Ministry

The State Of Junior High Ministry

By jgiroux ⋅ August 1, 2008 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

A couple of months ago Alan Mercer wrote a little blog about a new Barna Group Study.�  Below is that blog entry.

George Barna has come out with another research study that says 61% of students who were involved in church youth ministries as teenagers have disengaged from the church during their 20’s. My question becomes what are we going to do about this? I think that many are beginning to ask this question in relation to high school ministry. Yet, the root of this problem may be found in the junior high ministries. I have seen more and more high school ministries taking the task of discipleship and equipping more seriously. Yet, how are we, in junior high ministry doing? Are we still running “run and gun” offenses? Are we more about fun than discipleship? What does serious discipleship look like in the life of a squirrelly, ADHD, fun-loving 12 year old? One of the final paragraphs in this study states…

“Much of the ministry to teenagers in America needs an overhaul – not because churches fail to attract significant numbers of young people, but because so much of those efforts are not creating a sustainable faith beyond high school. There are certainly effective youth ministries across the country, but the levels of disengagement among twentysomethings suggest that youth ministry fails too often at discipleship and faith formation. A new standard for viable youth ministry should be – not the number of attenders, the sophistication of the events, or the ‘cool’ factor of the youth group – but whether teens have the commitment, passion and resources to pursue Christ intentionally and whole-heartedly after they leave the youth ministry nest.”

Having read Kenda Dean’s “Practicing Passion” I have also wondered what it looks like to stir this kind of passion in a 12 year old. If it can be done, what does it look like? It certainly will look very different from that of a high school student.

May we not settle for the average, same old, easy, game filled, shallow, junior high ministry. May we be in the business of discipleship and transformation.

Mercer raises some good questions about how junior high pastors are doing.�  What does discipleship and transformation look like at the junior high level?�  To begin with, I think that we each need to identify what the core irreducible values and truths are that we in our respective ministries would like our students to walk away from.�  I personally am a huge fan of North Point’s 7 Checkpoints but there may be some other things that you and your ministry team think our important but start there.�  Start by identifying what you want your students to know and what you’d like them to be and create junior high programming around those goals.�