A Church Within the Church
Dr. Chuck Stecker
We have lost the adult connection our young men and women need to transition
smoothly into adulthood. This would further explain why the time period of
adolescence is being extended. In a growing number of churches, the youth
program is virtually the only ministry that is not just allowed but encouraged
to become its own church. My observations are based on interviews and contact
with several hundred churches of various denominations across the nation.
Many youth pastors are being directed to not even call their ministry a youth
ministry, but to call themselves by a separate name as a youth church. One
youth pastor approached me before I spoke and asked me not to use the title
“youth ministries,” because they had worked for more than two
years to take that term out of their vocabulary. They were in the process
of helping the larger church understand that they, in fact, were a separate
church and that this was the healthiest thing for the youth. The church was
in the process of building and staffing a separate building—all the
time wondering why the young men and women weren’t transitioning with
clarity into adulthood and moving into the other ministries of the church.
Many church leaders have been convinced that to have a viable, thriving youth
ministry, the youth must have a separate facility—either within the
church building or, in many cases, completely separate from that structure.
The youth church is no longer a ministry within the church but functions in
the capacity of a separate church for everything except finances, for which
it is still tied and supported by the home church—with no adult connection
except for a few leaders. As the young men and women graduate from the youth
church, there is absolutely no place for them to go. In churches across America,
because we have allowed our youth groups to become churches, when young people
graduate from high school they also graduate from their parents’ church.
That accounts, to a great extent, for the huge reduction in attendance for
that age group during the next five years of their lives. And since they have
not been accepted as adults in the body of believers, most young people will
use the expression “Now that I’m on my own” when they are
living away from home—even though their mother and father may be paying
for the tuition, room and board, and so forth.
Tragically, in many cases we are seeing youth ministries and campus ministries
inadvertently discipling young men and women right out of the local church.
If young people finally see themselves as adults, they will associate their
current faith experience with adulthood and their earlier experience with
childhood. Therefore they don’t see a need for a local church in their
lives.
And the majority of young men and women in our high school and junior high
youth groups don’t perceive themselves as going to their family’s
church, except in the context of youth group. They see the “big church”
as Mom and Dad’s church, where they go to listen to Mom and Dad’s
pastor. Their pastor is the youth pastor, and their church is their youth
group or Sunday school class, at best. So once again we see the scenario that
when they graduate from high school—if they are still even in the church
at that point—they will often graduate from church with no place to
go. In talking with youth leaders across the country, I find that the few
young folks who remain in the church normally do so because they have been
called to be interns or placed in leadership positions.
Clearly the answer is not in trying to create a youth/student ministry that
tries to compete with MTV.
The likelihood of a young person finding relevance in the church has far more
to do with the number of authentic relationships with people outside their
own generation who are investing in them than the size of the youth facility
and the amount of noise it generates.
Excerpted from, Men of Honor Women
of Virtue, Raising Kids to Keep the Faith, Dr Chuck Stecker, 2006, Pages 94-96