Ask a youth leader

Question: How can I help my youth group work better, get other people involved and be an important part of our church?

Great question! First off, let’s get one thing straight. Youth groups are just the best. But they can also be the worst (does that make sense?). When people like each other and look forward to going along, when it’s great just to hang out and catch up on the week, to plan for outreach, study the Bible, socialise or do whatever you do, it’s sensational.

But when things are bad, they’re often really bad.

Snapshot: just a couple of people turn up. They don’t really know each other so they don’t talk. Everyone feels awkward. You’ve put heaps of time and effort into planning a cool program but you know it’s just not going to happen. A prayer comes to mind—“Please Lord, open up the ground and swallow me!” You wonder why you ever got involved in this anyway.

So what do you do? Apart from walking away, I mean. Here are a few thoughts:

> Don’t force it! At the end of the day, everybody wants to feel liked, valued and like they belong. But they also want this to happen naturally. There’s nothing worse than feeling like someone is only being nice to you because they have to. You can spot it a mile away. Lots of church groups encourage “forced belonging.”¹ After all, if you just put a bunch of young people together, we’ll all feel better, right? Wrong! Having a common set of values, meeting regularly and worshipping together sometimes works but often it just doesn’t.

> We have to recognise why people want to belong and cater to these needs! There’s gotta be a reason for getting together. Most people connect with a group for one of three reasons: they want help with their lives, they have a deep longing to belong and/ or they seek to connect in spontaneous and healthy ways.² They’ll often keep coming back, week after week, to a place where they get pretty much nothing because the need to feel less lonely is stronger than the awkward feelings they experience at youth group. Relationships are everything! Don’t waste this opportunity.

Let’s make our youth group welcoming and safe. If people do share stuff, let’s not use Desperate Housewives or Home and Away as the model for how we treat confidences. We must be trustworthy and our groups must be full of grace, involving without being threatening, incarnational (cool word! It means Jesus is part of it), spiritually focused and balanced.

> Bigger isn’t necessarily better. One of my ministry heroes is a guy called Tony Jones. In his book Postmodern Youth Ministry, he says something totally cool—he suggests we shift our focus from large to small, from a preoccupation with running massive events that reach vast numbers of people to something more intimate— individuals, like you and me, personally connecting with other individuals.

He writes, “To do this, we’ll have to overcome guilt and feelings of inadequacy that come when ours isn’t the biggest youth group in town . . . In an era of incredible wealth and information overload, we can be the new monks—the ones who have stepped out of the world’s frenetic pace in order to show that there is a different way.

“By doing so, not only will we last much longer in ministry but also many lost, postmodern souls will come knocking on our doors, asking if they, too, can escape the world’s madness.”

> Look out, not in! The other major question people have is “Why am I here?” The world almost never answers this question—but Jesus does. Writing under the influence of the Holy Spirit more than 2000 years ago, a very wise man (most likely Paul the apostle) declared: “Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works. And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of His return is drawing near” (Hebrews 10: 24, 25, NLT).

One of the best things you can do to amp up your youth group, involve heaps of people and put yourselves on the map, so far as the rest of the church is concerned, is to do stuff for other people.

Not so you’ll get to go to heaven (doesn’t work that way—see John 3:16) but to genuinely meet real needs.

Get involved with mission, organise a STORM Co trip, run a kids holiday program, do a Backyard Blitz, deliver food parcels—just do something! Your group will develop a cohesiveness like never before, you’ll get to know your team mates better than you thought possible, you’ll actually help someone and you’ll be living your life according to the principles of God’s kingdom (see Matthew 25:40).

Can we do this? Not sure. It’s risky but worth it. Have a go. Connect! Tell me what happens!

1. Joseph R Myers, The Search to Belong, Zondervan, Grand Rapids Michigan, 2003, page 68.

2. Ibid, page 62

3. Tony Jones, Postmodern Youth Ministry, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2001, page 229.