During the summer, many young people go away on camps and house parties — well some do.
And they come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Many of these young people are a great encouragement and come from churches where good biblical youth ministry is taking place. But that kind of provision seems to be a little patchy. Towards the end of an event I was teaching at, I was confronted by a male student, aged about 16, who confessed he wasn’t looking forward to going home because his church was ‘rubbish’. After we talked a little while, it became clear that he was trying hard to follow Christ and cared about many of the people in his church. But he went on to tell me that church leaders had promised to look into some kind of youth provision but he had heard nothing — he was simply feeling let down. His family were part of the church and were serving there and he wanted to be loyal to them, but his heart was longing to be with others of his own age. There was one other young person in his church.
No provision
Reading between the lines, it seemed that this church simply lacked either the energy or the understanding to know how to deal with a youth group of two and were therefore doing nothing. I suspect there are many churches going through head-scratching exercises wondering what to do with such people and desperately looking for a volunteer or two. As I meet with church leaders, this lack of volunteers seems to loom large in many people’s thinking and I begin to wonder if it is possible for all the churches that have young people in their church family to sustain youth ministry in any kind of viable way.
