It's Worse that I Thought

I’ve devoted the greater portion of my life so far to pouring into the lives of students, primarily jr. high and high school students. Post high school I spent 3 years as a volunteer youth worker, 5 years as a part time intern/assistant and 2 ½ years as a full-time youth pastor. By the time I arrived at my position as youth pastor I had developed a great level of optimism. I was convinced that I knew what it took to successfully accomplish youth ministry. I felt like I had seen some pretty good examples of how it should be done and I was ready to take that to the next level in my own ministry and really see God do some great things. Unfortunately I left youth ministry at the opposite end of the spectrum. I was discouraged and doubted everything that I had ever believed in.

All throughout my time in ministry I always had a soft spot in my heart for the outcast and unpopular. It seemed like with all the great things going on there seemed to be many that got left behind or that slipped through the cracks. I also had this continual nagging at my soul as I watched many of the “best” and “brightest” graduate from high school and seemingly disappear from the spiritual map. Nevertheless I refused to let those things distract me as I continued to make sure that I was giving my current students that all important experience or that life-changing event.

As time went on the nagging got more and more troublesome. Our ministry was doing okay, it was growing, we were getting into a groove, but something just wasn’t right. For some strange reason that I still don’t quite understand I decided to do an honest evaluation of youth ministry as I had always known it. I began to question the cardinal truths and as I did I slipped further and further into despair. I began to see the dismal statistics regarding the success of youth ministry and they became more dismal as I began to personalize it by putting faces to those statistics. I was beginning to learn that somewhere around 51% of students who graduated from high school were walking away from the Church, with no intention of returning. For the mathematically-challenged out there that’s more than half! Whatever was happening during those six years apparently failed to transcend the whole of their lives. Upon further examination I began to see more research that showed the number to be somewhere around 73% by the time these students graduated from college. Now we can talk about relevance and experience and community and all those buzzwords but if only 27% of our students are getting it then there seems to be no question in my mind that we need to try something else.

And here’s where it gets worse. I just saw an article last week that showed that the number was closer to 88%. If that is true, and I haven’t been able to fully confirm it, then only 12% of the students that we’re “reaching” are truly being reached. You have to wonder if we would do any better if we weren’t even trying!! Barely 1 out of 10 that I am investing all this energy, time, and these resources into are truly being changed in a way that affects their lives. I’m no rocket-scientist but I’ve got big red lights flashing and sirens wailing inside my head.

When I left youth ministry I told the people I was going back to school so that I could gain a voice to be able to speak to these things and that explanation was partially true. I wanted to have a voice to try and bring about change. We can’t keep doing the same things we’ve been doing for the past forty years with just a little more lights, a better band, and better coffee, and just hope and claim that it’s going to somehow be different. That’s just insane. They’re clearly not buying it.

The full truth of why I walked away from youth ministry and all ministry in general is because I’ve determined that I’m not going to keep being a part of something I believe to be the biggest farce in the Church today. I don’t know what the answer is but I know without a doubt that it’s not about a bigger, better flashier service. It’s not about more relevant teaching or a new building. We’ve been down that road and we’re failing miserably.

I admit there was a part of me during this honest soul-searching that thought, “I can do this. I can put on a cool service. We’ll make kids laugh and cry. They’ll have great experiences. We’ll take them on trips that give them warm fuzzies and use all those cool buzz words. But in the end I just couldn’t live with myself, knowing that God had called me to more than just Christian programming or brand marketing for tweens and teens. So here I sit today, not sure what the future holds but more resolved than ever that something’s got to give. I know all of this is pretty vague, but hopefully I can flesh it out more fully in future posts.