One of the greatest downfalls of any Children or Youth Ministry is a fixation on numbers. Get any 2 youth ministers together and the first thing that they usually ask is “how many at your youth group”?
We usually end up at meetings about children and youth Ministry because we feel we don’t have enough young people and we are desperate to get more.
The ministries we admire are the ones with lots of kids, we want to know how they do it and hope we can repeat it in our own church.
In 1 Thessalonians 2:8 Paul says “So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.”
The essence of youth ministry is relationship.
Jesus worked fulltime for three years and ended up with just 12 followers one of whom had him killed and a handful of women.
Any children and youth leader who had worked full time for three years with this would probably be seen as doing a pretty poor job.
So why did what Jesus do work? Because he had a relationship with those remaining disciples and they followed in his footsteps. He shared his life and the gospel with them and then they did this with others.
I would swap 100 young people at a church social group for just four young people who were interested in developing their faith and after 5 years (the length of high-school) were keen to do the same thing with other young people. It sounds pretty small but if those 4 young people after five years met with another 4 people for 5 years etc... after 50 years there would be 1,048,576 people in the church.
All with just a ratio of 1:4
So if you have 2 leaders then you'd have just 8 people in the group.
We usually end up at meetings about children and youth Ministry because we feel we don’t have enough young people and we are desperate to get more.
The ministries we admire are the ones with lots of kids, we want to know how they do it and hope we can repeat it in our own church.
In 1 Thessalonians 2:8 Paul says “So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.”
The essence of youth ministry is relationship.
Jesus worked fulltime for three years and ended up with just 12 followers one of whom had him killed and a handful of women.
Any children and youth leader who had worked full time for three years with this would probably be seen as doing a pretty poor job.
So why did what Jesus do work? Because he had a relationship with those remaining disciples and they followed in his footsteps. He shared his life and the gospel with them and then they did this with others.
I would swap 100 young people at a church social group for just four young people who were interested in developing their faith and after 5 years (the length of high-school) were keen to do the same thing with other young people. It sounds pretty small but if those 4 young people after five years met with another 4 people for 5 years etc... after 50 years there would be 1,048,576 people in the church.
All with just a ratio of 1:4
So if you have 2 leaders then you'd have just 8 people in the group.
2 comments:
Chap Clark speaks of the need for inversing that ratio, so that instead of thinking 5 kids (or four in your ratio) to 2 leaders you'd need 5 leaders per two kids.
In the old way of seeing this you'd need to have adults who are a part of the living faith community and the clouds of witnesses who are invested in the faith life of the young people, calling them up occasionally to say hello, how's school, to remember the transition times in their lives and celebrate them, to be intimately involved in their faith growth.
Hey Darren thanks for the great comment,
The context that the this was originally said was that of churches who often had two frazzled youth group leaders trying to look after 20 kids, and a somewhat detached congregation wondering why the 20 young people weren't coming to church on sunday as well.
I think what Chap Clark is hinting at is that youth ministry should not be isolated from the the rest of the church but incorporated into the whole church. I touch on this in the "isolation vs. incorporation" point.
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