Below are nine considerations youth workers might employ to provide a more family-oriented approach to youth ministry.
1. See the bigger picture and start younger.
A more family-oriented ministry cannot happen unless we work hard to start when our youth are children. This requires youth workers to have a broader perspective and definition of youth ministry and to be intentional about creating harmony with the church’s work with children.
2. Develop and commit to a theology of formation.
A youth ministry that does not have a theology of formation often lacks the ability to see how others in the church might help them guide students into spiritual formation for the mission of God. I'm not referring to a programming structure as much as I am a pathway for developing teens and families toward becoming more like Jesus. Your programs can help this, but they can't do this. You need a theology of formation to guide your efforts.
3. Understand family systems.
Every youth worker does not need a degree in sociology or psychology. However, every youth worker does need to seek out and develop a working knowledge of how healthy families function and then help other families embrace those traits.
4. Lead by listening.
Listen well. How aware are you of the various needs your families have? There will be many, and they will be unique, and you may need to ask.
5. Resource families with tools and practices.
One of the easiest yet most helpful things you can do is provide tools and practices for families to use to engage spiritual formation. For example, my family has a prayer cube that we use before each meal. It was given to me by my youth pastor years ago.
6. Schedule fewer events/services and encourage the families in your faith community to use the extra time for family gatherings.
You may want to offer suggestions for families of ways to use their time. My experience has been that families want to do this but don't know what to do to engage all their children, who may be at various age levels.
7. Develop a team of parents who represent various families from various backgrounds.
Let families speak into your ministry. This will help ensure that you are engaging families right where they are. This is hard to do for many reasons, one of which is age. If you are a younger, less experienced youth worker, you may want to delegate the leadership and coordination of this team to a more mature staff person or volunteer while you sit back and learn.
8. Create opportunities for the youth and families to experience the youth ministry together.
This does not have to be elaborate or even often. However, your effort and willingness to do this will most likely be viewed by parents as helpful. Most will be grateful.
9. If you have a family yourself, lead your own family well, and others will learn from you.
I know too many youth workers whose families come after the youth ministry. That sucks. Lead your family well and model family formation, and you will help others do the same.
Watch for Barefoot’s new Parent Journey series, the first component of which is scheduled to release spring 2011!
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There has been a move in youth ministry toward becoming more “family oriented,” which I celebrate. This move has been made because of the simple reality that parents are intended to be the primary spiritual caregivers for their children. Yet, as I talk with youth workers around the United States, I am still seeing a lot of youth ministries that, for whatever reason, tend to ignore parents or, at best, send them an occasional newsletter to keep them in the communication loop.
If we want to really make a difference in the lives of teenagers, we have to reorient our ministries to allow parents to become participants in youth ministray rather than just observers. Here are three suggestions for how youth ministry can become more family oriented.
1. Involve parents.
I know it seems simplistic, but it’s just not happening. As Mark Senter points out his in his excellent book, When God Shows Up: A History of Protestant Youth Ministry in America, youth ministry approaches are often regionalized. And in my extensive travels, I’ve found that there does seem to be a lack of real family-oriented youth ministry in certain areas of the United States.
Part of the problem is that youth workers have developed the sense that, because they are the trained professionals, they are the ones who will make the biggest impacts in the lives of teenagers. That is a falsehood! Every study over the last 50 years shows that parents are still the number-one influences in their kids’ lives. Why would we then attempt to divorce our students from the very people who have the opportunity to most influence them for the gospel?
Find ways to involve parents in the youth ministry.
(While I am talking primarily about Christian parents, I think it is also important for us to reach out to non-Christian parents and find ways they can contribute to the youth ministry. This will expose them not only to what the ministry is doing for their children but also to Christian adults who can speak into their lives in profound ways.)
2. Resource parents.
There is no tougher job in the world than parenting, especially when teenagers are in the household. We in youth ministry have been trained to understand developmental issues, spiritual formation of adolescents, family systems and counseling, and many other areas that assist us in our ministry to youth. But think about what types of training parents receive. Most have none, other than replicating the way their parents raised them.
The church should be a place that seeks to bring together parents of adolescents in order to resource, encourage, and challenge them in their sacred task of parenting. Consider how you could implement some of the following ideas:
• Bring in an expert on parent/teen communication for a weekend seminar.
• Create a 13-week Sunday school class for parents of teenagers focused on helping them understand the culture in which their teens are engaged.
• Develop a support group where parents can support, encourage, and pray for one another.
• Develop a parents’ council to help give guidance and support to the work of the youth ministry.
3. Celebrate Parents.
The reality is that many parents feel they do a bad job of parenting and are regularly disappointed in themselves. If the church could find a way to celebrate their roles in the lives of their teenagers, this would not only affirm them but help them better understand the real impact they can have on their children.
Find ways to celebrate with parents the major milestones of their parenting lives. While these milestones are often celebrated with family, the church tends to be absent in these times. Parents earnestly desire to know that they are doing a good job and that others recognize it.
Here are some potential ideas to help with this:
• Many youth groups have a special ceremony to welcome new sixth or seventh graders into the youth group. In addition, consider having a special ceremony for the parents of those teenagers as a way of reminding them of how significant they will be during their kids’ teenage years.
• When teenagers make significant faith decisions, send letters to their parents, thanking them for their faithful lives and their desire to see their children grow in Christ.
• During confirmation (as part of both an opening and closing celebration), find ways to involve parents, celebrating their part in getting their children to this point.
• At a graduation banquet, allow the teenagers to give thanks to their parents for helping them navigate their teenage years.
If we can learn to really engage parents in sharing the faith formation of their teenagers, then we will really have succeeded in our jobs as youth workers.
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It’s been a few decades now since youth ministry started adding “family” to its title. I’ve never done any real research on this, but my hunch is that this add-on came from the academy. The addition of family to make it youth and family ministry came nestled within the same unfolding of youth ministry programs in colleges and seminaries.
Now, this is good. I think youth ministry professors and researchers looked deeply at the research in the social sciences and saw clearly how important family is to adolescents, that family was the major element in so many outcomes—whether faith commitment, education performance, or avoidance of risky behaviors. And it was clear that most of youth ministry on the ground had not taken enough account of the family. In many ways, one could argue that youth ministry ignored the family and wanted very little to do with it.
Para-church youth ministries—the para-church ministries that set the terms for so much of twentieth-century youth ministry—almost always functioned outside of contact with the family. Adolescents seemed, at least socially, to be living in government institutions (like the high school) and the peer groups formed in these institutions. Being a teenager seemed to be a radical step away from the family, so these para-church ministries did the missional thing: they focused on where young people could be found—outside the home and in the school. And of course it was more than just this because the young people encountered through the para-church had no familial contact with the para-church; the para-church was solely a youth-driven entity. Besides needing a camp signature, parents and families were excluded from this religion-based peer fraternity.
When youth ministry migrated from the para-church to the local congregation, the adolescent-centered, family-excluded perspective migrated with it. Though the congregation was a family-centric reality (besides needing a few volunteers), youth ministry was practiced inside the congregation beyond the family.
So adding family to youth ministry has been a good move. It acknowledges something both ecclesial (that the church is made up of families and is intergenerational) and something anthropological (that young people as full persons are bound within families, forming identity and meaning from within the family).
But here’s the rub. And every one of you who works with families knows this: No matter how much you believe it is important to minister to families, it often feels impossible. One of the reasons the early para-church folks steered clear of the family was because of their read of the culture, and even today (and maybe more so), there are deep cultural changes that make it very, very difficult to work with families. You could actually make an argument that we are living in a post-family era.
Of course, we still have “family,” but families are changing and transitional; from step-families to blended families to kids bouncing from one to another, it’s hard to know what family means to people and to have any family ministry without stepping on a mine somewhere. Family has become more multivalent and porous, making it inappropriate to assume what is and what is not a family. So turning our attention to families is much more difficult than adding family to our job titles.
But the picture I’ve just painted with my historical brush is mostly in youth ministry from the mid-twentieth century on. And that’s usually where we start when we think about the need to get the family back in focus in our congregations. We often think that if we could just get back to the golden era of the 1950s, all would be good. But this is a misconception; I don’t think the church had any better idea of how to do ministry with families in this black-white, sitcom era of high Americana. It seems to me that the church has been treading water on how to do ministry with families not just since the 1950s but since the Victorian age of the early nineteenth century. So to make you depressed, it’s not that the church has been out of touch in doing ministry for the last 60 years but for the last 200.
Why? In the Victorian age of the nineteenth century, the family became what historians call a separate sphere. In other words, for the first time, most people left home daily to go to work, returning from the competitive workforce to find solace in the family. Women were no longer central to the work of the family as an economic reality (as Abigail Adams was in colonial America) but were now in charge of making this private sphere comfortable and safe for working husbands and vulnerable children. So the family became private and separate from the rest of life (you can read more about this historical change in my new book, The Children of Divorce, chapter one).
Very practically, what occurred is that the church was now no longer given voice inside the family—it was private, after all. For most of western history the church spoke directly into the family, especially in the medieval age. The church was the notary (legal representative) of family unions, judging who could marry and merge wealth and land. The church ruled (through marriage as a sacrament) who could be married and who couldn’t and how those marriages should function. Of course, this left open the possibility for a great deal of abuse. But it did mean that the church was involved in the family.
However, since the Victorian age, the pastor needs to be careful not to cross boundaries and will be told—when she/he speaks too much about parenting—to mind her/his own business. Because now the family is no longer the church’s business, it is no longer public—though it had been for centuries.
And this is what makes adding the family to youth ministry much easier said than done. It’s difficult for us to know how to do family ministry when, for most people, what happens in their families is their own business, and nobody (particularly you young, gel-haired youth workers) has a place to tell me what my kid needs and how I should parent her.
I’m tempted to stop here and let the depression just spill over you—for after all, this is a really difficult situation we find ourselves in; family ministry is very hard. But maybe that’s where we should start—by communicating to parents that we know what they wrestle with every day; that parenting their children is really hard; that confusion and fear are all around them. And with the family being private, parents can often feel stuck and fearful about how to express the difficulty and confusion parenting can bring.
So maybe the way we break through the tall walls of the private sphere of the family is not by providing advice and counsel but forums for parents of young and old children to express their fear and confusion. Maybe the work of the church in our time is not to have the moral high ground to “fix” family problems but to provide spaces for parents to connect with each other and share their stories and, through their stories, open up themselves and their families to each other.
Good luck, because I think family ministry is darn tough!
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