Youth Integration is Key

Great post from Tim Schmoyer today. Read the Whole thing.

“. . . our fundamental approach to giving students ownership must change nevertheless. Otherwise, we die and pass on a church system that is incredibly broken, disconnected and outdated.”

I love youth worship, I love youth group, but in the end, I think we too often create a youth ghetto. I’ve had many parents ask me to start a middle school program for their students on Sunday morning. We have 1 service. To do that I would just be isolating students again. And I don’t think that’s the best answer.

We need to integrate our students into the church system as a whole, or we will just continue to see people spin out after high school. So how do we connect students in the life of the church?

Here are some ideas.

1. Stop isolating them
2. Stop calling the the church of tomorrow
3. Get students involved in sunday morning ministries like ushering, greeting, worship team. (I need to do this)
4. Talk to students on sunday mornings – address their issues, their concerns, speak in their language.
5. If the church’s progression is to community groups, what if students were allowed to lead community groups?

There are more but this is just a start.

Our church went through this thing called CoHorts, lots of brilliant stuff that we picked up from there. But something that kind of stuck in my craw was that Adults, Youth and Kids all had to have their own model operating independently of each other.  So Kids and Students need their own worship, outreach, community, ministry, serving, and spiritual growth programs.  So instead of our church doing 6 things, we are actually doing 18.  That seems a bit excessive.

At what point do we stop and say, that’s too much?  Reading Simple Church, I began to wonder, why can our model’s overlap?  Why can’t we share the big things as a church, like outreach and worship?  Why do we need a Youth Worship Band, when in reality we have a system that is working every Sunday morning, and we can integrate students into that system.  Why do we need to have a youth serving program, wouldn’t it be better to have students and parents serving side by side?

These are some thoughts and I would love to hear your thoughts.  These are just my thoughts.  Perhaps I’m way out in left field on this one.  But maybe I’m not.