Monthly youth leaders column

Keeping up with the youth

This may not seem like a very spiritual article but it has come to me with real force in recent weeks.

Accurate record keeping is not on most youth leaders’ agendas as it is a bit of a pain taking registers of young people and there are many more exciting things to do in an evening of youth ministry. At a recent Root 66 training session (no plug intended!!), I asked the leaders to write down the names of five of their group and asked them to estimate how often each of these students came to the group. The usual response to that question is something like, ‘I suppose it’s about half the meetings this term’.

We can easily kid ourselves that young people are coming more often than we think and that what we choose to remember as 80% attendance which is nearer to 50%. I’m not suggesting we’re dishonest — it’s just not a high priority in all we do and I think it should be. Why?

Facts and figures

In our church, we have started to look seriously at the attendance figures of the children who come and it has led us to question some of things we do. We have seen that some of our children with around 50% rates are like that for different reasons — there are some Sundays where there are other attractions and children who attend those often miss on the same Sunday each month. Other families come in patches and we’re not quite sure why — they may come for three of four weeks then go missing. Do we spot people who don’t come for three weeks and what do we do if that happens. Somebody might ask, ‘Has anybody seen John lately?’ and we stare blankly into space.

‘We missed you’

It is part of our responsibility to ‘preach the word’, but it is equally our job to ‘care for the flock’ and any decent shepherd ‘knows his sheep’ and we can become so attached to ‘connecting with the young people’ in the way we deliver our talks that we don’t even spot one has walked away. A gap of two weeks should prompt some kind of pastoral action. In earlier years we used to send a card just to say we miss you — these days we have a plethora of ways of saying ‘we’ve missed you’ but I’m not sure they’re being used. Apart from any legal considerations of knowing who is in your building, keeping records provides us with the basic tool for our pastoral care. If we know if the student has been around then our prayer for them will be different than our prayer for one we haven’t seen for weeks.

When involved with the Billy Graham mission in the 80s we were told to never get rid of a list. One day at one of our Friday clubs a girl turned up and I could not remember who she was — I thought she had been away for four years and, of course, she remembered who I was. So, at an opportune moment, I dug out a previous list and it took me two minutes to find her details and how often she’d been coming and who introduced her. I think she was quite ‘surprised’ that I remembered her so well when I talked with her again.

A life in a line

Each of those lines in a database represent a life made in the image of God who, at some point, has been part of the youth group and, for some reason, has drifted away or remained consistent. We need to know far more than we do at the moment about who is sitting in the room and how committed they are to the group. There is far more to pastoral care than number counts but, if a person was coming every week last year, and this year is coming only once a month, we ought to know why. So keep careful records.

Dave Fenton

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