Youth ministry

Youth ministry:
emphasis must be spiritual

By Jeb Egbert

FRISCO, Texas—For a good deal of my 25-plus years in youth ministry, I held to an underlying philosophy that has changed over the past seven years. Fundamentally, I believed that if you bring young people (children, adolescents, young adults) into an environment where good people with good thoughts, good motives and good activities existed, good things would happen. And while good things often did happen, an entire arena of spiritual focus and value was missed.

I think for instance of the basketball tournaments that I used to organize. I teamed up with Al Barr, now district superintendent in Atlanta, Georgia, about 20 years ago to put on an enormous Youth Opportunities United (YOU) basketball tournament in Chicago, Illinois. We had about 40 teams with almost 50 representatives (coaches, parents, players, cheerleaders) per team in attendance. It was really terrific. And we played basketball. Lots of basketball. But we didn’t have a praise and worship session. We didn’t have a special chapel. And we really didn’t look at the experience intentionally as an opportunity to share the gospel.

Richard Dunn and Mark Senter make the following observations about youth ministry in their seminal work Reaching a Generation for Christ. "Youth ministry begins when adults find a comfortable method of entering a student’s world, happens as long as adults are able to use their contacts with students to draw them into a maturing relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and ceases to happen when either the adult-student relationship is broken or the outcome of that relationship ceases to move the student toward spiritual maturity."

In business, a phrase that the so-called quality gurus helped to introduce into mainstream business-speak was "start with the end in mind." The definition of youth ministry that Dunn and Senter provide helps those in youth ministry to focus, intentionally, on the important outcome of helping each young person to develop a maturing relationship with Jesus Christ. Anything different than that may be valuable, but it is not youth ministry.

I look back at the thousands of young people I’ve worked with over the past few decades. I believe I was one of those good people with good motives coordinating good activities, and in some cases, it led to some pretty good stuff. But I also look at it somewhat as a missed opportunity to intentionally preach the gospel.

More recently, I am impressed with Discovery Weekends and SEP camps to see how willing young people are to be fed a spiritual diet. This is the essence of true youth ministry.

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