Guest Entry - Someone else's thoughts on Sustainable Youth Ministry

As I am sure many of you know by now, I have been leading a book study for the past few weeks on Sustainable Youth Ministry. This week, I have the pleasure of sharing with you, the reflections of one of the participants in this study. She wrote them for our parish newsletter and with her permission I am thrilled to be able to pass these along. I think it is always helpful to hear ideas from different perspectives. Also, it is nice to have a week off from writing my own posts. Next week will be even better as I result, I am sure.

Enjoy!

 As many of you know, in September, Caitlin Reilley Beck joined us as Family and Youth Worker. As we have not had anybody employed to work with youth for a while, we need to set about designing a youth group that meets the needs of our parish. For five Sundays in October and November a group of us met to study a book called Sustainable Youth Ministry by Mark DeVries. In this book DeVries outlines in detail how to build a youth ministry that lasts over time. Not a ministry that starts with a bang and then fizzles out. He also emphasizes the fact that a youth ministry shouldn't be dependent on a specific youth minister. The youth ministry should be designed such that if and when the youth minister moves on, the running of the ministry should be able to continue smoothly.

Over the course of the five weeks we talked a lot about the fact that the youth ministry is the responsibility of the whole congregation. One commonly held opinion is that now that we have a Youth and Family Worker we don't need to worry about our youth any more since they are taken care of. Also, if volunteers are needed the expectation is often that the parents of the youth should be the ones to volunteer. In fact youth ministry is the responsibility of the entire parish – much like outreach, hospitality, stewardship, Godly play etc. Why is this so?  We as parishioners have got a lot out of St Philips and Christianity in general and we want to share that with our youth. Also, they are the future of our church and this is the time in their life when they are most likely to leave the church- "More than half of adolescents who attend church as children leave the church before they reach age 17" (DeVries p. 31). More than simply being the future of the Church, they are part of the Church right now along with children and adults of all stages of life. It is important that some of the volunteers not be parents as teenagers may not be keen for their parents to always be around when they are participating in church activities. Also, interacting with non-parent volunteers will make the youth feel like they are important and special to the whole congregation. If they are asked by their parents to participate in activities such as the Christmas Fayre they might view this as a "chore" whereas they probably won't feel this if asked by another adult. So you can see why the youth ministry needs the help of the whole congregation. The current challenge is to identify a volunteer pool and to recruit volunteers from this pool.

In his book, DeVries talks about the importance of long range-planning including developing a vision, goals and a statement of values- "without a clearly articulated , compelling vision of what their church would like for its youth ministry to accomplish these ministries meander with no higher purpose than simply 'having a youth ministry'" (p.67). In other words we need to work out what it is we want to achieve and give to our youth before we design programmes (instead of setting up programmes and then seeing if they are offering what we want to offer). In order to identify our vision for our youth ministry we at St Philip's are going to have a visioning day sometime in the New Year. All parishioners are invited and we hope to see a good number of them there.