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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.

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.

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’.

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?

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.

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.