As a kid, I thought I was just curious—like any other kid. But the grown-ups called it being nosy. More often than I can recount, I would hear the words “Go sit down somewhere and stop talking while grown folks are talking. This is grown folks’ business.” They had important things to discuss and decide, and I was in the way.
In Don’t Despise Our Youth: Renewing Hope for Urban Youth Ministry, David A. Washington, a pastor in Chicago’s South Side, addresses inner-city churches like his own. These churches, he argues, have neglected to invest in youth ministry and failed to engage young people as potential leaders and disciple makers.
Such neglect communicates that church ministry is “grown folks’ business,” to the detriment of reaching, discipling, and deploying youth as urban missionaries. Washington spells out some of the consequences: Urban churches will reach fewer outsiders for Christ, their own youth will struggle to belong, and their youth ministers will feel undervalued, causing some to leave ministry for good.
Because of these factors, Washington argues, the urban church in America is at a crisis point. As he notes, inner-city youth often grow up in communities beset by violence, poverty, drug abuse, and gang warfare. Traditional youth-ministry resources are not contextualized for the challenges of urban life, leaving youth leaders with few resources to help them navigate the needs, challenges, and opportunities of gospel ministry there.
One striking feature of Don’t Despise Our Youth is how Washington’s own life bears out its message. His story testifies to the dramatic difference youth ministry can make in even the most challenging contexts. Clearly, Washington’s philosophy of ministry flows from direct experience, not idle musings drawn up in a bookshelf-lined study.
That philosophy draws special inspiration from the ministry of Salem Baptist Church of Chicago, which helped rescue him from a downward spiral into teenage violence. At age 17, Washington was a gang leader plotting a retaliatory hit on a rival group. On his way to help execute the attack, he encountered Harvey Carey, Salem’s youth pastor at the time. The pastor introduced himself and asked Washington for his name, which he reluctantly gave. Three months later, Carey saw him again on the street and called his name, displaying the kind of intentionality, consistency, and love necessary for faithful youth ministry.
These encounters set the stage for God to draw Washington to Christ through Salem’s ministry. “I was greatly valued,” he recalls, “by a pastor who focused not on what I had become in the world but on what I had the potential to become in the kingdom of God.”
In urban ministry, one often encounters hardened people entangled in seemingly hopeless situations. The landscape can call to mind the valley of dry bones God showed to Ezekiel (37:1–14). Yet Washington’s journey confirms that God can make dead things alive. He can bind up people and places crushed by unrighteousness and injustice.
One of Washington’s central arguments is that vibrant ministry to young people involves “youth doing ministry” rather than merely adults ministering to youth. For some, this distinction might seem like semantics, but the difference is significant. Rather than seeing a church’s youth as passive recipients of ministry formation, Washington hopes they will contribute to the church’s life and mission, even at a tender age.
As Washington argues, simply having a youth ministry doesn’t guarantee that a church is effectively raising youth to spiritual maturity and thereby multiplying disciple makers. On top of that, youth ministries often grow overly isolated from adult congregations and senior pastors. In such situations, teenagers can struggle to find meaningful places in a church’s life and ministry.
To help turn the tide, Washington calls urban churches to a focused ministry of the Word, in which habits of evangelism and discipleship transform young people into active participants in the church’s mission. Even while they are still being discipled, he argues, they can join in the work of “soul fishing.”
Washington writes, “Until we understand the power available through the lives of mature and discipled teenagers in our churches, we will continue to miss out on incredible opportunities to do greater works for God.” For pastors like me, this means remembering to equip our youth as we consider our broader responsibility to equip the saints for the work of ministry (Eph. 4:12). It means valuing them as vital participants in the work of building up the church to maturity in Christ as well as calling other youth from darkness to light.
Building this kind of ministry involves finding and retaining youth pastors whose gifts, calling, and passions are aligned and who intend to stick around for the long haul. The youth-ministry grind can be difficult to sustain. When leaders receive inadequate investment and support from their churches, they can feel tempted to quit or to seek positions higher up the leadership ladder. While Washington calls youth ministers to deep commitment, he also encourages partnership efforts by parents and other church members as well as consistent, public support from senior pastors.
This is all worthy counsel. Still, I believe the book could have done more to emphasize the church’s role in caring for the souls of youth pastors themselves. Seeking lost teenagers in hard places exposes the soul to mountains of grief, as anyone involved in urban ministry knows well. You might lose a kid to gun violence or the criminal justice system. You might witness once-faithful kids succumbing to neighborhood pressure.
These are painful experiences. One way the church can keep youth pastors from wearing down is making sure they can access resources, such as counseling, that help them persevere through tears.
This oversight notwithstanding, Don’t Despise Our Youth meets a critical need for the urban church. It provides inspiration, powerful testimony, and helpful suggestions for inner-city churches looking to tailor their youth ministries to inner-city realities.
Washington deserves credit for treating youth ministry as something more than grown folks’ business. In fact, grown folks’ business isn’t complete without training young folks to be about their Father’s business, for the good of our cities and the glory of his name.
Brian Key is pastor for discipleship at Imago Dei Church in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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