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As someone who’s invested the last decade of her life in youth ministry, I really hate to say this, but I feel I must: there’s something wrong with the way we’ve been doing youth ministry.  Now, it’s not all wrong, but there’s a very important ingredient or two missing, and there isn’t any one person to blame for this.

Trends in church attendance clearly show that attendance among young people begins declining as soon as these young people turn sixteen.  Give them the freedom of a car, and pretty soon they’re driving away from church.

These students haven’t decided they hate church.  Rather, those who leave say they quit going to church simply because church wasn’t essential to their lives.

This isn’t even a case of going out and “sowing wild oats” for a time or anything like that, the most basic difference between young people who stayed and young people who left was whether their church was essential to them or not.

If we break this down and look at what church is supposed to be, then perhaps we can get an idea of how to make our churches essential in the lives of our young people again.

First of all, the church, as Archbishop William Temple said, “is the only society on earth that exists for the benefit of its non-members.”  That goes handily with the Great Commission in which the followers of Jesus are instructed to go out and make disciples of all the world.

So, if we as the church are supposed to exist to make disciples, then we ought to be making disciples of our youth as well.

And we can’t allow this job to fall solely to the youth minister, because if we do, then the youth end up with their own church—separate in all of it’s customs, rituals, meetings, and traditions from “big church.” Is it any wonder then that students toward the end of high school no longer see a place for themselves in the church as a whole?

What’s the solution? I believe we need to stop looking at our youth and young adults as the future members of the church and to realize that they are current members of the church and need to be given leadership roles.  This goes beyond being acolytes and having youth Sundays, as good as both of those ideas are.  This would include youth on the vestry, youth as part of larger out reaches and missions, part of the planning, not just the part of “what the youth always do” or “what we’d like to see the youth doing.”  Let them help figure out what to do alongside of the adults.  They need to have ownership of the church, to have their ideas listened to, to be given a place to serve and make a difference.

But they can’t just up and start teaching Sunday school for the first graders all by themselves either. These are youth and young adults.  They need to be mentored by older adults in the congregation.  Studies  show that there is an inverse relationship with the number of adults in a young person’s life to the percentage of young people that drop out of church.  Where there are no adults from the church present in a young person’s life, the drop out rate is 9 out of 10.  Where there are 6 or more adults that are somehow active in that young person’s life, the drop out rate plummets to only 50%.  That’s 40% of all young adults that could be retained simply by involving them! (1)

And 6 or more adults per young person adds up more quickly than you might think.  For instance, the youth minister who knows that kid’s name is one. The youth small group leader is another.  The retired couple who sits behind the kid’s family in church and has pool parties at their house a couple of times in the summer and keeps up with what the kids are doing are two more.  Then there’s the spouse of the small group leader who keeps up with the lives of the kids who are coming over to the house, maybe fixes snacks for the small group.  The minister can be another in a smaller church, or the music minister who also leads a youth choir, greeters by the door, and so on.  It’s not that hard to get up to 6, but we have to be intentional about it.

So, to keep young people in church, church has to be essential to their lives.  For them to view church as essential, they need ownership, and connections within the church as a whole.  They need to be real members of the church, not future members.  You know how fun it is on youth Sunday to see those teens or children doing the readings and taking such a big part in the service? Why can’t that be every Sunday? Why are our youth largely delegated to this one service, but not on regular rotations?  There are many places in both the service and the life of the church where our youth can take part.  At 16, if they’re confirmed, they can serve on a vestry.  At even younger ages, they can participate in all sorts of different roles if we’re only willing to hear what they have to say.  We might be surprised what God would want to do in our midst through some of our younger members.  The only question is are we daring enough to give them a chance?

Only connect! (2) And then go and make disciples.

(1) Thom and Sam Ranier, Essential Church, (Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2008) p. 124.
(2) E. M. Forster, Howards End, Title page.