In Depth:  Dave Fenton

Whatever your version of church government, you must have something like a PCC or a group of elders who lead the church.

I wonder what they talk about? When it comes to youth and children issues, is the conversation restricted to key appointments and finance?

This name first came up in a conversation about how we can help those people who turn up every week as volunteers to do youth and children’s ministry.

They receive no payment, they have probably had little or no formal training, but they arrive each week and provide the backbone for discipleship of our young people. There are far more of them than there are paid youth ministers, but we can so easily just assume they will turn up week after week. What can we do to help Mrs. Jones?

Most of our youth groups are attached to a church. It may be just one of the activities the church gets up to alongside its services on Sunday. There are youth groups which are completely separate from the life of the church and there are others where there is some kind of link between the two. How much should integration be attempted or should we wait until they are 18 when they simply move up to ‘adult church’?

All-age service

One answer to this is the all-age service which some do well and for others it becomes a children’s service where the adults and older children are spectators. In a typical church with people of most ages represented, is it possible for there to be some degree of shared activity? Starting with services, I think it is possible to bring young people into what is done there. If they stay in the morning services or turn up in the evening their presence needs to be acknowledged. That does not mean the whole service is geared to their language and culture, but, if they are there, what can’t they do. They can welcome at the door, they can read a lesson, they can pray, they can play in the worship band and, at the end, they can help count the money and make the coffee. It may even appropriate for a 16-year-old to preach the first five minutes of a sermon (initially) and have his talk critiqued by a sensitive mentor.

Younger readers won’t recall the lone ranger, a cowboy hero of the 50s, although they may be aware of the Johnny Depp film due this July.

It always amused me in that he had a partner called Tonto, thus rendering the description ‘lone’ somewhat inaccurate.

Always the biggest take-up at house parties or conventions, the topic of relationships never seems to wane in its popularity among young people.

There are plenty of people around who want to tell us how to begin and sustain relationships. The magazine racks are full of material designed to help you find the right man or woman irrespective of your own gender. All is well as long as you love and respect your partner. Even secular health authorities produce literature for their youth service staff on how to advise young people.

The word implies a setting out to change for the better. I will use my time better than I did last year. I will not spend as much time saying trivial things on Facebook. I do not need to know what even my best friend had for dinner. I wonder if you even bother to make resolutions, knowing that you won’t have the self-discipline to keep them. So you give them up on January 3.

Self-control is biblical

But self-control is a biblical word and is linked with other qualities. ‘ .... for God gave us not a spirit of fear but of power and love and self-control’ (2 Timothy 1.7, ESV). The danger with this verse is that it turns us all into super self-confident, all-conquering, problem-solvers who never put a foot wrong and never have a stressful day. I have never been like that and have often had days where I fail to love the people I work with because they’ve stitched me up or let me down. As for a ‘spirit of power’, I have had days where I feel completely impotent and unable to see a way forward.

I am often asked what I consider to be the ‘ideal’ youth minister. It’s a bad question in a way, because we should never have stereotypes, but it gets me thinking about the kind of youth leaders who seem to gather young people and keep them coming back. Young people want to be there with them.

There can be some bad examples of this. For example, the leader who works so hard on his popularity, that his charismatic personality draws people for all the wrong reasons. There are plenty of examples of groups that folded once the dynamic personality evaporated or left. In my travels to churches to do consultancy work, I am often surprised by the type of group that really seems to be cutting it. I think there are some common parameters in the groups I have observed.

Over the years of this column, I have tried to write about simple practical ideas which will help church-based youth ministry run a little better.

I’m sure there has been a bit of repetition but I’ve never written anything about virtue. It came to me from Romans 16. Writing about Phoebe, Paul says: ‘I ask you to receive her in the Lord in a way worthy of the saints...’ (Romans 16.2).

The simple and right answer is the Bible!

But I wonder which bits. Most of us have a bias towards teaching our ‘favourite’ bits. I have also come across people who love to go for the most challenging parts and for no other reason than the fact that most would never dare to try. Having recently spent a week teaching Revelation (the book) to a great group of young people I could be accused of daring.

God and Satan

The whole experience was both challenging and rewarding and raised many issues. I think the most significant was their understanding of God. Many face issues where Satan’s activity rears its ugly head in their lives. To know that God is on the throne and Satan is permanently defeated makes a huge difference when you sometimes think that bad things and bad people always seem to win. When put in proper context I was surprised how easy they found it to get the big picture from the book — God was very gracious in revealing himself in that way to that group of young people.

I have often been asked about how I keep fresh in youth ministry which I started some time ago!!

It can be hard to start yet another year of youth ministry even if you’ve had a month off to recharge your batteries. I always found it hard if I simply started a new year in exactly the same way as I finished the previous year. All the routines and meetings were the same and everything we were doing was predictable. So what’s the alternative?

Recent research suggests that you will only find provision for under 18s in around 50% of churches in the UK.

If you reduce that to provision for 11s to 18s (youth) your chances are reduced to 25%. Starting up in youth ministry can be hard work and discouraging, but, if the figures are right, then 25% of churches providing something for children have nothing for post-11s. What those children do at 11 is open to speculation, but I suspect it is a mixture of moving on to other churches or staying at home.

I read the other day that the most successful armies are not necessarily the ones with the best generals.

The most important factor is that the soldiers feel part of their regiment and are well cared for by their officers. If they know they matter, they fight more tenaciously because they are committed to the cause. The Bible uses the military image. ‘No one serving as a soldier gets involved in civilian affairs — he wants to please his commanding officer’ (2 Timothy 2.4).

I wonder how you remember the young people who have passed through your group.

Do you ever look back and reflect on and, to some degree, evaluate them? In reminiscent mood you may recall incidents that happened at group meetings and weekends away. They can easily be about the more exuberant members of the group — those who made the most noise and made you aware they were around.

I flew 25 hours long haul from Auckland to London recently. My legs were in a permanent knot — not pretty. But the long haul is a phrase that has come to be used about the desired length of service of youth ministers which appears to be too short to really build a ministry. We want people to stay longer.

Does the fact that the average tenure of a paid youth minister is under two years matter? What is our expectation of those who commit their lives to serving God in a salaried role? Is it merely a staging post for those who will eventually move on to ‘real’ ministry? Should we essentially see it as a part of a pathway to ordained or even secular ministry? As I heard one senior minister say, ‘Do a bit with the kids — it’s a good preparation for church leadership’. The long-term consequence of that thinking is that all young people will be led by those who are immature, inexperienced or both. Of course we need some leaders who are younger, but do we really want to commit the spiritual development of our young people entirely to such people?

It seems many of us do this these days.

After a hard week at work we get in the car and drive off to the sea or the country. Judging by the traffic on the M3 near my home on a Sunday evening, quite a few people are doing it even in the depths of winter. Youth groups, along with summer camps and house parties, are doing weekends away with their groups in the winter.

My experience is that many of these prove to be valuable.

We all meet situations in church life where people have been hurt through being at odds with another leader.

Perhaps it never happens in your set-up, but I seem to have run into it quite a lot recently. There are examples in youth and children’s work where there is conflict either within the team or in the youth ministries relationship with the church body. Why do we do this when at the heart of our ministry should be the love of Christ?

The world of economics is a depressing one at the moment.

Turn on your TV and you will almost certainly get a gloomy forecast of impending doom somewhere in the money markets. Greece, Turkey or Ireland may not exist by the end of the year!! Without question the effects of this downturn have been felt in church budgets and in reduced amounts of giving coming from God’s people.

So how do you run a youth programme?

Does everybody have to be involved with every decision or do you have a dictator? How does information get circulated or do you just get to hear about things if you happen to be around.

Whether you have a team of 20 or two people doing the work, organisation is a live issue. If I know something that the rest of the team don’t, do I need to tell them or would it be better not to tell them? How do plans get made? Is your whole work driven by the vision and energy of one person who just goes on producing ideas, or does everything have to go through a committee? The worst committee I ever sat on had the minutes of the previous meeting as its agenda, so we spoke about the same things every meeting!

‘You don’t need to teach Bible — all you need to do is to love them’.

That was said to me by a youth leader who was convinced that, if young people knew they were loved, they would come back to the church. My response was simple. What greater evidence of love is there than to tell someone the truth. And, what is more, it is the truth which comes from God’s word.

Are we?

‘Where there is no vision, the people perish.’ The quote is, of course, how some interpret Proverbs 29.18. The NIV renders it: ‘Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law’.

God’s word is that which guards us and saves us from undue wandering in godless places. But we do need to hear God’s revealed word to teach us how we should move in the future. But how do you look at the future and how should we, as churches trying to do biblical youth ministry, be looking to the future? Here are some models.

I wonder how many times you’ve been caught out with too little time to prepare a talk.

You know you should spend time reading and studying the Bible, but there’s just too much to do in too little time. The group is meeting the next day and you haven’t even started on your talk. It seems to be a problem that affects both full-time youth workers and volunteers. I am the last person to pontificate about time management, but I have come to know that decent preparation affects the quality of what is said to the group. Of course, the Holy Spirit is the one who changes lives, but God does use his servants to ‘preach the word’.

I have a rather large and growing file of churches looking for full-time youth ministers.

We now have many more paid youth ministers in the UK than ever before and we have tended to recruit from a younger age group, often as young as postgraduates. What we expect of these 22-year-olds is an ability to teach and pastor a youth group and also lead a team of people, most of whom will be senior to them. There will be people in youth teams who have many years’ experience and they will be led by someone who, only three years earlier, was a member of a youth group.

This is the time of year when many people think about how the year has gone and what they will do next year.

It is also a time when some people, quite rightly, review their time commitments and decide to give up. And when we say to our church leaders that we feel we’ve had enough, they probably try to persuade us to keep going because they cannot see a replacement for you in the church. But why do people give up the job of youth ministry?

As summer approaches, I guess our thoughts turn to holidays and finding some down time to relax a little.

After all, the youth group won’t be around for much of July and August so I can relax for a bit before winding everything up for the new term. There is often a sense of relief at reaching the end of a youth ministry year, but I wonder if, in the slackness of the time, there are things still to be done.

Not a phrase you’ll find in Scripture, but one I use often in training courses.

I’ve recently attended an excellent Bible by the Beach in Eastbourne and heard Bishop Wallace Benn quote from Acts. ‘Then Peter stood with the 11, raised his voice and addressed the crowd’ (Acts 2.14). It seems that Peter did not stand alone, but the rest of the disciples stood with him lending support and encouragement. They were ‘supporting the man with the ball’. Football may not appeal to everyone, but the simple principle is that, if you have the ball, you need to know that you have passing options to other team members — you are not isolated.

‘And there were added that day about 3,000 souls’ (Acts 2.41). Very few of us have seen our youth group grow by as many as that.

After all, where would we put 3,000 people — the small groups could be quite large. But, although there were some struggles in the early church, there does seem to be a growth factor in the first century. Churches grew as the gospel was preached and we should expect the same.

If church is a place where young people should be, why do many of them turn their backs on their place of worship.

We all know stories of young people, brought up in a loving Christian environment, who turn their backs on the church as an institution, their faith, because it doesn’t work for them, or they just feel it isn’t for them because most people are much older than they are.

Youth groups? Do we need them? They always seem to have been around but they are a relatively new phenomenon in church life.

In the ‘old days’, when the family went to church, they all went, sat together, and went home again. It was assumed, sometimes wrongly, that parents would be training their children in spiritual matters and that training would include the family attending church. Those were the days, some might say. That was when children were always obedient and happily sat through church services. I doubt it.

In the city of Southampton where I live, the Titanic is part of the city’s history. We have a memorial to the string quartet who played until the unsinkable went beneath the waves.

The crew of the liner knew they had a finite time to communicate with the world before the inevitable. Somebody once challenged me to say what would be the last message I would send given that time was running out.

Most of us probably think of ourselves as the most balanced Christian in the church.

I’m sure your doctrine is very sound, but I want you to think about balance in another context.

Young People are not what they were!!! The press loves to make that kind of statement when they report yet another example of unruly behaviour.

Two thoughts arise. Unruly behaviour by adults rarely gets reported and not all young people behave in unruly ways. But I wonder if such reporting gives rise to the perception that young people are generally out of control and always behave badly at school or in public. A group of young people together ‘having fun’ can appear quite daunting, but it’s often quite harmless if a little more noisy than most adult gatherings.

Whatever happened to the ‘Youth Fellowship’ or, if you go back even farther, ‘Youth Squash’?

Perhaps you’ve adopted more trendy titles like THE GaNG, which, I understand is a mnemonic for ‘The Hyperactive Evangelical Growth and Nourishment Group’. Words for titles can occupy committees for many happy hours, but I suspect youth groups spend less time thinking about the purpose of their groups than they do about their trendy titles.

It seems that the current fad in the world of work is outcome and the process we have to go through to achieve that outcome. There are some aspects of management theory that I have encountered recently which seem to talk more of man’s almost superhuman ability to achieve while the idea of dependence on a holy God for wisdom and guidance gets shoved into the background.

It prompted me to ask what kind of people should be the end product of Christian youth ministry? Any youth group I have led has contained a rich variety of personalities; so we need to look at the characteristics of those young people who have been through our youth ministries and think about the aspects of their character which we have tried, with God’s help, to fashion. Much of the world young people live in is a world of self-sufficiency where achievement of performance is everything. There is nothing wrong with being proud of achievements — a beautiful painting or scoring a brilliant goal. But if that is seen as something which makes us look good and about which we boast we’ve missed the point.

Unless they are incredibly bright, most young people hate examinations as they encroach on their busy social lives. As youth leaders, there are lots of ways of handling this season. We can sit at home and moan that our young people have deserted us as attendance levels plummet. But exams are part of their life and are therefore, by definition, able to be approached in a Christian way and we can help them handle them in a way that helps them grow.

I’m sure we’ve met the young person who, having done little or no work throughout the year, spends a night in prayer asking God to fill his brain with all the ideas and facts he should have learnt from his books. A chance there, maybe, to talk about work being pre-Fall and something which God honours — maybe there’s a teaching series of four in that. Parents have hopes and dreams about their offspring and we should never try to compete with the demands parents will sometimes make on students who are idle and need to learn the discipline of hard work. But maybe we can learn to work with parents during this season when the family is often under pressure. We had five nearly consecutive summers where our children were involved in public exams.

I once sat in on a church youth leaders meeting which left me a little perplexed. Issues were raised and discussed; people spoke their minds and there were some good ideas and solutions advanced which everyone agreed. The only downside was that after every issue was discussed by the team, the leader said something like ‘Let’s ask the young people what they think’.

So the team, thinking that their evening had been given to deciding what was to happen, ended up thinking that all their plans now had to be filtered by the youth group. And it wasn’t just a small group, as all the issues had to be aired at the next youth group meeting. It left me asking who the leaders were around there.

Young people continue to leave our churches, although the rate seems to have slowed.

The remedy we came up with was to appoint youth workers / leaders / ministers to our staff teams in the hope that they would solve the problem. There are now quite a few of those people who have completed ten years of active service and are beginning to ask the question, ‘What next?’

It’s now a month since some of us may have made a list of things we‘re going to change in the new year. I’ll be more disciplined in my quiet time, keep my study tidy, give my family more quality time, and so on.

For most of us, our good resolutions have gone out of the window by the end of January. So let’s think again and see if there may be another kind of resolution that all of us should set as a goal for the 11 months we have left in 2010.

Where do we get the staff from? — I’m always short of volunteers!

This is surely the cry of the hard pressed youth minister as we enter another new year of ministry. You may have all the best ideas, the best material on the market and the most fantastic premises to work in but if you don’t have the staff to run a group with a good ratio of leaders to young people you may well struggle to make an impact. If we are to engage with young people we need the people to make that connection.

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’.

I was struck quite recently, as a very amateur military historian, by the death of the only two surviving ‘Tommies’ with eye-witness accounts of the 1914-18 war.

For as long as they both had strength, they loved to visit schools and talk to children about the things they had seen. One of them majored on the theme of peace and reconciliation and children were fascinated by his experiences and listened, perhaps because they spoke with eye-witness authority. Young people will listen to senior citizens — indeed, the Bible seems to tell us that this is the way faith is passed on from one generation to the next (Psalm 78.4). I am not basing a theology of youth work on two old soldiers, but I have begun to wonder about the way we select and train those who work with young people.

It’s how you say it that makes the difference. We have seen many politicians on our TV screens recently making brave attempts to sound repentant (or otherwise) in order to save their skins.

The public seems to have got to a point where no politicians can be believed. Whatever they say and however sincerely they mean it, they have lost the ability to be credible. When leaders give their speeches, some are immediately captivating and others a complete turn off, whatever the substance of their message. Barack Obama has to be listened to whereas some leaders closer to home don’t even sound convinced by their own message.

Youth ministry has undergone radical change over recent years.

In the early post-war years it was almost exclusively run by well meaning volunteers who faithfully did their work week by week — the concept of a full-time youth minister was virtually unknown.

On occasions, those of us who have stayed with youth ministry in advancing years are the subject of ageist banter from our younger colleagues. But I wonder if the oldies should fight back a little on an area of ministry where, just maybe, our younger partners in the gospel have lost the plot.

I was recently involved in a university mission and the inevitable question arose about how friends are to be invited to the mission events. Different people recounted their successes and failures and one student came out with the statement: ‘I have texted and emailed all my course mates’, and then, as an afterthought, he said: ‘Oh yes, I spoke to one person face to face’, and it almost came out as an expression of failure that he had to forsake technology and speak to a human being. His case is probably extreme but I wonder if inter-personal skills are going out of fashion or, at the very least, conversation fashions are changing.

Much of our energy in youth groups is centred on keeping our weekly meetings well organised and doing our best to maintain good teaching to our young people. If that’s so, great — keep it up.

But I wonder if it’s possible for our groups to become so insular that we lose the perspective of what is happening in our world. How often do we mention world mission in our group meetings and should we anyway? Is it wise to give our young people insight into a world that is beyond their everyday existence?

If you have children, you will remember the various stages in their development which meant so much — a kind of mark that they had made progress. I remember joined up writing when they moved from that very child like way of writing a single letter to a word becoming a continuous line with all the letters joined up.

So much of what we do with our young people looks like writing that hasn’t become joined up. We operate groups essentially in isolation — someone does the crèche, someone else does the young children, someone does the Pathfinders and so on. But we’ve yet to join it up.

Most young people will appear to be unaffected by what is happening in the global financial crisis.

After all, they are not serious earners, and they don’t handle large investments and nor are most of them into high finance and the dealings of money markets.

When I was doing an annual review with one of my youth team, I asked him why he wanted to continue in youth ministry.

His response slightly alarmed me. He said to me, ‘I did it last year so I might as well do it this year’.

I was once soundly rebuked by a member of the congregation for daring to ask the gathered flock to give someone a round of applause because they had given a great service to the church. I was told his ‘reward was in heaven and he didn’t need us to make an unseemly noise in the church’.

However, I have been in youth meetings where if I had heard ‘give him a round of applause’ one more time I would have felt fairly ill. But I wonder if some of us have gone to the other extreme. Paul seems to be encouraged when in Romans he says he wants to see this group of believers that he ‘may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith’ (Romans 1.12).

I wonder when was the last time you had a vision? — I don’t mean a Damascus Road like vision, but one where you could clearly see how you should shape or re-shape the ministry you are involved with.

When did you last draw back from the routine of week-by-week ministry and look at the longer term. A failure to do this often results in a group becoming grooved into their routine but unsure about where they should be going. You do things only because you did them last year.

We often use the word back-up to describe what we should all do with our computer files so when our wonderful machines go wrong all our valuable data is not lost.

We buy memory sticks and remote hard discs to make sure all our files are well preserved. We consider our written files to be important enough to make sure we preserve them. What do we do to preserve the ministry of our youth and children’s teams?

I have been struck in recent months, through several conversations, how isolated youth and children’s workers often feel.

It’s a bit like being condemned to play football for Berwick Rangers or Torquay. People end up there and nothing much more is heard of them (no insult intended to those two excellent football clubs). It is quite common to find churches where volunteers are appointed to a youth group and it is assumed they will just keep going until the return of the Lord or their death, whichever is the sooner.

As I visit various churches and groups of churches with Root 66 training courses, an issue, which keeps coming up, is the role of parenting in the life of the church. In the December EN I raised this as an issue and I want now to suggest some practical ways of helping the parents of the children we teach and lead.

Most would acknowledge that parenting is no easy task. Often when our first child is born we feel that we’re making it up as we go along. When a child comes along we have all taken our new baby to church for everyone to admire and this can soon be followed with having to deal with some difficult issues.

What a way to start a new year when we should all be thinking positive thoughts, longing to get started after the Christmas break. The term’s programme is planned, all the rotas sorted, the team are briefed and you’re ready to go.

But some terms’ work is hard to start. Over Christmas, there were some discouragements and the response to the wonder of the Incarnation was less than lukewarm. The group still meets but there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of enthusiasm around the place. How do you deal with discouragement, because it is part of the youth ministry deal? You long for young people to be back in the group who have left for pastures new and are really getting involved in service away from their home church and you seem to have been left with all the half dead ones. This can really get you down because you can’t see a way to improve things.

Few would doubt the wisdom that parenting is a tough call in the 21st century. I hope parents still have some pleasant moments with their children, but the pressures are still very obvious. Even government seems to be taking the role of the parent seriously.

As youth ministers, what should our attitude be to the parents of the children we minister to? There is little doubt that the Bible sees the parent as the prime teacher of spiritual things to their own children. Parents are to train a child in the way she/he should go (Proverbs 22.4) if God’s word is to dwell in the hearts of our children and they are to be followers of Christ.

It was only recently that two young people sponsored by the Lawn Tennis Association were effectively cut off from LTA finance because they had posted pictures on their blogs which showed them involved in nocturnal antics.

I listened to a radio phone-in the following day (while driving) where the majority verdict was that these two young people had been very harshly treated. After all, that was how all teenagers lived — it’s all part of growing up. It was expected that teenagers would indulge and be seen in party mode, preferably drunk.

My knowledge and expertise at golf is strictly limited. I play the same hole very differently each time I take to the fairways — you can do that with par 5s (they’re the long ones with the bunkers at all the wrong places) but when you play the par 3s (they’re the short ones) there’s only one way to do it. The first shot must hit the green then you have to get the wretched ball in the hole with two putts. It’s sometimes called target golf but your target on a par 3 is clear — hit the green in one.

It is very possible to do our youth ministry like a par 5. We wander all over the place and from week to week you’re never quite sure what you’re going to do. You just turn up, run a meeting or a drop-in and go home again. Youth ministry done this way can very soon become stale because you are not setting yourself clear targets each time you go along. You’re such a relational being that you just hang out and hope something happens and another meeting just comes and goes.

The cycle of youth ministry tends to see September as the ‘new start’. Some of the young people have moved on and some are joining new groups. It’s so easy to see a new start as just like it was a year ago — I just have to gear up for the Friday night meeting, the Sunday meeting and try to be a bit better organised than I was last year.

If you feel like that then you’re approaching the new year in an organisational way not in a ministry way.

I am writing this on the night before England play South Africa at cricket. It is supposed to be the day that is ‘the final statement on England’s winter — a day that sums up all they have achieved’. The press were never likely to underplay the game but is it really that crucial. England will have other opportunities to perform well.

There was one crucial day which can never be repeated — Good Friday is the day in question when Jesus died to take away sin. There was not another chance — our whole lives are bound up with this day. Our past is dealt with, our present life is full of hope and our future is secure in the hands of the man of Calvary. As a day, Good Friday has got a little lost — it is no more than a ‘day off’ for most people. But it is the day which secures us and gives us the answer to the basic human problem of sin. Now, most of you know all of this, so why bring it up?

I find I keep coming back to a verse in 1 Peter 3.15. It reminds us that, if we are truly the Lord’s people, we will ‘always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give a reason for the hope that you have. But do this with grace and gentleness’.

In previous columns I have suggested that we need to keep a balance between Paul’s instruction to ‘teach the word’ and Peter’s words to ‘care for the flock’. I was once approached by a young person, who bemoaned the fact that his youth leaders never seemed to answer his questions. He had benefited from his leader’s teaching and he was sure he was cared for but his problem was that he could never seem to engage with his leaders and talk.

You must have heard the phrase. It’s what we do when we sweep away all the constraints we have and think in an expansive way without worrying about the minutiae of detail.

It makes you wonder what your ministry would be like if you swept away all the history, traditions and practices of your church and started with a blank piece of paper. What would you do differently — what would you stop doing (Christians are notorious for doing things because they did them last year) if you were given a free hand?

And not just festivals — your work needs celebrating. Some of the churches I have visited seem a bit low on celebrations.

Everything’s a bit quiet and restrained. Apart from the biblical example to celebrate at significant moments in the life of God’s people, there is the sheer common sense that when a team has been working for a bit, to break off, say thank you and rejoice together at what God has done in your group is a good thing to do.

Most churches have a bulletin which tells us all what is happening and when.

If you take time to analyse what you do, how much of it is involved in maintenance, and how much in other things?

During the summer, many young people go away on camps and house parties — well some do.

And they come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Many of these young people are a great encouragement and come from churches where good biblical youth ministry is taking place. But that kind of provision seems to be a little patchy. Towards the end of an event I was teaching at, I was confronted by a male student, aged about 16, who confessed he wasn’t looking forward to going home because his church was ‘rubbish’. After we talked a little while, it became clear that he was trying hard to follow Christ and cared about many of the people in his church. But he went on to tell me that church leaders had promised to look into some kind of youth provision but he had heard nothing — he was simply feeling let down. His family were part of the church and were serving there and he wanted to be loyal to them, but his heart was longing to be with others of his own age. There was one other young person in his church.

I wonder if you made it to the end of the year. Maybe it was a bit of a struggle and you were mightily relieved when you knew you had a month off in August. Perhaps you have slight anxieties about what the young people will get up to over the summer and whether they will come back motivated to serve God or their faith will have diminished.

These are pressures we all face in youth ministry but I wonder if they occur because of our failure to finish a year well. Maybe a celebration like a dinner in the post-exam period would have been a good way to finish and give some words of encouragement to maintain their walk with God through the summer. But one of the most crucial activities at this time of year is. . .

A favourite word among the young and youth leaders quite like it too. There has always been a radical feel about youth work — a desire to challenge the status quo and go for more radical ways of doing things.

At training events, you often hear people say that their church needs a radical shake up because of their attitudes to the young. Many would argue this is the reason for the ‘youth church’ phenomena — people get so fed up with battling with traditions they go their own way and set up radical congregations designed for the young people who are so frustrated.

Our work as youth leaders has a weekly pattern. We have plans (hopefully) for each term but we meet our group week by week either in the regular meetings or in small groups.

One of the most often asked questions on training days is about available resources for our ministry. Off the shelf sessions are handy and there are countless books which help with all the activities you could possibly need. There are resources on games, dramas, role-plays, etc., etc.

How old can you be and still do youth ministry? We seem to have invented some kind of cultural barrier which suggests that 23 is about as old as you can get before you become totally irrelevant to young people. I admit I argue this from a position of bias as I have been doing youth ministry for many years. I’ll leave you to guess.

How old can you be and still do youth ministry? We seem to have invented some kind of cultural barrier which suggests that 23 is about as old as you can get before you become totally irrelevant to young people. I admit I argue this from a position of bias as I have been doing youth ministry for many years. I’ll leave you to guess.

Churches produce a lot of paper. Most churches you go into have mission statements, basis of faith documents and all sorts.

It’s often the process that led to the document that is more important than the document. If the mission statement is left in a rack in the hope that someone will pick it up it probably wasn’t worth the effort, but if it expresses the heartbeat of the group then it will constantly be used. So anything we produce for our youth group must be a living document.

When terms like vision and values are mentioned, some argue that we are introducing the world’s thinking into God’s work.

I have some sympathy with that as management-speak is all around us and it is easy to do things for wrong reasons. But it is hard to believe that vision is not involved in Jesus’s statement to go into all the world to make disciples. That is a huge vision and one which many feel we may have lost. Paul’s vision clearly drove him into Asia Minor and on into Greece and beyond, so that people of every nation should hear the gospel.

Most of us do ministry in teams even if there are just two of us running a youth group together.

Teams need to know how to work together if they are to be effective. But how do you keep your team focussed on their ministry task. Many volunteers are too busy to get to meetings and I guess we’ve all had a moan about people who don’t seem committed to the youth group. What can we do to make our teams more effective.

Apparently those working in the world of advertising are always looking for a new slant. Some years ago BP paid an agency a lot of money to discover that ‘BP’ looked better in italics than in ordinary type.

Youth ministry has always been open to new slants for young people. In these days of spin, people are constantly trying to say things in a new a way which gives a product a new life. We have seen things drift into the church from this kind of area. Leadership style is in danger of wandering from the servant model of the Bible to the management model of the 21st century. There are things that can be learnt but that is not the way we should do things. A group with God at the centre operates in a very different style from those seeking a good return to their shareholders.

Adolescence is a period of change — there’s nothing much more obvious than that, but that doesn’t mean it is easy to cope with.

The pace of any developmental process seems to be in overdrive at this time. The child in Sunday school at eight years old is very different to the 18-year-old about to leave the youth group and it is because of this rapid physical, emotional and spiritual development that pastoral care for our young people is so vital. Change produces questions in people’s minds and young people need to have someone who can help them through these changes.

It just didn’t look right. When your life is turned upside down by a catastrophic event like a rampant hurricane what you don’t need is two national guardsmen pointing their rifles at you and ordering you to leave the only home you know.

It looked so bad because it looked as though they didn’t care and they should have done. There is something in most of us that cares for people when we see a need — we are touched by orphaned children in the wake of the tsunami or people having to live in the stench-ridden waters of New Orleans.

Most youth work has a fresh start about now. We work in rhythm with the school year and, if you have time for any forward planning, it’s been done in the run up to the September new start.

Your priorities

Perhaps it is simply maintenance — you are going to have to work extremely hard just to keep your ministry on the road. Your team are only just coping. You may have the energy for planned growth in your work and you may even have a gospel project ready to go.

Youth ministry works in cycles. Most youth leaders reckon the autumn term is a key one and the September start is an important moment in the year.

The summer term can be dominated by external pressures (like exams) but, after the youth group seems to have been spread all over the place, they all return expecting a programme. What are the things that need to be in place at that point so that you’re not playing catch-up for the whole of that crucial term? Hopefully, time well spent in August makes the term easier to survive.

Not an original title but one pinched from a report published a few years ago to examine the place of children in church.

Visiting churches can be fun. There you will find a whole variety of ways of what people do with children and young people.

Prodigals are on the agenda. We are having conferences about them, and perhaps, finally waking up to the fact that we have a problem.

We have known the statistics for some time but, as ever, we seem too slow to respond. One response we have seen is the proliferation of the ‘big event’, which, in some ways, exacerbates the problem.. We may have theological doubts about the ‘youth church’ phenomena but we must understand the reason for its birth. Frustration with the ability of the church to keep its young people has driven people to positions they would not want to be in.

What’s happening in your youth ministry at the moment? What’s going well? What are the upcoming events? Who are the leaders and what do they do? If you are in the middle of the youth ministry in your church you could give answers to the questions without breaking sweat.

But what does the church as whole know about it? How much do the parents know about what happens to their children week by week? If you are on a staff team, how much do your colleagues know about the week by week work with young people? By reputation, youth leaders can be a bit defensive about the work they do and fail to connect with other parts of the church. Unless you are passionate about youth church and totally disconnected from an all age body of believers, you are, like it or not, part of a community of God’s people. You are not running a distant outpost where you put as much space as you can between your work and the rest of what happens in that community. I remember a Sunday School teacher who, when encouraged to see herself as part of a bigger picture, said: ‘This is my department; these are my children — what happens to them after here is none of my business’. She was horribly wrong. Children have a habit of growing into young people who grow into adults. We can’t stop it happening so we must see their path to spiritual maturity (surely our aim) as one task to which many groups contribute.

Any Christian periodical tells the same story. The church is looking for full-time youth workers. Our response to the well-known and frightening statistics is to appoint someone (if we can afford it) to deal with our young people, or lack of them.

But this is not something new. The need has been there for some years and there are now people who have been working as church-based full-timers for a number of years. Some of these people started in smaller churches or worked part-time and have now moved to larger churches where they can work full-time. There are many different roles. Some see themselves as very much hands on who are in daily contact with young people. Some see their roles as evangelists and look for places like schools (or even streets) to serve God. Others work as coordinators with little daily contact. Many youth ministers are not clear about the expectation of their churches and try to juggle several roles, and end up being driven only by the expectations of different parts of their communities.

The one problem with an early Easter is that next term's programme comes round too soon. Christmas is hardly over and Easter is fast approaching. We have to sit down and decide what we are putting in the programme for next term - or do we? Let's assume that it's good to plan our teaching programmes at least a term in advance. We don't just sit at home on Saturday night (trying not to watch the footie) and plan what we're teaching in the morning.

Do we base next term's programme on a live issue within the group? We've heard a fair bit of gossip in the group recently - do we do a session or two on the family of God and how they should behave? There's still a lot of chat about the tsunami - do we really need to grapple with the 'suffering and God of love' theme yet again? Or have we been working our way through the Bible and finally got to 2 Chronicles so we're going to teach that, come what may? Are there any guidelines which will help us plan what we're going to teach?

New Year often means a new start - new ways of doing things and frustrations with the way things have been. If only I had five more leaders. If only I had a wonderful youth centre rather than a very obvious church hall. If only my young people could afford to go on a youth camp. We could do so much more if ... . And the sentence trails off into a dream world that you feel is unattainable.

Have you ever sat down and wished you could transform the youth ministry at your church into something better but where do you start. 'I need a new strategy but the first step even baffles me, let alone all the hard graft of making ideas into reality'. Here are some stages that may help.

So what do you write about in your first youth ministry column? It could be all about big strategies and how we look at the big picture and there will be some of that later - promise! But for many of us in youth ministry the most pressing need is the week-by-week demands placed on us in maintaining our ministry. That Friday (or Sunday) feeling of knowing that there will be a group of students waiting for us whether we like it or not. And the last time we met them things didn't go to plan - some listened but others were on another planet.

In the years I have taught and led young people, the chapter in the Bible I come back to so often is 1 Thessalonians 2. Paul was defending his actions, having left the city in a hurry (Acts 17.5 ff), and was anxious for the new converts to get the support they needed. This chapter reveals his motives for doing things and should help clarify ours.