I don’t know how the tradition of holding high school graduations on Sunday in Rapid City got started, but is has been going on for as long as we have lived here. The city has two high schools and they hold their graduation exercises in the same venue on the same day – one in the early afternoon the other in the late afternoon. The schools trade the time slot each year. It actually works pretty well for our church to have the schedule that way. Families simply add church to the list of parties and events that they are attending and we hold a graduate recognition ceremony. Attempts at a community baccalaureate service were hijacked by several fundamentalist churches that tried to turn them into political events by inviting candidates to speak. We find it more worshipful to hold our own services and invite the families of graduates to participate.

Today is the day. We will be honoring six high school graduates this year. This class holds a special nostalgia for me because the graduates were born the year we moved to Rapid City. Among the graduates is the person whose baptism was the first I celebrated in this congregation. Not all of the families have belonged to the church for all of those years, but I held most of these kids when they were babies and I watched them play as youngsters and journeyed through confirmation preparation with them. As we have been making the rounds of the graduation parties, I notice how much I recognize the children in the pictures on the poster boards. I have a sense of having shared a significant part of their journeys with them.

More important than my role is the role of the congregation in the lives of these youth. Rapid City’s high schools are big – around 2,000 students each. That means that the youth don’t get to know everyone else in their class. Some connect through activities such as music or drama or sports. But the connections made through the church are important as well. Some life-long friendships have been forged through Sunday School and Vacation Bible School and Youth Group and Confirmation classes. Along with the youth, we have been running into adults from our church at the graduation parties as well. Through our confirmation mentor program, high school youth often forge lasting relationships with adults in our church. These relationships continue beyond the rite of confirmation and it is easy to see that they are significant in the lives of the young people.

There are lots of platitudes issued about youth in the church. I’ve collected many of them simply by being involved in the week-to-week process of youth ministry for three and a half decades. For example, I’ve learned that when someone says, “This church needs more young people – they are the future of the church,” chances are pretty good that the person making the statement won’t do anything to invite youth into the church – in fact that person often doesn’t have much grace in accepting the activities and antics of youth. They want the youth to be the future, but are rarely willing to share leadership in the present. The desire for large youth groups is sometimes pure nostalgia. There are people who can remember when family sizes were bigger and so was the youth group. They want to recover those days. But the clock never turns backward and the challenge of the church is to serve the youth that we have in the present.

In my experience, the size of the youth group is rarely the most important part of youth ministry. Big youth groups tend to separate from the main congregation. The youth hold events and activities that occur in times and places where they are not witnessed by the rest of the congregation. Youth tend to associate with other youth and are rarely integrated into the whole life of the congregation. There are plenty of people who enjoy youth congregated and elsewhere. They will tolerate a “youth Sunday” from time to time, but they don’t want to change the style of music in every-Sunday worship to welcome more youth. They like it when the youth paint a designated youth room from time to time, but they don’t want to have young people lead the process to choose new furniture for the church parlor.

What works best is working with the youth we have. General congregational growth is good, but evangelism efforts that target only one age group tend to produce churches that are less diverse and less stable. When we invite all ages into our congregation and foster relationships between people of all ages we may not have the biggest youth group in town, but we provide better experiences and relationships for the youth who are a part of our congregation.

The bottom line is simple. Youth ministry is not about institutional maintenance. Having more youth in the church does not assure a stable future. Having more youth in the church does not decrease the need for participation and leadership from elders. Youth ministry is mission work. We raise our children in the church and send them out into the world. Some of the youth we graduate today will become active in other congregations as they move away from our town for college or jobs. Some will become leaders for the church in other settings. A few may choose to live their adult lives in our town and participate in our church. Others may live much of their adult lives elsewhere and return to our community and our church upon retirement. There are as many patterns as there are individuals.

We don’t engage in youth ministry to take care of ourselves. We engage in youth ministry to pass on the faith to a new generation. And that new generation will go places that we have not yet imagined. New forms of church life will emerge. New ways of being faithful will be revealed. The future belongs to God, not us.

So today we celebrate. And we wax nostalgic just a little bit. And we confess that we are not in control. But we also celebrate that we can trust these young people to form community and live their faith in ways that are meaningful and appropriate for them. And that faith will be passed on to generations that are yet unborn.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.