What youth ministry cliche needs to go away?

For many Gen-Xers like me, no punches are pulled when pointing out what is cheesy and hypocritical in the church. We’ve authored zillions of tweets, posts, articles, and books over the last decade about how the church is irrelevant, suggesting that Christianity has become a cliché in and of itself. Much of this critique is warranted and possibly part of a greater redemptive good. But those who are committed to being part of a Christian community feel a sense of fatigue from this barrage of critique.

There is a certain attitude I slide into, one in which I exhibit a stance of having it figured out. This contributes to divisiveness as it delineates us and them—the sophisticated from the simpletons, the educated from the uneducated, the forward thinking from the stuck in the muds (is that another cliché? Someone stop me).

With these realities in view, I felt conflicted about pointing out youth ministry clichés. I am tired of being the squeaky wheel (cliché?). I don’t want to labeled as the contrarian, the dismissive idealist who tears everything apart rather than helping construct. I want to provide solutions rather than pointing out the problems. You feel me? (Darn, another cliché.)

So how do we offer critique that is redemptive? How can identifying clichés that need to go away move beyond targeting pet peeves? When I critique a cliché, is it just me being tired of its overuse in my circles, or is it a phrase that is truly losing its helpfulness? The danger with clichés is that they are here today and gone tomorrow (got me again). How do we walk the fine line of critique without sliding into arrogance? Is it possible to create better categories of language? I hope so.

The language we use is important because it shapes the way we think. Language is a way that we make meaning and identify ourselves. We must thoughtfully evaluate and refine how we speak, especially about God and the church.
So maybe it is good for us to identify clichés that hold us back from clearer and more substantive descriptions of our realities. Perhaps it is helpful for us to shed words and phrases that have lost their meaning by being overused or spewed carelessly and without context.

Now, I just have to think of a ministry cliché that really gets under my skin… That would really take this post to the next level!

Youth ministry becomes segregated from the church body. It becomes us (students) versus them (adults). Chap Clark calls this the Mickey Mouse Syndrome. Essentially, youth ministry becomes an extension and not a part of the church body. When only focusing on ministering to students, it becomes easy to drift away from the church. The problem is that there is no intersection between other adults and students in the church context.

Youth pastors cannot effectively disciple the masses. One adult can really only have a deep spiritual relationships with five to eight students, max. There is no way a youth pastor can do discipleship well for more than five to eight students at a time. Eventually the youth pastor will need more help from the community and church. This is why the youth pastor must get parents and adults to partner together in order to raise the next generation.

So if youth pastors are not supposed to only hang out with students, then what do they do? Why should a church pay for a professional youth worker? I think there are two primary tasks that define the role of the youth pastor.

The first task of the youth pastor is to mobilize God’s people to do the work of the ministry to young people. The youth pastor has to figure out how to get the church and the family to work as partners in raising students. God’s people are called and compelled to serve. Therefore, youth workers have to persuade adults they need to serve the next generation.

If the youth pastor is not empowering and equipping more adults to care for students, then no one ever will. Youth workers must approach everyone with the opportunity to work with this incredible next generation. Every youth pastor has to be thinking, How can I get more adults to care for students?

The second task is assimilating students into the church body. The goal of youth ministry is to assimilate authentic disciples into full participation in the life of the community of faith and the church. As Jim Burns of Homeword and Mark DeVries of Family-Based Youth Ministry have said, "The degree to which students will stay in the church, get involved, and make significant life decisions for Christ is directly dependent on their sense of belonging to the church community.”

The aim of any youth ministry must be that students see and experience themselves as participants in God's family of faith. One of the best and most practical ways for students to play an active role in the life of the church is by creating avenues for them to serve inside the church. Bottom line: The youth ministry programmatic strategy needs to move students from youth group participants to church body participants.

I must admit that during my first year in youth ministry, I thought youth ministry was awesome because I didn’t have to deal with adults. In fact, church adults annoyed me. I thought my job was to be the cool friend to all the youth. After my first year, I realized there had to be a more robust framework. After some seminary education, contemplation, praying, and reading I was convicted that youth workers are theologically responsible to train all generations to care, love, and serve the next generation. The more committed adults the church has to care for students, the more sustainable the students’ faith will be.

It is really tough to change the mentality I only work with students to I mobilize God’s people to care for students. But trust me; getting more committed adults in the lives of students is such a healthier and sustainable way to do youth ministry. So let us shatter this cliché.

I think it only continues to promote the idea that the youth pastor is merely a stepping-stone job to some senior role or is for overzealous twenty-somethings who want to hang out and have an excuse to revisit their high school years. I suppose—on a good day—it could be a caution that the job might be harder than one thinks. But beyond that, I’m not sure it has much merit.

I also think those of us who have accepted a call into youth ministry need to take a hard look at what we signed up to do. I know several youth pastors who have been at three or four churches for three years or fewer each time. I also know plenty who have been in the same spot for more than ten years. But when you move on for a third time after a short stay, I stop believing the church is at fault and start to believe it’s the youth pastor. The truth is plain and simple: Mentoring teens into young adults is no short-term process, and if we are just one more revolving door in their lives, then we should have little reason to believe our impact will be much different from the example we’ve set. If their faith comes and goes, well, so did we.

In addition, if you only stay three years and then leave, depending on the age of students you’re working with, you likely won’t even have any understanding of what it is your ministry is producing. About the time you get a chance to see any real fruit, you’ll be headed for the door, never once serving alongside a student who came fully through your ministry and is back to serve with you. It’s a tragic loss to the kingdom of God and even your own personal story. Let’s stack hands and destroy this cliché once and for all.

Your youth ministry is full of cliques. Really, please tell me, what group of people in the world is actually clique free? It seems that every sports team is one or has many. I’m guessing every small group ever formed is one. Workplaces have them. Schools have them. Churches have them. We could build a solid argument that Jesus and his disciples were an exclusive clique. Maybe Peter, James, and John were yet another.

I’ve been told more times than I’d like to admit in the last eighteen years of youth ministry that someone’s child won’t come to my high school ministry because it’s too clique-ish. Nine times out of ten it’s just an excuse from a student who sits in the back, is uninterested, won’t talk to anyone, and is looking for someone to blame.

The truth is that we do have cliques, and we do all kinds of things to try to both build and destroy them. We build them all the time by trying to help students form small groups, serve in community, and build deeper relationships with a select few. Once your youth ministry has more than ten students in it, they’re going to form friendship circles, and not everyone is going to hang out with everyone else. The student claiming our youth ministry is full of cliques is almost never the one trying hard to make new friends or risking saying hi to someone they don’t know. They are actually not really even upset that we have cliques; they’re just upset that they’re not in one yet.

We also work against cliques in our main gathering especially, working hard to pay attention to those who are new and introducing them into existing friendship and small group circles where they would be a good fit. Instead of falsely fighting cliques, we strive to keep them open and use the bonds of friendship and connection to help students gain ownership of their faith and our ministry.

Perhaps some cliques need to go, but so do the clichés that people use as excuses for lack of risk and investment.