Most articles, books, seminars, conventions and Web sites about youth ministry challenge us to do something. Do better programs, do deeper teaching, do more leadership development. Well, I’d like to suggest there’s something we need to stop doing.
Stop abandoning kids.
Failing Expectations
Our kids resemble the penguin Mumbles from Happy Feet. Mumbles is born into a society of Emperor penguins who value their young for what they do rather than who they are. What they must do is sing. Mumbles can’t carry a tune, though; and penguins without “heart songs” are worthless. So he’s abandoned by his peers, parents, teachers and the elders of the penguin nation.
Teenagers are in pain. They’re hurting, lonely, isolated, unplaced. Whenever they fail to achieve adults’ contrived expectations, they feel abandoned. Most kids tolerate this through middle school; but by early high school, they either rebel against the adult world or retreat into painful isolation. Few are strong enough to follow the path of heroic Mumbles, who searched for his true identity, striving to demonstrate the intrinsic value of who he was created to be—a dancer.
Discussing these issues with some youth leaders, I dared to ask an irreverent question: “How do we abandon kids in our ministries?” After a moment of awkward silence, someone said this: “We abandon them by building relationships with kids and when they don’t do what we want, such as commit to Christ, come to Bible study, go to camp, et cetera, we find more compliant kids who will do what we want.”
That opened the floodgates of a conversation lamenting dozens of whys we abandon kids every week. (Try it at your next leaders meeting.)
Subtle Ways
What I realized is that we abandon kids in very subtle ways. It’s rarely as obvious as when a parent abandons the kids in a divorce or a youth leader leaves the ministry. It happens when kids move from the middle school program to the high school program while the eighth grade volunteers stay behind. We rationalize that we’re “called” to middle school ministry, but we are actually modeling conditional love. “As long as you’re in middle school, I’ll love you; but now that you’re in high school, our relationship is over.” Similarly, we abandon seniors leaving for college; and with all our technology, we’re without excuse.
In The Heart and Soul of the Next Generation, a 14-year-old reflects on being average. Teachers talk with him until a popular kid arrives; and it’s like he disappears in mid-sentence, as the teacher asks the jock about the big game that night. We do the exact same thing! We’re talking to one kid, another kid enters the room, and we abandon the conversation to engaging the kid we haven’t seen in a while or who’s scheduled to lead worship that night or who won the big game. We abandon kids without even realizing it, but they feel the pain all the same.
Volunteers often ask about the amount of time they need to give to the ministry. Frankly, I’ve stopped answering those questions because kid’s lives are too messy and we need to commit to relationships rather than programs. In the words of Brian McLaren, “We need to start counting conversations,” so that youth ministry becomes marked by unending conversations with kids who deserve to be honored for who they are— not just what they can do—and with an unconditional love that knows no limits.
So let’s continue building better programs, developing stronger leaders and teaching deeper truths—but for heaven’s sake, let’s stop abandoning the very kids God has placed in our sphere of influence.
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Mark Cannister is Professor of Youth Ministries at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts.
