Is Youth Ministry Biblical?
Most of us who have grown up within American evangelicalism have fond memories of youth group. We remember camp messages that focused on our response to the Gospel. We remember youth pastors calling on us to take our purity seriously. Whether it was an all-night lock-in or songs around a campfire, we remember our time in youth group as equal parts fun and spiritual growth. For good reason, we often look back to our 4-6 years in a youth ministry and remain thankful.
However, amidst our nostalgia, we often forget to consider our youth group’s primary foundation. While youth ministry has quickly become canonized within the evangelical church in the 20th century,[1] we rarely ask the most important questions about the ministry’s underpinning. We know that we should share biblical truth in our devotions and messages. We remember to point students to Christ in good times and bad. Nevertheless, when we look at what we’re doing in the churches, focusing on teenagers and their spiritual walk, we must consider whether we are doing something that is grounded in Scripture. Put simply: is youth ministry biblical?
The Tension
The answer: no and yes. Christians have vacillated on this question recently. Some say that it is a “failed experiment”, needing to be removed in all churches everywhere. However, others stand by youth ministry and the good it has fostered. Amidst these varying options, I still believe the answer is both no and yes. While this may sound indecisive, it is true.
A tension prevails in the way youth ministry is approached today, which makes all the difference. We all agree that the Bible is “[the] sufficient and infallible rule and guide to salvation and all Christian worship and service.”[2] Thus, we have to examine the intersection between youth ministry and God’s Word. The answer to this question cannot be answered simply through a no or yes though, but requires a bit more. We must examine the practice in order to substantiate the claim. The answer of how we do youth ministry will tell us whether it is biblical.
The Answer: No
I want to begin by answering this question in the negative. This may sound peculiar, if not completely ludicrous coming from someone who teaches and practices youth ministry for a living. If anything, my livelihood depends on youth ministry having at least some scriptural claim. However, the answer to whether youth ministry is biblical remains a “no” so long as youth ministry remains segregated from the church. As Alvin Reid writes, “We are not helping young people grow into maturity when we add to the dichotomy between a weekly time of worship for students and the time when all the people of God gather to worship the holy God and then scatter to live out the mission of God.”[3] Unfortunately, this is often the contrast we’ve chosen.
Many models of youth ministry completely separate youth from contact with the older members of the church, as well as the younger children of the church. Worship, ministry, and fellowship are segregated and can often send the message that the Christian life is highly customized and individualized.
Rather than turning youth ministry into a parachurch organization, a youth minister’s focus should be on the integrative, spiritual function of teenagers within the local church. While parachurch organizations have offered many great benefits over the past few decades, Christ has chosen the local church to advance His kingdom here on earth (cf. Acts 1:3; 28:31). For that reason, youth ministry is unbiblical so long as it works apart from the church in its discipleship of teenage Christians.
Not only does removing youth ministry from the church create an unbiblical institution, but it also creates unbiblical youth. Think of those things that the Bible commands the church to be: missional, confessional, communal, purposeful, and clear on identity. But don’t teenage Christians need to be these things, too? While we often hear that youth need their own space, activities, etc., we quickly realize that the church alone offers the remedy to the human sehnsucht.[4] As Kenda Creasy Dean writes in Almost Christian, those youth ministries that successfully produced disciple teenagers were “[c]ongregations [who] view[ed] young people, not as moralistic do-gooders, but as Christ’s representatives in the world.”[5] Allowing youth ministry to stay woven into the context of the church fuses all of these dynamics together—not only affirming studies, but truly guiding and giving students the answer to their deepest longings and questions.
The Answer: Yes
So I might ask again: is youth ministry biblical? Ultimately, I hope that we can answer this question with a resounding “yes.” Though we may not realize it, Scripture is full of statements about our ministry to youth. The Bible does not only talk about youth as a blessing (Gen. 3:15; 48:9, Ps. 128:1-4), but also as vital to God’s covenant work in humanity (Gen. 12-13). Christ Himself blessed youth (Mt. 19:13-15), pointed to youthfulness as a sign of humility (Mk. 9:42-48) and gravely warned any who might cause a youth to stumble (Lk. 17:1-2).
What does the Bible say about ministry to youth? Deuteronomy 6:7-9 charges parents to teach the commandments to their children. Ephesians 6:1 encourages children, albeit briefly, to obey their parents. One passage admonishes parents directly to minister to youth; the other admonishes youth directly to follow a biblical commandment. What we might easily overlook in both of these passages is this: they are both given in the context of the faith community, the first in the assembly of the Israelites and the second to the church in Ephesus. In other words, both of these admonitions occur in the context God’s people. Therefore, they should never be separated from it.
If the discipleship of our youth occurs in connection with our homes and churches, this has implications for our understanding of the body of Christ. In 1 Corinthians 12:12-26, Paul, though not directly speaking to youth, highlights the diversity found within the unified body of Christ. Agreeing with John’s picture of the church in Revelation 7:9, Paul believes that it should be made up of “every tribe and tongue”. Thus, to have a biblical representation of the church today is to have a wide array of diversity and minister in light of that diversity.
Writing for the Fuller Youth Institute, Mike Kipp suggests that the answer to whether youth ministry is biblical depends on your goal of youth ministry.[6] Youth ministry “mission statements” can range anywhere from “saving teens” to “promoting purity.” Youth ministry, as Kipp argues, should ultimately exist “to integrate young people into the body and mission of Jesus Christ.”[7] Thus, youth ministry should and needs to be church-centric, specifically because that is how Scripture talks about God’s people.
As one writer formalized, the biblical mandate for youth ministry should “begin religious instruction in the family home as spiritual practices, add knowledge through the larger community of faith, and provide mentoring from key spiritual leaders for specific practices and duties.”[8] Thankfully, this defines youth ministry not as a ghettoized ministry of the church, but one that is holistic and deeply interwoven in the life of the local church.
Conclusion
We should love youth ministry, but we should love the church more. While it seems counter-intuitive, it is precisely because we love youth that we love the church more. To love youth is to desire for them to be part of a larger community in order to be discipled, instructed, loved, and held accountable. For Christians, this only comes in the body of Christ.
How do we do this, though? By not only ministering to students, but also ministering with students. Be intentional about making space for students to be in the church choir, serve as an usher, read Scripture during worship, and even teach.
As Alvin Reid states, “The church in America stands at a crossroads, and student ministry sits right in the center of the intersection.”[9] As Christians, we want to be deeply biblical. We seek to teach and preach the Bible. As youth ministers, let us begin with the Bible as our foundation, and let it saturate everything we do.
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[1] Concerning the development of youth ministry in America, I highly recommend Thomas Bergler’s book The Juvenilization of American Christianity. In it, he traces four church movements over the past century and their efforts to minister to the next generation.
[2] A Treatise of the Faith and Practices of the National Association of Free Will Baptist, (Nashville: Executive Office of the National Association of Free Will Baptists, 2008) 3.
[3] Alvin L. Reid, As You Go: Creating a Missional Culture of Gospel-Centered Students, (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2013), 89.
[4] Sehnsucht is a German noun that is often translated as meaning “yearning” or “longing”. However, we do not have a perfect English equivalent because sehnsucht implies deep emotional state with this longing. This became a very popular theme in many of C. S. Lewis’ writings.
[5] Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 83. This book focuses heavily on, and explores, the findings of the National Study of Youth and Religion, completed by Christian Smith and Lisa Pearce. You can find the study in full here: http://youthandreligion.nd.edu.
[6] Mike Kipp, “Is ‘Youth Ministry’ in the Bible?: Researching the Scripture Behind Youth and Family Ministry,” Fuller Youth Institute, http://fulleryouthinstitute.org/articles/is-youth-ministry-in-the-bible (accessed January 9, 2015)
[7] Kipp.
[8] Dave Keehn, “Biblical Mandate for Youth Ministry (Part 3): Youth Ministry in the New Testament.”, The Good Book Blog, http://www.thegoodbookblog.com/2012/mar/05/biblical-mandate-for-youth-ministry-part-3-youth-m/ (accessed January 9, 2015).
[9] Reid, 86.
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