There’s something, at some awkward level, that we need to look in the eyes: youth work, to a large degree, just doesn’t work.

We’ve been engaging in the youth ministry experiment as we know it today since the mid-1940s, and I don’t think it’s ever fully found its groove. It’s true that youth work in the church did exist in some form before this time, but the models we favour today were largely born out of a post-war, church-wide missional landscape. That makes it still a baby.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a youth worker. I share the same passion to see young people meet with Jesus and grow into fullness with Him as you likely do! I want them to have a community that’s designed to show them compassion and committed to give them opportunities. I believe in youth ministry. If I didn’t, then frankly I’d be unemployable. That said, I don’t always believe in what we call youth ministry.

There are lots of amazing youth ministries (plural), but I’ve often found myself troubled by the wider body language, spiritual tone, and practical longevity of youth ministry as a much larger tribe both within and independent of the church. Let’s have a look at a few of these.

Youth ministry is widely under resourced and undervalued

In the UK especially, youth work is often under-resourced financially at both the local and national levels. Strategic budgeting at denominational meetings, for instance, tends to favour new church planting innovations, and so youth work would need to swim in those particular waters to get a piece of the pie (hows that for a mixed metaphor!). Similarly, there’s often a lot more training incentives for ordinands and far less for lay leaders which includes youth and children’s’ workers. In face, youth workers are rarely even mentioned as a distinct group within lay ministry when money and training is spoken about.

Youth workers nationally, on average, still earn less than entry level teachers, even after significant time in their roles. Although jobs often advertise a salary scale ‘depending on experience and qualifications’, most youth workers don’t come with professional training, and even when they do, it’s rare for a church to pay at the higher advertised level. Usually, the higher rate of pay is what they might expect to ‘grow into’, making it a functional advancement cap.

It’s also not usual for youth worker contracts to come with additional budgeted perks either; so, no clear costs set aside in advance for training, professional development plans, coaching, conference expectations, or books. It’s also exceptionally rare for youth workers to get help with things like relocation costs.

There’s an unwritten expectation that youth workers won’t last very long—which is probably one reason that they don’t. As a whole, youth ministry isn’t understood well by the wider church, meaning people still see it as glorified babysitting with fun events and games thrown in. So longevity and long term value don’t tend to be serious parts of the hiring conversations.

All of this speaks to an attitude of low value placed on youth work.

It’s often too separate from the church and sits in too many separate boxes

Almost every model of youth work used since the 1940s has held its main projects separate from the church. If you’re interested in following the journey of how this came to be, you can read my short booklet ‘Does Youth Ministry Have a Future’.

More simply, we place ministry areas into homogenous boxes with their own contained eco-systems. There’s a youth ministry ‘box’, a children’s ministry ‘box’, maybe a student ‘box’ and then, of course, a ‘big’ or ‘main church box’. All of these, even if they interact, mostly exist as separate spaces.

Then within those boxes we have smaller boxes: 9-11s, 11-14s, 14s-18s, discipleship, evangelism, schools work, Sunday School, Alpha Courses etc.—all of these serve to continually separate our influence into smaller and smaller units – with the hope of them making it through to the end.

The average church with a functioning youth and children’s ministry can go through between six and fifteen transitions from creche to ‘main church’. That’s six to fifteen boxes they need to climb out of and climb into, and six to fifteen new cultures, friends, styles, contents, venues, and leaders they need to readapt to. And we wonder why we lose so many young people between groups?

These units then exist separately to the ‘main church’. This means, in effect, that there actually is no church because—theologically—church is made up of all these parts interacting intentionally together.

It’s often too confused by its own models

Youth ministry modelling has swung back and forth between the high-attractional and the high-relational approaches. A high-attractional approach tends to focus on larger, exciting events, with relevant games, music, languages, and branding. The idea is to fill a room, spread the net wide, and hope that some will connect more deeply. A high-relational approach would focus much more on small groups, detached work, and mentoring. This, in my opinion, has more going for it, but often leaves the youth worker in vulnerable situations if it’s not fully integrated into a much broader community—which they don’t tend to be.

Under these two approaches we have strategic models such as the funnel model which starts with easy to attend, low content projects, and moves young people into progressively deeper and smaller groups where—at some point—they’ll make a commitment to become a Christian and start being discipled. The issue, of course, is this over-commits resources and is a little bait-and-switch. Then there’s the incarnational model which has a lot of interesting (and mostly helpful) ideas on contextualisation and relationships, but often takes these too far with poorly defined boundaries. Then there’s the hub model, which is all projects meeting around, and flowing into, one large youth gathering or centre. This model, although it may have a relevant expression of youth community, has huge drop off rates, and is often at the cause of the ‘one-eared Mikey mouse’. There there are several versions of the intergenerational model—which are often more successful with mixing ages intentionally but haven’t quite cracked how to engage non-typical families, or the specific missional needs of young people.

There’s definitely some merit in all these models, and some issues too. I think, however, that youth ministry needs things from all of them, but always ends up championing just one of them to the exclusion of the benefits of others. The result is that it’s very rare to find a healthy youth ministry that doesn’t have significant strategic holes.

Put another way, it’s hard to find too many youth ministries that have sound enough strategic plans and don’t fall into the pitfalls of one or more of these models.

It can be too short-termed and small-minded

Hundreds of thousands of young people have ‘become a Christian’ at Christian festivals—but the measure of evangelistic effectiveness is not how many made a commitment on the night, but how many are pursuing hard after Jesus many years later.

When I worked in London, the local ‘churches together’ group ran a huge local festival with hundreds of young people in attendance. However, fifteen years later, I could only point to two or three young people that became a believer in those events who were still following Jesus—and in every case they had a Christian family to support them. In the short term the events looked great, but over time their effectiveness was almost non-existent.

Youth ministry doesn’t tend to identify growth pathway plans to help a child grow long-term right through into adulthood. This needs an unprecedented amount of cooperation between the ministries of a church to identify and guide the common ways in which young people enter faith, grow in community, and leave that specific church spiritually healthier at the other end. However, as youth work is often separate to other ministries and has shorter term success measures, this just doesn’t work.

This is seen more clearly in our resources. Last year I did an experiment; I bought a copy of two dozen of the most popular youth work group resources from the biggest publishers in both the UK and America, and from across a range of denominational and doctrinal persuasions. They all had two things in common:

1. They were very short. The average time in a teaching series was six weeks. The longest lasted a year.
2. They were very repetitive, to the point of having no maturity progression to speak of at all. When you complete one series and move onto another, the content depth remains the same—it’s recycling the same level of depth with a new topic. There isn’t even that much difference in the depth of content between ‘evangelistic’ resources and ‘discipleship’ ones.

So, you could spend seven years in youth clubs, go through (on average) twenty-eight teaching series, and never actually grow in depth or maturity because of those resources. You may grow in breadth of information, but the depth level is just recycled. The result is stunted growth, and young people who are not prepared to become members of the broader community of faith.

There’s just a whole lot less of it going on

On the surface there’s a lot of statistical decline. So, there are less youth clubs, less full-time youth workers, less entering training, and less training courses available. There’s less lunchtime clubs in schools, less detached workers, less conferences, less attending festivals, and – well – it just looks like there’s increasingly less youth work.

Let’s get into some actual figures and do some quick maths.

In 2018 the Church of England reported that its Sunday attendance at 703,000 people. Across roughly 16,043 churches and cathedrals, this makes the average attendance 44 people per church. Of this, 13% were children under the age of 16, or about 7 per church. However, as 75% of these churches reports no youth provision, it works out much like 22 young people across just a quarter of Church of England churches.

We know that that there is a significant attendance drop off for young people between the ages of 11-14, so only around 26% of those young people aged 0-16 would be older than 11.

It’s a similar story in the Methodist Church. In 2016, 7192 13-19-year-olds were attending on a Sunday morning, but 67,000 attending weekly activities. This (according to Piggot, 2017) would be across 4512 Methodist churches so up to 15 teenagers per church, but this would only be in about 6% of Methodist churches.

The Church of England and Methodist Church make up around a third of all church attendance but using similar available figures and methods for the Baptist, United Reformed, Catholic, Pentecostal, Orthodox, independent, and ‘other’ churches, we can put together a reasonable estimate of how many young people there are in churches today.

Splitting up the two common age categories into separate groups (11s-13s and 14s-18s), the average youth group size is probably 5-12 young people, and these are in only about 25% of all churches in the UK. This means 7 out of 10 churches don’t have any young people at all, and the three that do, most only have a small handful.

That ain’t a whole lot, and it’s getting smaller each year!

So, what’s your point?

Youth ministry is a beautiful thing, but we need to take it far more seriously as a Christian movement. We need to value it, resource it, integrate it, and deepen it. We need to shift our focus away from ‘room-filling’ models, and even away from purely relational models, and find a way to integrate young people and church together again much more intentionally.

If you cut a body up into smaller pieces and place each piece in a jar of formaldehyde, you don’t have a functional body. Even if you feed each separate limb and organ through tubes, and artificially flex the muscles so the separate parts all grow, it doesn’t matter. Sooner or later, that body is a dead body.

If there is something fundamentally wrong in how we approach youth ministry, then it comes from there being something fundamentally wrong in how we view church. The church is always more than simply the sum of its parts. The body is bleeding—the patient is on the table—and we’ve got to do all we can to make it whole again.

Photo by Sebastian Huxley on Unsplash