I began ministry with a simple outlook and ferocious passion. Raised without the benefit of a regular church home, I transformed when Jesus met me and changed my life during high school. He did the same for a number of my friends.
The Lord seemed to work in various ways through His people: some at the church I began attending three times a week; others at meetings organized by Campus Life or Young Life; still others at the Bible studies we started, on the trips and retreats we took; at the parks where we played, in the school lunch room where we ate, during our chemistry class, in the family rooms where friends hung out, at the local McDonald’s, and a local Catholic cathedral that never shut its doors, where we would sprawl on the floor between big wooden pews during midnight periods of conversation and prayer. Jesus even met me as I cruised in my ’65 Mustang!
It seemed pretty clear to me that Jesus was comfortable working wherever He could find willing people. So I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out what made the local church so special.
What I’ve noticed through the years is that many of us parachurch ministry folks try to take the most direct path available toward hooking up lost kids with Jesus. Heroically motivated (I’m biased), we tend to skim the playbook whenever instructions about how to be and do church pop up in Scripture.
Some who have spent their lives trying carefully and faithfully to build local churches into communities of the King may be terribly annoyed with those of us who have shown little inclination for such ecclesiastical construction projects.
Instead, we parachurch types preferred to channel our energies into finding and developing adults who will invest hours in Christ-sharing relationships with teens. If you’ve spent time with kids and discovered the depth of their hunger and brokenness, this mission seems worthy. It certainly did to me, but I’ve never been one to ignite a recruiting war between local churches and youth ministry organizations such as YFC.
In fact, as a relatively well-placed spokesperson for Youth for Christ ministries throughout the United States, I think our first move should be to ask local churches for forgiveness. There are times when we’ve been so consumed with the urgency of our call that we’ve neglected one highly significant truth: Our organizational allegiance does not give us a waiver regarding the obligation we have to work for the vitality of the church.
We come by our ignorance honestly, if that’s a defense. Many of us came to our understanding of the church without the benefit of a theology degree in ecclesiology. If most of us form our theological assumptions based on our own experiences, it makes sense that sociological realities would shape our expectations for how church ought to look. Plus, we have an aptitude for retrofitting biblical instructions to current ministry structures, often by cherry-picking the values we want to emphasize. The result is that diverse local and denominational expressions of Jesus’ church testify to our confusion rather than our unity.
Of Wine and Wineskins
Because no one taught me about this stuff in college, it may not be surprising that I launched into YFC as a passionate youth evangelist with Lone Ranger tendencies. Sixty-, 70- and 80-hour weeks didn’t give me time enough to do what I thought God had called me to do with kids. Sundays were a strange mixture of serving a fledgling church in teaching and preaching capacities and getting my soul nourished by fellowship and worship. To be perfectly honest, the entire pattern was slowly draining my life, not to mention straining my marriage. I opted for a pre-burnout timeout and left for graduate school.
While there, I realized I had been operating with a hole in my theological bucket. I needed an ecclesiology that could interpret the tensions of my ministry experience and offer me hope for aligning my work with God’s master plan. Howard Snyder’s seminal work, The Problem of Wineskins (IVP, 1976), introduced me to the notion that there is a critical difference between form and function. When he agreed to guide me in a personal tutorial about YFC and the Church, I discovered that most of my frustrations were due to the unnecessary way I had attached myself to temporal ministry forms common to YFC and the churches I knew.
For example, when Jesus used Peter’s confession as an opportunity to foretell a future church built so well by the Lord that “…the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (
These organizational forms are as much tied to temporal and man-made structures as is Youth for Christ. That’s why every year in this country hundreds of non-profit organizations shut their doors.
Those of us at YFC—which began in the ’40s by using the crusade format and enlisting Billy Graham as our first full-time employee—believed that no wineskin is intended to last forever. Mark my words: There is a day when YFC will cease to exist, as will First (Fill in the Blank) Church in your neighborhood.
However, there is enough shape-shifting embedded in the church of Jesus Christ that mere mortal economies, persecutions and tsunamis cannot wipe it out. In fact, on Jesus’ authority, the gates of hell won’t triumph over God’s people who gather and disperse to do His will on earth. Such a robust vision of the church has helped me recognize that many of us pull psycho-spiritual hamstrings over our efforts to straddle two allegiances. On one side, we’re beholden to the ministries that pay our salaries so we can do important work for the Lord; but at our core, we signed on for something deeper, the less tangible but more transcendently real affiliation with God’s people tucked away in a variety of organizations throughout our local communities.
Probing the Problem of Church
During my tutorial, I also did a regional ministry survey in which, much to my chagrin, I learned the following three things about my YFC colleagues:
1) They did not share a common understanding of church;
2) They were not of one mind in their commitment to a local church;
3) They were largely comfortable with this status quo.
My return to Youth for Christ after grad school was marked by a desire to practice in my own life and ministry something that surely needed to be taught more widely. Beyond leading a sporadic workshop or filling a pulpit, I have found that being a youth ministry professor for the past 26 years gives me an outlet to champion a nimble, missionally faithful church.
Lessons Learned
My relatively new full-time gig in YFC’s leadership gives me a bigger platform for seeing our little parachurch operation become more serious about how what we do must feed and be fed by what happens in the church.
This growth toward theological maturity is a hopeful predictor of how the bride of Christ is being positioned by the Lord for strong missional resurgence, glorifying God by making a real difference in the world.
Here are some of the results of this process thus far, as I see them from my place in the kingdom:
We are part of the church. Teaching and internal commentary about our YFC mission disavows the notion that the grand scheme of the mission of God does not apply to us. Rather, we recognize that as we “reach young people everywhere,” our work with “the local church and other like-minded partners” is absolutely necessary if we want “to raise up lifelong followers of Jesus…who lead…”
There may have been a day when we were content to celebrate decisions for Christ as our goal. We would like to distance ourselves from that aspiration, believing that it unintentionally compromises the more thorough transformation process of making disciples who collectively represent the Lord well in this world. This mission is clearly a subset of what Christ’s church is to be doing on planet earth. We simply want to help facilitate this agenda by offering dedicated resources and leadership to the local communities of God’s people who are called to faithfulness.
We are stakeholders, not subcontractors. Our service to the local church is never offered as if we are contract vendors. We are total stakeholders in the body of Christ, and there isn’t a moment in time when Jesus’ followers who work in Youth for Christ are not also part of the local church. We want all of our staff to experience meaningful support, teaching and accountability in particular fellowships. We also want our leaders to recognize God’s people in any given community may be hampered from doing God’s work if they operate exclusively within the organizational silos of their local churches and parachurch ministries.
We fear that such hubris will make it very difficult to work together and display the kind of unity for which Jesus prayed for us all. On our best days, we hope we are known for our humility, embrace diversity and champion unity that glorifies God. The platforms through which we carry out our main assignments in the kingdom are important and should be honored. They also need to be held lightly for the temporary vehicles they are. One way we try to practice this in YFC is by fighting fiercely for a mission we hope gets widely practiced without insisting our organization expands.
We are called to contribute to the life of the church. Our most cherished values in YFC are called the Five Essentials, expressions of principled practices that we believe will contribute to a revitalized church in America. As diverse as our ministry models are, our national strategy depends on our ability to practice Widespread Prayer, Loving Relationships, Faithful Bible Teaching, Collaborative Community Strategy and Adults Who Empower in every one of our nearly 2,000 local ministry sites.
It’s our expectation that people who are formed by such practices will be treasured assets in their local churches, contributing an approach to ministry that is foundational to being used by the Holy Spirit.
We are called to focus not only on ministry, but also missional communities. We once taught about recruiting and training staff teams for ministry; now we are increasingly asking our folks to step up to the challenge of forming missional communities. We aspire to reach kids with others as we cultivate our lives together in Christ. Integrating our own growth as Jesus’ disciples with what we do will help us make two important contributions to the church. We will prepare some people to meet church-planting needs. We also can invigorate existing churches with leaders who will accomplish mission-driven purposes as they experience transparent, loving relationships.
How should the rest of God’s people judge parachurch organizations such as YFC? Simply put, we ought to stimulate vitality and faithfulness through our unique efforts. The mission of Youth for Christ pledges to raise well-formed, first generation (converted) Christians who will make critical leadership contributions to the church. Can anyone dispute the infusion of such persons will energize the body of Christ?
Once hindered from working out the implications of such a vision by my understanding of the urgent needs of lost kids, I’m now thrilled to embrace this meaningful assignment for the church I love. Anybody want to join me?
