

Screening Out
What are we now doing (and probably don’t realize we are) to screen out people from connecting with our ministries? Is it how we do things? Is it the financial cost of participating? Is it the kinds of things we do? Or is it our attitude about others in our community? What about our claiming Christ’s command to reach others for the Kingdom? How might we be “screening out” youth?

Screening In
On the other hand, what could we do to “screen in” new youth for our ministries? How could we help them feel welcome and included in what we are doing? How can we invite them to discover who Christ is and what living in the Kingdom means? Is it about specific behaviors? about attitudes?

How could we “screen in” youth to ensure that they experience acceptance and personal affirmation from their initial times in our ministries?

Think About It
Ministries with youth are living entities; they are always changing. How have your ministries with youth changed over the last two years? What needs to change now?

1 From Growth in the Muddle of Life, by Stefan Vanistendael; © 1995 by International Catholic Child Bureau; used by permission.

From Lifegivers, © 1997 by Abingdon Press. This material may be reproduced for educational purposes.

Brought to you by your youth ministry colleagues at Cokesbury.

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