Youth ministries
18/06/15 05:20
My first internship was a youth ministry position at Union Church in Hinsdale, Illinois. At that time the congregation had a full-time minister for children, a full-time youth minister and two internship positions in the youth ministry program. The youth ministry was full-spectrum, with weekly fellowship meetings, a full calendar of retreats, lock-ins, game days, and other special events as well as camps, mission trips, and participation in conference, regional and national youth events. As an intern, I didn’t participate in all of the ministries offered by the church, but I definitely got in on the ground floor with driving rental vans and sleeping on church floors.
I’ve remained actively involved in youth ministries ever since. It would take me a while to make a complete list, but I’ve traveled with youth groups all across the United States, leading delegations to events in South Carolina, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Colorado, California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Texas, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Indiana and Michigan. I’ve driven cars and vans and suburbans and buses filled with often-sleeping youth.
I’ve been with youth on their first trip out of their home state and their first trip outside of the United States. I’ve sat beside youth for their first ride on a train and their first ride on an airplane. I’ve bought tickets and arranged group travel, figured out insurance and travel policies, recruited chaperones and trained a lot of adults in their role as advocates and protectors.
I am a big advocate for youth involved in mission and outreach. I am a big advocate for travel as a component in the complete education of youth.
These days, I’ve been more involved in promoting and arranging intergenerational ministries. I’ve become convinced that among the best youth mission trips are trips where youth travel with adults. I find that working side-by-side with people of different ages provides opportunities for growth in faith that might not exist when youth travel together and carry with them much of their own, music, friendships, language and culture.
Living next to one of the most impoverished counties in the United States, our congregation plays host to a lot of different traveling youth groups. We are the location for overnight accommodations for those on their way to more distant locations and those who come for work projects in reservation communities near to our church. I’ve watched the rise, in recent years of package mission trip providers who sell local congregations complete packages with the agency arranging housing and meals and work projects. The local congregation signs up, pays a per-person fee and makes travel arrangements. Once they arrive, all of the basics are covered. The agency acts as an intermediary to arrange many of the specifics required for a successful mission trip.
This process has advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, it is much easier for those in a distant location to work out their mission trip. On the minus side, the intermediary agency forms many of the lasting relationships with the people served and the local congregation experiences the trip more as an event and less as a relationship.
I can no longer count how many times I’ve sat in a circle of youth from other places and listened as one by one they recount how their lives have been changed by a week of working in a reservation community. Perhaps they did some painting or provided activities for young children or served at a soup kitchen or volunteered for some construction. They will have met a few people from the community and perhaps listened to some of the problems and trials faced. They will have seen, at least from the outside, substandard housing and yards filled with junk vehicles and appliances. They will have been amazed at the number of people living in a single trailer or small home.
Then they go back to their lives in the cities and towns from which they came and things are pretty much the same as usual.
Sometimes it makes it seem as if we live on the outskirts of some giant amusement park designed for the personal transformation of youth from distant cities. But I’ve got news for those people and for some of the organizations that organize these mission trips: entrenched poverty and institutionalized racism won’t be overcome in a week. Problems persist after they go home. Some of the places they visit won’t be able to distinguish them from the dozens of other youth groups that come summer after summer and as they pass through the poverty remains. Problems with inordinately high rates of teen suicide persist. Children experience hunger. People of all ages suffer abuse. Unemployment rages. Nothing gets fixed.
The joke in one of the communities where youth groups often visit is that there is a house whose walls are a foot thick because it has been painted so many times by work teams. No one lives there. They just keep the house to have a project to keep the youth work camps busy each summer.
I’ve decided that mission relationships work best when we form long-term relationships. That is why our congregation has been involved with the same sister church in Costa Rica since 1988. That is why I encourage our woodchucks to develop partnerships on the Cheyenne River and Pine Ridge reservations where we work with the same people year after year.
Youth ministry is, by its very nature, a deep combination of transient and mission ministries. It is transient because the youth are only youth for a short amount of time. Many move to other communities for college and a sizable percentage don’t return to their home congregations. All who survive their youth become adults. We are constantly re-inventing youth ministry because our congregation experiences a 25% turnover every year. It is mission because we are not raising our youth for our own future, but rather sending them out into the world to carry faith to other places.
Yes, it is transformational. Lives are really changed. But, in a sense that is automatic. No one gets through the ages of 15 to 18 years old without having their lives changed. What catches my attention is when a relationship is formed that endures. The people who remain in the lives of individuals when they have grown from youth to adulthood have the deepest impact.
My focus, these days, is on the relationships that endure.
I’ve remained actively involved in youth ministries ever since. It would take me a while to make a complete list, but I’ve traveled with youth groups all across the United States, leading delegations to events in South Carolina, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Colorado, California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Texas, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Indiana and Michigan. I’ve driven cars and vans and suburbans and buses filled with often-sleeping youth.
I’ve been with youth on their first trip out of their home state and their first trip outside of the United States. I’ve sat beside youth for their first ride on a train and their first ride on an airplane. I’ve bought tickets and arranged group travel, figured out insurance and travel policies, recruited chaperones and trained a lot of adults in their role as advocates and protectors.
I am a big advocate for youth involved in mission and outreach. I am a big advocate for travel as a component in the complete education of youth.
These days, I’ve been more involved in promoting and arranging intergenerational ministries. I’ve become convinced that among the best youth mission trips are trips where youth travel with adults. I find that working side-by-side with people of different ages provides opportunities for growth in faith that might not exist when youth travel together and carry with them much of their own, music, friendships, language and culture.
Living next to one of the most impoverished counties in the United States, our congregation plays host to a lot of different traveling youth groups. We are the location for overnight accommodations for those on their way to more distant locations and those who come for work projects in reservation communities near to our church. I’ve watched the rise, in recent years of package mission trip providers who sell local congregations complete packages with the agency arranging housing and meals and work projects. The local congregation signs up, pays a per-person fee and makes travel arrangements. Once they arrive, all of the basics are covered. The agency acts as an intermediary to arrange many of the specifics required for a successful mission trip.
This process has advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, it is much easier for those in a distant location to work out their mission trip. On the minus side, the intermediary agency forms many of the lasting relationships with the people served and the local congregation experiences the trip more as an event and less as a relationship.
I can no longer count how many times I’ve sat in a circle of youth from other places and listened as one by one they recount how their lives have been changed by a week of working in a reservation community. Perhaps they did some painting or provided activities for young children or served at a soup kitchen or volunteered for some construction. They will have met a few people from the community and perhaps listened to some of the problems and trials faced. They will have seen, at least from the outside, substandard housing and yards filled with junk vehicles and appliances. They will have been amazed at the number of people living in a single trailer or small home.
Then they go back to their lives in the cities and towns from which they came and things are pretty much the same as usual.
Sometimes it makes it seem as if we live on the outskirts of some giant amusement park designed for the personal transformation of youth from distant cities. But I’ve got news for those people and for some of the organizations that organize these mission trips: entrenched poverty and institutionalized racism won’t be overcome in a week. Problems persist after they go home. Some of the places they visit won’t be able to distinguish them from the dozens of other youth groups that come summer after summer and as they pass through the poverty remains. Problems with inordinately high rates of teen suicide persist. Children experience hunger. People of all ages suffer abuse. Unemployment rages. Nothing gets fixed.
The joke in one of the communities where youth groups often visit is that there is a house whose walls are a foot thick because it has been painted so many times by work teams. No one lives there. They just keep the house to have a project to keep the youth work camps busy each summer.
I’ve decided that mission relationships work best when we form long-term relationships. That is why our congregation has been involved with the same sister church in Costa Rica since 1988. That is why I encourage our woodchucks to develop partnerships on the Cheyenne River and Pine Ridge reservations where we work with the same people year after year.
Youth ministry is, by its very nature, a deep combination of transient and mission ministries. It is transient because the youth are only youth for a short amount of time. Many move to other communities for college and a sizable percentage don’t return to their home congregations. All who survive their youth become adults. We are constantly re-inventing youth ministry because our congregation experiences a 25% turnover every year. It is mission because we are not raising our youth for our own future, but rather sending them out into the world to carry faith to other places.
Yes, it is transformational. Lives are really changed. But, in a sense that is automatic. No one gets through the ages of 15 to 18 years old without having their lives changed. What catches my attention is when a relationship is formed that endures. The people who remain in the lives of individuals when they have grown from youth to adulthood have the deepest impact.
My focus, these days, is on the relationships that endure.