A ‘Facilitated Model’ of Youth Ministry

Over the last couple of years, I have dialled up my public opposition to the model of youth ministry known as ‘incarnational.’ I certainly don’t regret this as it’s a largely unchallenged idea in the youth ministry world that has a shaky foundation at best, and real negative consequences for our work. This idea has been a given, and it needs another side in the conversation.

I’m aware, however, that some people really just mean relational, or contextual youth ministry when they say ‘incarnational’, and I’m mostly fine with that. Not everyone has read the books that push it, and many have only heard bits of the idea through conferences and training days that use the name. I also guess that some more experienced proponents of the model have matured the idea into healthier and safer practices. Although if the ‘updated’ incarnational model as presented by Dr. Root is anything to go by, I’m not too sure that’s true.

I get that incarnational ministry sounds right but having a theological sounding name doesn’t necessarily make something theologically sound. Although I too believe in ‘doing ministry like Jesus did it’, I’m not really sure Jesus did do it like incarnational theory sometimes suggests, and – if I’m really honest – I’d rather build a model that reaches for all of the Bible, not just bits of it.

If you’ve not read my longer posts outlining the issues, I think the concept of incarnational youth ministry misuses the Bible, hijacks a well-established and important theology diluting it in the process, and encourages exceptionally unhealthy practices. Bottom line: I’m tired of meeting people who ‘used to be a youth worker’ but burned out after trying to live the way incarnational theory suggests. An ‘always on’ youth worker, after all is a ‘sometimes off husband’, and an ‘always available’ youth worker, is a ‘less available mum’.

You get it, I’m not a fan. It’s gotten to the point, however, where it would be very easy for me to be known more for what I’m against rather than what I’m for, which would be rubbish, and if you know me personally, I hope you’d agree that that would be out of character!

In some sense, I haven’t wanted to suggest an ‘alternative’ model for youth ministry, rather I’ve tried to harmonise what I feel are the better parts of the more popular models of youth ministry (namely the funnel, hub, intergenerational, and indeed incarnational).

My instinct was that if we instead started with the Bible itself, rather than our praxis, then we would end up with an amalgam of the better parts of each popular model and shake off some of their more questionable features. We would then have some form of ‘alloy’ youth ministry, one that blended the helpful and disregarded the dodgy. This was one of the central features of my book, Rebooted.

Of course, what I have unwittingly done is in fact suggested a different model in a roundabout way, rather than just a youth min alloy like I hoped. So rather than beating any more around the bush, I thought I would spell out the basics here, and even give it a name.

Facilitated Youth Ministry

I know this isn’t a particularly sexy sounding phrase. I played with mediated youth ministry, but that’s only part of the story, and I thought about enabling youth ministry, but that’s weird for other (I hope) obvious reasons.

Facilitated youth ministry, or if I may be so bold, the facilitation model, is driven by the central premise that a youth worker’s primary function is to facilitate ministry for young people rather than simply deliver it. The youth worker’s role is to facilitate the movement of truth, compassion, discipleship, worship, and mission between young people, the church, and the broader community. The youth worker is the junction box not the electricity.

This requires skills like mediation, management, direction, discernment and oversight at least as much as the ability to communicate with teenagers. A facilitator needs a keener awareness of boarder theology and a passion for more than just young people. The need to be church builders, not rebels.

Facilitated youth ministry begins with the idea that young people were not segregated in the Bible. The youth group didn’t cross the Jordan separately, the youth group wasn’t exiled in their own camp, and the youth group wasn’t taken out of temple services to play Mafia. Young people are no less a part the church as anybody else.

There are times and spaces in the Bible way young people are separate, but even then there is always significant overlap with the whole people of God, and this relationship is always facilitated by a handful of parents and elders. There’s our facilitating youth worker!

The responsibilities given to the church, also directly apply to young people. If we wait until they ‘grow up’ before we introduce them to what God asks of them, it is more likely they’ll just grow out of it. Young people are looking for mission and adventure, after all. Why not give it to them?

Before we go further, it needs to be said that the ultimate responsibility over young people is not the youth worker, but the church pastor. That’s what the Bible teaches. This means Bible Colleges need to broaden their curriculums, pastors need to learn some new skills (and maybe new attitudes), and youth workers need to team up more closely.

With that in mind, I’m going to try and give a few pillars to this model here but will write more broadly on it as time goes on.

Facilitating discipleship

In this model, the youth worker seeks to create relationships between young people and many Christians. Through some form of mentoring, small groups, service, and participation, the young people are looked after by a variety of older Christians throughout different areas of their lives. This should be the biggest part of a church-based youth worker’s timetable.

One young person could go sailing with a married couple, get help with homework by an old Maths teacher, serve on the worship team under a spiritually aware a music director, learn to cook with a homegroup, read the Bible in MacDonald’s and with a student, and still not go near a youth group. This isn’t to say youth groups aren’t important, but they are no longer the nucleus of discipleship or spiritual growth. Although our models might leave room for this, a facilitator makes it their primary role.

If a youth worker spent more time finding and facilitating these relationships – knowing and training people, making introductions, periodically checking in – then each young person would have much broader and deeper experience of spirituality, without becoming overly dependent on one person or group.

Not only is this healthier for both the young person and the youth worker, it will subtly train the church to be much more accessible to young people. It’s also more clearly what we see in the Bible.

Facilitating community

There is significant difference between a classical youth club and genuine youth community. A club is entertainment-driven; it’s about providing the young person with an experience that they can consume. As a result, clubs exhaust leaders, strain resources, and create an ‘us-and-them’ culture. Sessions are spent enforcing rules and energetically managing people’s moods. This is why clubs are incredibly homogenous, and only tend to attract one type of young person.

A community on the other hand, is much more interested in integration and mutual service. In a healthy community, relationships police each other, everyone is involved in providing aspects of what happens, it overflows the bounds of the meeting spaces, is less likely to form cliques, and is spontaneous enough to adapt to the real needs of the people within. Clubs are attractive because of the system; communities are attractive because of the people.

A youth work facilitator knows how to integrate young people together – to help them like each other, not just like the leaders. Their time isn’t spent on making a club that attracts the biggest number of young people, but instead creating a safe space where young people integrate healthfully. This also works for a wider age bracket, and is more inclusive of different types of person.

A huge part of this is adjusting our youth work philosophy to help the young people to take responsibility over their own culture. The facilitator helps them develop an environment where each person is cared for by the environment itself. This involves peer mediation, more open communication, and asking individuals specifically to look after people who struggle, including those with additional needs.

Games, teaching methods, seating layouts – everything – needs to be adjusted to help grow a community, not a club. This takes very careful steering and organic growing, not top down leading. It’s facilitated not dictated.

Facilitating truth

As youth workers we have a habit of teaching our favourite bits over and over again. This isn’t helped by the last thirty years of youth work resources basically orbiting the same questions and Bible stories. We are told in the Bible, however, to teach the whole council God, and we know that every piece of God’s truth is truth for everyone.

Facilitating truth is looking far and wide in the Bible and creating teaching plans and methods that help a young person grow from birth and into adulthood. Ideally, each young person should know broadly about the character of God, the nature of the Gospel, and the responsibilities of a Christian.

Most of our resources and curriculums, however, don’t last more than three months, and don’t sequentially go deeper in maturity. The maturity level stays the same with a new topic until the circle begins again. It’s a stair-master, not a ladder.

A term that I would like to see us use more, therefore, is growth pathway.

A growth pathway is a likely track a young person might take on their spiritual journey and what they will learn in that time. A pathway for a young person who starts coming to a group at age 14, for instance, will be different to a young person who has been bought up in a church. When a young person ‘graduates’ youth projects, they should be transitioning into the next stage which, if you’ve been facilitating discipleship (above), should be quite smooth.

This means working closely with children’s workers and parents, but also student workers and senior pastors. You should roughly know what to expect when your youth group gains a young person from Children’s ministry, and who you’re passing on too. This takes the sudden jumps out of the equation, and means you lose less young people in the process.

Facilitated youth workers are able to recognise potential growth pathways and how to connect each young person individually into the life of the church. This form of ministry is far more adaptive and specific – and as a result, far more relational and compassionate. This means you don’t have to move at the pace of lowest common denominator but can help different young people thrive within their own growth pathway. This all comes back to facilitating discipleship.

Facilitating mission

We heard it said that the best person to reach a young person is another young person and there’s a lot of truth in that, however we will insist on doing it for them! The great commission says go make disciples of all nations, however, I think we subversively send the message that this only applies after you turn 18 and the youth group will no longer do it for you.

The question here is how do we facilitate evangelism among the young people themselves? What is it they really need? Is it better training, more engaging clubs, funnier talks? It genuinely could be any of these things, but I’m suspicious that it goes a lot deeper than this.

All mission is driven by the same relationship with Jesus. When we’re excited by Jesus, we tell people about Jesus, just like when I am excited by the pizza served at my local kabab shop, I tell everyone I meet that it’s better than Dominos.

Facilitating missions starts by helping young people develop deeper maturing relationships with Jesus and as a result take greater responsibility for the great commission in their own lives. This isn’t guilting young people into ‘saving their mates’. It is, however, helping them see the great commission as something that applies specifically to them and asking them how we can help them to fulfil it.

It’s calling them to an adventure and a mission that’s real, not just cool sounding.

Facilitating worship

Worship in Israel was an all age affair. Whereas teaching largely happened in specific groups, worship was practised as a whole body. All age for us usually means a children’s service with a little bit for everyone and hardly anything for anyone.

When we ask young people to participate in worship, that should mean more than just giving them a token thing to do. For young people to truly participate in worship we have to give actual responsibility within worship.

The youth work facilitator’s role here is to help young people integrate into all the worshipping activities of the local church. This means helping them enter into the groups and teams in the same way that an adult might. A facilitator supports them and knows how to help other people support them to, without actively having to lead them in those spaces themselves. This involves safeguarding and accountability, but it comes back to facilitating integrated ministry.

When young people participate as an integrated member of the whole community of faith rather than a token, ‘aw isn’t that nice’ occasional addition, then the whole church start to develop a genuine pattern of authentic all age worship. Worship will reflect the needs and desires of those leading the worship, the more diverse that group is, then the broader the needs that are met.

Facilitating resources

This should be a smaller point, but it’s worth adding. We should always step out in faith, but that doesn’t mean over-reach and burn through our resources. The job of a youth work facilitator is to carefully steward the resources available across the whole church. This could actually be a lot more than is usually available, because we would not just be recruiting cool-sounding people for a club!

Not every specific church can tick every potential ministry box, which is why the Church (big c) is supposed to work together as one body. Rather than trying to do everything, find one or two things to do and do them really well.

For someone wanting to have a crack at facilitated youth ministry, I’d suggest dropping your gathering-styled projects to one a week – look for a way to cultivate a healthy community in that space, and then start plugging your young people one by one into the wider church. Start to train mentors and prepare the other ministry teams (even if that’s just ol’ Olive the organist) to accept young people. Go with young people into new spaces and start to wean them off you and carefully into new relationships. Perhaps most importantly, however, start talking regularly with your pastor about all of this – if you can’t get them on board, then it’s just not going to work.

A model of facilitation

A youth work facilitator’s job is to facilitate the movement of truth, compassion, discipleship, worship, and mission between young people, the church, and the broader community. This has do be done in close relationship to the pastor (after all they are ultimately responsible, not you).

A facilitator is a conduit that helps young people grow deeper with God, deeper in themselves, and deeper within the church community. A facilitator helps a young person grow individualised roots that will last, and that are not dependent on ‘youth friendly’ stuff, or a single individual.

A facilitator will need to be integral to the life of the church, actively involved within its ministries, and have a real passion to see the whole body grow not just the young people. They will need to be specialists in youth culture for sure, so they can help the whole church understand young people better, but primarily their time should be spent in facilitating healthy church-wide ways to integrate young people into the whole community of faith.

In the Bible youth-specific ministry is the responsibility of the whole church, carefully facilitated by a few people. Driving at this today means youth workers need to know how to utilise the whole church to reshape itself and help everybody grow together.

So, is this a new model of youth ministry? Or is this just a very different model of church? You decide. Thanks for reading this far!

Photo by Elaine Casap on Unsplash