Guest Post: Young Life and the Church by Lars Rood
A few weeks back my friend Nate wrote a series of blog articles about the relationship between Young Life and the church. At some point I started conceiving of a blog post that I felt needed to be written.
First some background. I didn’t grow up with Young Life. It didn’t exist in my town. A few friends in college were involved as leaders and a lot of people I knew were pretty impacted by the camp called Malibu in Canada. Although I’d never been, I applied and was offered a position on the “Beyond Malibu” team one summer. I turned it down and went to work at Forest Home in Southern California.
Over the years in ministry I’ve had the chance to be around some pretty great young life staff that love kids. I’ve also met a ton of people who had their lives changed through the ministry of young life.
With all of that said I still have one issue with young life. That issue is when church kids are reached out to by young life staffers.
This statement will probably get me in trouble but I will say it anyways. If your ministry is aimed at seeking the lost then when you find someone who is connected to a church you don’t need to reach out to him or her.
I guess where I’m at with this is I’ve seen several Para church ministries (to be clear my statements here are aimed at everyone not just young life) begin to reach out to kids who are already connected to other places and encourage them to come to their ministry. Many of these kids don’t need outreach they need encouragement to stay connected to their churches.
Before you kill me in the comments I will say that I have a solution and it’s really simple. Last year a Young Life club was trying to get restarted in our town. We offered them to use our Youth Facility so that they would have a space to meet. We invited the Young Life staff to Network events and made sure they knew that we really liked them and wanted to work with them. The solution is to partner. I want the Young Life staff person to know that I think they have an incredible role. I want them to know that the church desperately needs ministries who are reaching out and caring for lost teenagers. I want them to feel supported and empowered that we pray and care for them. In return I want them to support the long term discipleship that we are doing with students. I want them to know when a student was baptized and confirmed at a church. I want them to do everything they can to encourage students to stay connected to their churches. We need to partner to love teenagers and to encourage them to not just jump around to the new great thing. Will it be easy to partner? No. But ministering to teenagers isn’t supposed to be easy. Commissions never are.
You can follow Lars at www.larsrood.com for more youth ministry conversations.
I think Lars is asking a question that I have heard several times over the years. His not taking a cheap shot. I hope this will generate good conversation from people who serve in YL, the church and both.
Lars, I greatly appreciate your thoughts and I think I understand your perspective completely. However…what if a true “partnership” means sharing kids. What if restarting YL in your city means having YL leaders connected with your kids because your kids can open doors for them to reach non-Christian kids they could not reach? What if YL turning kids over to the church (admittedly, not one of the strong points of YL. I have some ideas about that to be shared later!!) also means sharing strong Christian kids with YL? What if “sharing” kids could be a real opportunity for us to teach our kids how to be Christ to their friends…it is what YL does best.
YL is getting ready to open a new school in my city and I am excited to use it as an opportunity to teach my youth group how to be involved in evangelism. I want my strong Christian kids to bring their non-Christian friends to YL (and I want my non-Christian kids posing as Christians to hear about Jesus!!). That to me speaks of partnership.
One more point…YL is EXCELLENT and forming lasting relationships with kids and I wonder if we (youth directors) fear that our kids will form stronger bonds with YL leaders than with us. If we were better at intimate relationships would we be as concerned about sharing kids? I do not fear “losing” a Christian kid because it is my relationship with them that bonds us, not their connection to our church. I have no problem sharing “churched” kids with YL to further the kingdom.
Danny, I hear what you are saying and appreciate the “sharing” perspective. I want you or someone else to speak towards the clubs that are predominantly kids who have a close connection to a church. As a guy who was in Young Life for years, do you get frustrated when it is more “church kids” than the furthest out? Or do you take what you can get? Who do you target?
Ok…I have seen many different club dynamics. In my current city, where most YL leaders are college students, there are VERY VERY few churched kids in YL club. And those that are beginning to walk with Christ are being taken to churches by their YL leaders…VERY exciting to see!!
In my previous YL Area (small town) we had several kids who were previously or currently connected to a local church…possibly 60% of club attendance. MOST of them smoked pot regularly and partied excessively (not an exageration). I considered our ministry incredibly valuable in their lives. We did not have a “partnership” with the local church, but yet our relationships with them were impacting them in ways the local church could not. For the kids who were legitimately walking with Christ…we strongly encouraged them to remain in their churches and use to YL as an outlet for their own ministry. I hope that most YL staff have the integrity to recognize these differences and operate within the mission of YL. I wish our local youth directors were more open-minded. We could have built something amazing!!
I cannot speak about other clubs that exist around the country…except to say that it is very frustrating when a YL club is predominately churched kids. Perhaps there are reasons…maybe the Body of Christ should pursue those YL staff persons and figure out how to better establish an evangelistic ministry in the local area rather than criticize them.
If THE CHURCH is ready to be central to God’s working…let it act accordingly…and take the LEAD role (your post from a few days ago) in reconciling and pursuing.
Danny- Great point. I am fully supportive of YL connecting with church kids to open doors. I hope I didn’t say “My kids” in my original post. I fight that language because I think that God has given us his kids to reach and teach. I believe that YL has a major purpose and if my church is “Boring a kid with the Gospel” then we are at fault and I would want them to get connected with anyone who can show them that it is a real living thing that should transform and change them. My hope though is that transformed and changed students would have the belief that they could change their church.
Lars,
“My kids” was MY interpretation of the common dilemma I was talking about…I think it was my predisposition that assumed the language, not yours. Apologies!!!
Continue on my brother…reach the world!!
I’ve been in many conversations about Young Life over the past year now. I totally get both sides of the spectrum. However, when there are other articles written (over and over again) on how OVER SCHEDULED kids are, how are we helping these kids by saying “go to both programs”. We have enough “trouble” finding the best time for kids to be involved on a regular basis, b/c of the 10 activities from school, as well as family time, are included.
Now that is an angle that nobody has mentioned yet!
That my friend is an whole new post and major issue!!!
I thought I’d jump in the discussion… hopefully I can offer some additional perspectives.
I’m a YL area director, and in our area we’ve tried to build a healthy partnership with the church. Technically speaking, YL is a MISSION of the local church. Just like the soup kitchen or the missionaries your church hopefully sponsors overseas. We are in our community because the local church decided that our town needed YL leaders at the high school. Because we believe in the Church and Church membership..we require of our volunteers and campaigner kids that they be plugged in to a local church body.
I feel like the point of my ministry as a YL leader/ evangelist is to make disciples. The thrust of the ministry is always toward the disinterested and unchurched, but from the beginning, Young Life leaders have always moved into the high school community in partnership with believing adolescents, introducing their lost friends to the leaders and meeting to pray for their friends to know Jesus. From an outsider’s perspective, that may look like “reaching out” to churched kids. I’d rather call it reaching out “through” churched kids. Now, if a believing high school kids elects to spend their time reaching non-believing friends through Young Life (and no one’s forcing them, I constantly tell Christian kids to make Church a priority over YL) have they been “stolen”?
I don’t want to be an apologist for clubs full of christian kids, who are just showing up to an event. (A church full of kids just sitting around not doing anything about their faith would be equally disastrous, I think we can all agree.) But a club with a core group of the “right kind” of Christian kids, ones who are acting a YL leaders at their schools, who have a sense of call, and who have the benefit of a Youth Pastor, YL leader (who both are gracious enough to not the let kid over-schedule himself/herself and can teach them the valuable spiritual discipline of saying “no”) and Christian community both at church and on their campuses– that sounds like a recipe for real healthy ministry.
Now to stir the pot a bit…. I have heard the diss before that Young Life is like “youth group lite”–that it is just a spritually watered down, wild youth group service. This would certainly be the case if your club has 75% Christian kids and no one is exhorting them to pray for and reach their friends. However, we have seen Youth Programs in our area that have become so entertainment focused and event-driven, that they seem like “Young Life Lite”– a YL club on a bigger budget, essentially a para church event within the church. Discuss.
Nate, sorry to blow up your blog with posts today! But i came across this article about churches partnering together… the sense of hospitality and cooperative spirit it describes would be helpful if we apply them to the conversation about YL and the local Church:
http://www.9marks.org/ejournal/fellow-workers-truth
Sam, thanks for adding to the conversation brother! I have learned a bunch recently from these posts.
Your comments on Young Life and Youth group Lite are helpful.
Since I’ve been in the Springs I have heard many of the YL folks use the word “the mission” instead of YL and I think it is a healthy reminder.
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Nate,
Sorry I didn’t find this post when it was active. As someone who spent 20 years on Young Life staff (three of which were in a church partnership) and the last five working in the church, I can say from experience that any partnership is very difficult. The main difficulty is just plain sinfulness. “Partnership” tends to means doing whatever the strongest personality wants. I have seen churches define “partner” as “how many kids did you plug into our church” and I have seen YL define “partner” as “how many donors, kids and leaders did you give us.”
More helpful is to try to get everyone involved to have Kingdom eyes. An unchurched person experiences the Kingdom when a person who loves Jesus shows up in their world. In a perfect world, YL is the evangelism arm of the church and the church is the discipling arm of YL. When operating well, they evangelize far better than we do and we disciple far better than they do.) In a perfect world YL would train every one of our youth leaders (and those from all of the other churches) to go into the world of kids and tell them about Jesus in with passion, clarity and detail and ask students to give themselves to their redeemer. Then every one of their leaders would do new Christian Bible studies at churches (which they would call “Campaigners” and we would call youth group). Then we grow them in the body of Christ and train them to serve and give and worship and drink deeply of God’s Word and become a new generation to return to the world as missionaries in a display of spiritual power.
This breaks down in a myriad of ways: Leaders do not have enough time. Churches do not want to “turn over” our leaders. Many churches stopped being places that “equip the saints” but rather do YL club lite in the misguided seeker movement (which the date tells us is driving twenty year olds out of the church). As a result, YL kids come to church and ask, “Why do I need the church when we I get challenged more in my Campaigner group?” YL staff and leaders sometimes view the church as a resource for them (as if the church were para-church). YL staff and leaders often forget that their discipleship should drive their evangelism not the other way around and that the goal of YL is to fill churches with new Christians. And the church doesn’t do enough to help our students weep over the lost condition of the kids sitting next to them in Math class.
It is hard work to partner with other churches and with parachurch ministries for the glory of God and the salvation of our increasingly unchurched kids. However, it is right and good. For me, some concrete thing partnering means are that we never do anything on Monday (club) and ask our leaders to consider being YL leaders. We ask YL not to do things on Wednesday night (discipleship) and Sunday night when our church plant meets. We make our youth program discipleship based and have our fun by making doing the things Christians have done for 2000 years enjoyable.
blessings,
Matt Marino
Director of Youth and Young Adults
Episcopal Diocese of Arizona
Pastor of St. Jude’s Church (www.mystjudes.com)
Director of youthministryapprentice.com
This is a thoughtful and great response. Do you care if I re-post sections of this and give you the props? It will help keep the convo of Church and YL going.
nate
feel free!