Have you ever been confronted by an adult who is bold enough to interrogate you about your goals and practices with questions such as these?
“What do you actually do in youth ministry? I mean, I see kids flocking around you, and you’re always going places and playing games and having your own worship services and everything. Why? What are you trying to do? What is the point of youth ministry?”
These days, such questions often are accompanied by financial concerns. “Why does youth ministry cost so much? And do we really need more staff?”
Adults who have been around the church since they were kids often have fond memories of events, campfires and singing; but most have no clue of how much time and energy it takes to pull off programs and events.
Plus, kids and families are much busier today, making it more difficult to build deep relationships. Also complicating our work is the pain and brokenness of many young people (an issue I explored in the book Hurt 2.0).
When pressed, most of us defend ourselves by tossing around words such as evangelism and discipleship. We say we are “challenging students to live their faith, serve others, befriend the lonely and take Jesus to their schools and friends.”
Or we fall back on that portion of
Or we simply say youth ministry is in the business of making disciples. We encourage kids of all ages to become faithful and committed disciples of Jesus Christ.
What does it actually mean to “make disciples who follow Jesus”? In other words, what does it look like to think, train volunteers and parents, program and plan for, and work toward a ministry that produces disciples?
My perspective on discipleship has changed through the years. Let me explain.
My Unsuccessful History as a Disciple(r)
In the 1970s, I was a devoted youth group kid who attended nearly every event and study I could find. I was a student leader in Young Life and our church. I had an (almost) daily quiet time. I got out of bed twice a week at 6 a.m. for small group Bible studies; and I was active, along with my best friend, John, in sharing Christ with whoever would listen.
I was a walking, talking, praying, preaching teenage disciple who—I hate to admit—did not often live a life that necessarily drew kids to Christ, but who had been taught to do everything on this simple list:
• Have a daily quiet time when you can read the Bible and pray (preferably in the morning, just like Jesus).
• Go to church, and be as active as you can be.
• Be a witness for Jesus.
• Give most of your friendship loyalties to Christians.
• If you have other non-believer friends, don’t spend too much time with them; and make sure they know where you stand.
I was also taught that I needed to avoid the following:
• Drinking;
• Drugs;
• Going to parties; or,
• Having a non-believer as a girlfriend.
These lists of the gospel dos and don’ts more or less worked for me until I hit college and moved into ministry. That’s when I began to see the cracks in my understanding of what it means to be a disciple.
First, I realized that carefully following my rigid discipleship checklist wasn’t working all that well for me. To make matters worse, my legalistic approach wasn’t working very well for many of the kids I was discipling. They were experiencing everything from mild disappointment and shame to dismal failure, and in many cases eventually abandoning their faith.
As for me, I was now occasionally missing my morning quiet time and began to wonder about the value of this undiscussable daily ritual. I found myself wrestling with lust, sexuality and typical college life. I increasingly found myself spending long hours and days in loneliness and insecurity, filled with guilt and shame, because I felt as if most of the time I was a huge disappointment to God.
At times, I felt as if God were saying, “I love you, my son…now GET AT IT!”
At other times (sometimes on the same day!), I experienced rare triumphs over temptation, or a devotional time stirred me, or a conversation I had with someone seemed to move them closer to Jesus; and I knew God was pleased and that I was doing a good job at my faith.
In short, I was a spiritual schizophrenic, a condition that was accurately described by Brennan Manning:
“When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rationale animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer. To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God’s grace means. As Thomas Merton put it, ‘A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God.'”1
My faith seemed like a sham. I loved Jesus and sincerely desired to serve Him. Yet I was not able to be consistent in my faith (either according to my standards or the standards of others). That meant I was a long way from being someone God could use or even care about.
God loved me because He was committed to loving me, but I knew He was constantly bothered by me.
My own struggles seemed to be mirrored in the vacillating faith of the kids I was trying to lead. Out of a recognition that I needed to deal with my own struggles in community without burdening the kids with whom I worked, I didn’t share my problems with them; but they shared with me that they were going through the very same struggles that I was having. My own experience of regularly feeling frustrated about my selfish, shallow and undisciplined Christian life was being replicated in them.
Even now I cringe when I say this, but I could see that in my youth ministry I was trying to perpetuate precisely the same kind of flawed version of Christian growth and discipleship that was failing to work with me.
Discipleship by manipulation, guilt and shame hadn’t transformed my life; and it wasn’t working in my ministry. The problem was that I didn’t know there was a different, more biblical, more theological way of following Jesus.
Finding Freedom
Some time during my mid-20s, my seminary studies were prompting within me a deep stirring. Was there a different gospel of Christ than the one I had been taught and was now teaching to others?
Then by God’s grace, I met Dee, now my wife of 31 years. Amazingly (to me, anyway) she had never been enslaved by a theology of legalistic and formulaic discipleship; through her, I was introduced to a new way of seeing faith in God.
From the first days of meeting Dee, I was introduced to a vibrant and free faith that I had rarely known for myself. She lived in a state of grace that I had not noticed in anyone before. Her favorite verse always has been, “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (
Then a few years into our marriage, Dee and I were exposed to one of the most genuine and authentic saints we have ever known, Henri Nouwen. Our first exposure was through his writings, but in 1991 we were invited to spend a week with Henri and his community and a few of our close friends. Thereafter, as Henri became a mentor and friend, a far more biblical and theological understanding of Christian discipleship slowly began to gel for me.
This new understanding was that discipleship is not all about me and what I must do to make it happen. In the past, I had seen God as an angry critic who was waiting in the audience, watching me to perform my faith perfectly. Sometimes He nodded gentle approval; occasionally He applauded; but mostly I pictured Jesus either nodding off or shaking His head in disgust (“Some follower of Me you are!”).
Now, I began to recognize the gospel is actually more about Him and less about me. His role is to change me, and my role is to let Him. When Dee and I had the chance not only to read Henri’s deep and rich insight into the love of God,2 but actually see his life live it out, I discovered what had been there all along had I allowed myself to read God’s Word without bias:
Discipleship is simply the willingness to give up trying to be faithful and do my faith and to trust God—not just for salvation, but for all of life.
Toward a Biblical Theology of Discipleship
This is my story. It’s a long and winding tale that probably won’t give you a new checklist to make kids jump through, but perhaps you can identify just a bit with my struggles.
I’ve been at this youth ministry thing a long time; and I’ve seen many trends, philosophies and strategies come and go. As I carefully and critically study the current state of youth discipleship, I am convinced that very little of what we actually do with kids leads them to the maturity and freedom that God has for them.
Today, many of us continue to perpetuate a gospel of performance, work and doing. We still so easily slip into attempting to lead kids (and adults!) to Christ through a combination manipulation, strong and persuasive rhetoric, and shaming.
Most everything we teach on discipleship is actually focused on the outcome of following. We try to drum up the passion to follow Christ in how we live. We want kids to serve others, live a life of holiness and discipline, and learn how to love.
Yet what truly drives our attitudes and lifestyle must come from someplace deeper and more profoundly connected to creation and redemption. Our obedience is not a call not be an external duty we perform on our own. It is our natural response to our experience of Jesus’ love and transformation deep within our own lives.
As Jesus became increasingly popular, large crowds were trying to get close to Him. In one case, people basically stalked Him across a huge lake. They went to Him and asked, “What must we do to do the works God requires?”3
Many in the crowd wanted to figure out the formula, the recipe, for getting the goods Jesus came to bring. They wanted to be able to say, “This is it. Do this stuff. Here’s the list.” Then God will say, “Well done, My good and faithful lemming.”
Jesus blew them away with the last thing they expected to hear: “The work of God is this: to believe (trust) in the one He has sent.”
That’s the core of discipleship. To follow Jesus means to trust Him. Obeying follows trusting. This is the call of biblical freedom: to explore what it means to trust God in every circumstance, with every person, regardless of what life throws us.
Paul put it this way: “But by trusting God4 we eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope…the only thing that counts is trust expressing itself through love” (
Discipleship, or following Jesus, is quite straightforward: It is God’s job to change us into obedient, holy servants; and our job to sincerely trust Him enough to respond as He leads us. In the end, it is not simply loving that is the mark of a faithful disciple, but love that is formed, shaped and driven by trusting Jesus Christ as my everything.
The Practice of Biblical Discipleship
Our task in youth ministry is to disciple kids, so we should teach kids what it means and looks like to trust Jesus.
When we talk about service or ministry, our message must be to focus on trusting Jesus with our time, heart and energies.
That’s what happened with my young friend Cody, who took a year off school last year to serve alongside the poor in Africa. For Cody, this radical move was not a result of guilt and manipulation. It was his expression of trusting God with his college career, time and money.
When a kid is struggling with self-image, addiction or racism, the question—the only question—we have to offer is, “What does it mean to trust Jesus with that? How can we hear His voice, know His perspective, see this through His eyes? He sees us, He knows us. It is His love we receive and embrace, His mercy we lean on and His guidance we trust.
That’s discipleship. That’s what we do.
Notes:
1 The Ragamuffin Gospel, Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2005, 25.
2 If you are interested in reading what God had given to this gentle, brilliant saint, start with In the Name of Jesus. If you have the courage and self-awareness to hear Him from the heart, you will never be the same!
3 The story and context can be found in
4 In English this is translated faith, but the word used is pisteuo, the same as in John 6, and in my view for contemporary believers the concept of “trusting God” is a bit clearer than having “faith.”
