Tom McKee
Can a small church have a successful youth program? When the same few young people look at each other each week in Sunday school, can they possibly match the dynamic quality of eighty or a hundred?
I learned a valuable lesson a few years ago from a small Baptist church in San Bruno, California. The youth sponsor was a high school math teacher named Clell. He and his students traveled forty miles to meet with me about a special one-week outreach. They asked me to come speak and bring a seven-member musical group.
When we arrived some months later, I was amazed. About fifteen young people, unified in purpose and direction, had invited their friends. The first night we sang and spoke to about thirty young people; the second night, about fifty came for a night of games. On Thursday night more than a hundred young people came to the church for an all-night volleyball marathon, and a local TV station covered the event.
At the end of each evening, the music group sang and gave testimonies and I spoke. What brought those young people out? I am convinced it was the vision, prayers, and enthusiasm of a small group of teenagers and a math teacher who loved kids. Their unity and spiritual depth was exciting.
From this experience I began to see some things I hadn’t realized before:
1. A Small Church Can Think Big.
When I first met with the San Bruno young people to pray, they impressed me with their vision for their peers at school. This group of fifteen, along with their sponsor, wanted to see their friends come to Christ, and they were convinced they could be used by God to reach out. In their prayers they named friends and kept talking about each activity of the week and how it would appeal to kids at school. Not once did they mention they were just a small group and no one would want to attend their meetings. They reminded me of Joshua and Caleb wanting to “take the land.”
When we planted Sun River Church in 1980, we had only eight junior and senior high students. But our youth sponsors, Andy and Linda Braio, plunged ahead enthusiastically. They were determined to get involved in the Mexicali Outreach of Azusa Pacific College, which places hundreds of teens in Mexican villages during Easter week. While leading regular activities, they promoted and planned for Mexicali. As a result, our eight-month-old church sent a team of eleven young people and sponsors on a mission to Mexico. The sponsors didn’t let being small stop them.
Neither does Lance Mitchell, pastor of a new church in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, which in June 1984 had about fifty members and eighty attending the morning worship service. The youth group went from three to thirty within six months. How? Lance had been discipling a young adult, Barry, who had accepted the Lord through the church. Barry was growing in his Christian life and was taking some video extension courses from a seminary. As he and Lance talked about reaching youth in the town, Barry began to sense God wanted him to leave his managerial position in a department store to work full-time with youth.
Barry presented the idea to the church leaders, and after prayer, they asked him to raise his own salary (similar to the parachurch organization model). In the meantime, they would ask the congregation to foot the bill for the other costs of a three-year pilot program called “Youth Alive Ministries.”
The leaders made four initial recommendations to the church:
1. To bring Youth Alive Ministries into existence with a committee and director.
2. To name Barry as director of Youth Alive.
3. To notify their bank that Youth Alive was a subsidiary ministry of the church, and to open its own checking account.
4. To re-evaluate the ministry after three years.
The people of the church got excited. In fact, the first Sunday after voting the Youth Alive into existence, someone put a check into the offering for $12,500. As Lance put it, “We have never received a check for that much before; in fact, I’m not sure any church in New England has received that much in one day for youth work!”
Barry began the ministry immediately and was able to give most of his time to Youth Alive. He supplements his income with some part-time work, such as substitute teaching and officiating at sports events.
Barry is responsible to Lance and the deacons, and is chairman of the Youth Alive Committee. Lance meets weekly with Barry, just as if he were officially on the church staff. Barry tries to disciple the young people he meets, and that includes getting them into a Bible-believing church. However, when Barry is on a campus or at a sporting event, he represents Youth Alive rather than the church.
One of the most successful youth activities was free pizza and pop (called soda in Massachusetts) for the young people after a high school football game. Barry showed the film Football Fever, and after his presentation of the gospel, fourteen teens indicated they wanted to make Christ part of their lives. Four of those young people are now attending the church and being discipled.
Four months after beginning the ministry to high schoolers, Youth Alive Junior High began. Now both ministries are steadily growing.
2. A Small Church Can Piggyback on the Resources of a Large Church.
The San Bruno church could not afford a full-time youth pastor. But in essence, they hired a youth pastor for a week. When I spent those days with Clell and the young people, we prayed, laughed, and played together. I also brought seven dedicated, mature young people from my own youth group to provide musical talent, thereby discipling them as well as our hosts. Together we learned how a large church and a small church can work in cooperation.
Many times large churches are looking for places their music groups, drama teams, youth choirs, or evangelistic teams can minister. Some of them would be excited to bring mature college students to counsel for a weekend retreat or help with a special outreach. The small church should be able to find help from these groups.
The first years I was in youth ministry we had a youth choir of fifteen. Many of the large churches in our area, which had youth choirs of sixty to a hundred, put on a youth choir festival every fall. I called the sponsors to see if we could sing in the festival’s mass choir. For the first few years we did only that, but when we had grown to thirty singers, we began to do our own special numbers also. The enthusiasm of that all-day festival challenged our small choir toward growth.
Many of the pastors I talked to mentioned monthly skating parties for young people sponsored by the local ministerial association. In Collinsville, Illinois, our local ministerial association had a youth committee that sponsored occasional activities such as concerts for the youth of that city. Many of the smaller churches took advantage of these.
3. The Key to Any Size Youth Group Is the Sponsor.
Not every church can hire even a part-time youth pastor. And, frankly, not every church needs one—if they have a Clell with a burden for young people. In actuality, he was a “tent maker” youth pastor. He taught school for a living, but he was the unpaid professional youth pastor of that church.
But let’s be practical; most churches do not have a Clell. One pastor of a small church (about a hundred in Sunday morning attendance and a youth group of about ten) told his experience, which is probably closer to the norm. He and his wife noticed not much was happening in the youth department, so they invited the sponsors over for dinner. They sat around the table and shared ideas. The sponsors then planned several outings (skating, water-skiing) for the next three months.
“As long as I meet with the sponsors every three months and help them plan,” he says, “they will do all the work of running the youth program. They just need help getting started.” This is no doubt the case in many churches.
4. Communication Is Essential.
How many times has a parent said to me, “You’re the pastor—don’t you now what’s going on in the youth program?” This is a source of real tension for many pastors. They search for the balance between being nosey about every detail on the one hand and not showing any concern on the other.
Some churches make the youth sponsor a member of the Christian education committee, which means giving monthly reports of activities: projects completed and future plans. This is one way for the pastor to stay informed, provided he attends the committee meeting.
Other pastors meet for breakfast or lunch once a month with the head youth sponsor. Others meet for coffee and donuts in the pastor’s office once a week at 6:00 a.m. to pray for the concerns of the youth group. This prayer time is a supportive ministry for both pastor and youth sponsor, and it bridges any gap.
5. You Might as Well Start Where You Are.
When you have only three young people in the group, each of them can bring one friend, and the youth sponsor can load them in a car and head for the snow or a nearby amusement park. The most important thing is to be positive about however many teenagers God has sent to your group.
6. It’s Crucial to Know Where You’re Going.
Two high school boys showed up at my door one evening. They each held huge Bibles under their arms and said, “We want to rap about this book.” I was surprised, because I knew them and their reputations. They were absent from school more than they were present.
I invited them in, turned off “Monday Night Football,” and listened to their story. They had run away from home, hitchhiked to Washington, and talked to a pastor, who led them to Christ. He gave them Bibles and told them to look up their pastor and begin studying the Bible. Here they were.
The next Monday they were back with five more young people—of the same type. The next Monday they were back with ten more. In a month we had more than forty young people, all with Bibles, asking me to teach them. They did not want games; they only wanted to study the Bible.
A church down the street was also having a youth meeting the same night. One night when a group walked in late, someone asked them, “Why did you leave that other group?”
I will never forget the answer. A young man said bluntly, “Everytime we go there, they just keep talking about what we need to do to reach the kids of this town. We just keep talking about the same things each week. I like this study because we just study the Bible. We seem to know what we are doing.”
The reason that comment was so shocking to me was that I really did not have the confidence I was doing the right thing. All I knew was that the Lord had dropped a hungry group of teenagers into my lap who wanted to study the Word of God. I opened it each week with fear, wondering if I would relate to these young people who were so different from any I had dealt with before. But one thing we did right was to have a purpose to our meeting. Everyone knew we met to study and pray.
Not all youth activities have that purpose, but all must have some goal or purpose or program.
7. The Question “Do We Need a Youth Pastor?” Is Always Worth Asking.
If you have a sponsor like Clell, a full-time youth pastor may not be needed. However, if the group keeps growing, even Clell may not be able to keep up. At some time you need to seriously consider creating a youth ministry staff position. There are several possibilities.
Part-time staff. Shingletown Community Church, in the mountains of northern California, has an average Sunday morning attendance of a hundred with eight young people in junior high and high school. At first look I assumed they were not ready for a youth pastor—but when I spoke with them, they had had one for six months. Pastor Steven King and his people found a couple attending a local Bible college. Someone in the church offered a mobile home for a very reasonable rent. The church called this young man part-time and offered housing as part of the salary. During those six months, the youth group doubled, and parents in the community began to come to the church because of the youth ministry.
Internship. The summer between my junior and senior years in college I was called as a summer youth minister at a 350-member church with about 30 young people in the high school department. When I graduated from college, I was called to the church staff full-time. The summer intern opportunity did two things.
First, it gave us the opportunity to work together. This working relationship turned out well, and so we both wanted to continue. Otherwise, there would have been no obligation once the summer was over.
Second, the internship sold the church on its need for another staff member. This can happen even if the intern is less than the person of their dreams; the possibility is highlighted.
Although I am a firm believer in the youth pastorate and encourage churches to bring on a youth pastor as soon as possible, I am convinced that churches can have a dynamic youth ministry without one. The youth of today in our communities must not be made to wait until finances and other factors mature tomorrow.
© 1986 Christianity Today
