How to Shake up Your Teenagers

Let them taste a slice of the world.

Why do you spend so much of your youth group time teaching your teenagers about world missions?

Why do you have two or three fund raisers for missions each year and ask for substantial aid from your missions committee to send teenagers into cross-cultural service opportunities?

Wouldn’t your efforts be better focused on college students?

These valid questions were posed by a perceptive visitor to our youth ministry. Here are my answers:

It promotes the lordship of Christ. Submitting to Jesus Christ as Lord is the greatest challenge today’s teenager faces. Urging our students to consider God’s call to missions has helped them realize that following Christ means yielding their priorities to him. God still uses the singing of traditional missionary hymns and the reading of missionary biographies and missions histories to stir our high schoolers to intensified devotion.

It instills the Christian “basics.” Two-week mission trips have been our most effective tool for training teenagers in the importance of daily time alone with God, the disciplines of walking in the Spirit, and the exercise of loving others. Adult leaders and missionary or national hosts have modeled Christian living and compassion. Their examples are leaving lasting, life-changing impressions on these young men and women.

It solidifies Christian conviction. Many church teenagers live in a relatively secure, “Christianized” world. Through the contrasts of other religions, service teams show students that being a follower of Jesus Christ sets us apart. This contributes to the necessary adolescent phase of making the faith of their parents their own.

It teaches them to pray. The results orientation of our culture, combined with the pragmatic mindset of most teens, makes intercession a difficult discipline to teach. By experiencing God’s answers to their prayers as they have raised money to feed the poor or spoken through an interpreter in another culture, students are learning to dedicate more effort to prayer.

It builds Christian unity. Teamwork in the church is a necessity if the Great Commission is to be fulfilled. Before embarking on service projects, we train our high schoolers in teamwork, resolving conflicts, and relational commitments. Students discover true Christian fellowship through group efforts in fund raising and in the high-pressured environments of cross-cultural service teams. They bring this understanding back home, becoming willing to work together in spite of their differences.

It combats a materialistic outlook. Most North American students are wealthy compared to the rest of the world. Mission trips to Third World countries and educational fund raisers such as a “planned famine” bring this into focus.

One girl, after seeing a poverty-stricken barrio in Colombia, decided to stop her habit of window shopping because “it led me to think I needed things that I now know I don’t need at all.” Another began supporting from her own budget a child she met at an orphanage in Costa Rica. Another student who worked hard on a mission team saw how much he could accomplish. On returning home he sold his television set because “I saw how much time I had been wasting in front of the tube.”

It creates world awareness. A missions emphasis helps destroy stereotypes and racist attitudes. Students learn the complexities of world economies, and become able to refute simplistic, bigoted ideas (“people are poor because they won’t work hard”).

Our goal is to bring students to a level of world awareness that allows them to make decisions about their future in the light of both world needs and opportunities, and their commitment to Christ.

Numbers of our teenagers, upon applying for college, list the youth missionary teams as the most important experience of their high school years.

It develops servanthood. Teenagers can be the most self-centered members of society because marketing, the media, and standard adolescent growth phases force them to focus on themselves. And like most youth ministries, we have our share of activities and talks on self-image. But students have grown more in two weeks of energy expended on behalf of others than they have in two years of “finding themselves.”

It produces cross-cultural servants. As missionaries increasingly work under national leadership, the need for people who understand what it is to serve grows. We emphasize missions with our teenagers because we are convinced that preparation for such service must start before college or Bible school.

Our goal is for the local church to produce young men and women who are willing to serve cross-culturally. God can then direct many of them to fulfill his plans for our world in this way. Exposure to the worldwide scope of Christianity is causing many to add a uniquely Christian perspective to the career plans they are making.

Why do we spend so much money and work so hard to involve our youth in world missions? Because of the results in their lives.

PAUL BORTHWICKMr. Borthwick, who is minister of youth at Grace Chapel, Lexington, Massachusetts, has coordinated 19 youth mission teams in eight countries, and has written How to Plan, Develop, and Lead a Youth Missionary Team (1980, published by his church).

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