I’ve come to a realisation, and it’s taken me nearly ten years to get there. Confession time: I have always assumed that youth ministry was something that I’d give myself to with abundant passion and commitment… for a time. I’ve operated on the assumption that at some point, I’d stop doing this and progress on to something else. Not adult ministry, you understand – I couldn’t think of anything worse – but the pursuit of some of the other dreams and ambitions that I hold.
Over the last decade, working for this magazine, I’ve seen many, many people come into youth ministry and then leave it. There have been a variety of reasons for this, but usually it has come down either to a lack of money or ‘career progression’, or a clash with an employer so poor, they weren’t fit to manage a public convenience.
I understand all these reasons well (although ten years working under John Buckeridge has been like being line managed by Jesus), but it leaves us with two major problems. First, that very few young people are afforded the consistency of the same youth pastor throughout their youth group life, and second, that the new blood being called into youth ministry, is only replenishing that which we’ve haemorrhaged. This month, we meet some of the new generation of youth workers to emerge from youth ministry training. They’re all brilliant, but they’re entering a revolving door. At the same time, many youth workers are calling time on this phase of their careers.
So what do we do? Sigh, shrug and lament that this is just the way it’s going to be, while the number of young people reached by the church gradually declines? Or commit together, as the Christian youth work community, to something else?
We need more youth workers. We need a whole new swathe of passionate, theologically-literate people who love God and love young people, to step into the greatest area of ministry known to man. You may be involved in inspiring and recruiting them. But that doesn’t necessarily mean passing on the baton and stepping away, so that you can involve yourself in more important church business like the preaching or flower-arranging rotas.
Stay in youth ministry. Please. I’m not asking you to stay in a job or a church that you find difficult, but don’t turn your back on ministry to young people. Not many people get it. You do. Stay.
I’m not asking you to do anything I won’t commit to myself. Which brings me to the great revelatory realisation that I mentioned a moment ago. After ten years, I’ve realised I’m a youth ministry lifer. I’m going to stay involved in Christian youth discipleship until I’m so old that my cultural illustrations don’t even resonate when I’m talking to the parents of the kids in my youth group. Until I’m so old, they won’t let me drive the hover-minibus anymore. I’m in this for the long haul.
This commitment means several things. I will never have a very well-paid job. I will never get to be a ‘big deal’ in the circus of awfulness that is ‘the Christian world.’ I may have to work for and alongside some utter plonkers. All of this is secondary though. I am called to follow and serve Jesus by loving, serving and discipling young people. I just have to leave all that other stuff to him to figure out.
Last month I met Ruth, a volunteer youth worker who has committed to remaining at the church she wants to leave until she has seen the young people she first met aged 11, through to their 18th year. It involves an awful lot of commitment, and not a little inconvenience, but she’s very nearly there. And once she’s moved to her new church, she intends to do exactly the same. Ruth is ‘youth work ‘til she dies’, to hijack the football chant. Thank God for people like her.
If we want to see the trend of youth participation in church reversed, then the change starts with us. We need more people in youth work, and that means fixing the holes in the leaky bucket. Perhaps we need to start seeing youth ministry as a monastic order, renounced only in the most exceptional circumstances. So join me. Become a youth ministry lifer. Stay.
Martin Saunders is the editor of Youthwork
