I mentioned in my previous post that there are no examples of "youth ministry," in the traditional sense of games with Twinkies and shallow Bible messages, to be found in the Bible. And that's true. But, depending on the age that you attribute to the disciples, you could say that the entire ministry of Jesus is an example of ministry with youth.
Of course no one knows for sure how old the disciples were at the end of Jesus' life, but there are some hints in the Bible. For example:
In Matthew 17:24-27 Jesus and Peter are subjected to a tax that the other disciples are considered exempt from and in Exodus 30:11-16 that only those 20 years old and older are required to pay the tax. These seems like pretty good evidence that the majority of the disciples were under 20 years old.
In addition, in Matthew 10:42, Jesus refers to his disciples as "little ones." If the disciples were adults I don't think he would refer to them in this way. The logical explanation is that the disciples were in fact "little ones," or children.
The new trend in conservative churches is to throw youth ministry out because they've deemed it ineffective (see previous post), but that's a mistake from my point of view. In reality there's a good argument to be made that youth are actually doing much better in churches than adults in terms of growing in their faith and living it, and that's probably because there is at least one adult, i.e., youth pastor, in their churches who is completely devoted to walking with them in life and ministry.
Rather than throw the baby out with that bath water, we should rather reconsider the elements of youth ministry that aren't working and seek to improve them. We also need to get more adults involved in discipling young people. And, in my opinion, we need to move toward a model of more characteristic of the model of ministry that Jesus demonstrated, i.e., ministry with youth, rather than traditional youth ministry.
3 comments:
I think I would tend to agree that Youth Ministry -- in it's current form of fun and games -- is not effective.
We are competing against the world and it's offerings, but we still should just teach and preach the gospel and forget trying to compete.
I agree. I also think though that there's a place for ministry with youth, where young people have the opportunity to create, lead, and implement gospel ministry in their communities. Especially ministry aimed at reaching their own generation with message of Christ. Youth pastors have a tremendous amount offer the church in terms of helping guide that process and I am disheartened by the current efforts to completely discredit youth ministry and youth pastors.
By the way, thanks for the comment!!
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