I grew up in church. Sunday school, VBS, children’s choir and musicals, and of course eventually youth group.
In fact, I still remember how big of a deal it was when our church started allowing 6th graders to join the youth group instead of having them wait until 7th grade (what used to be called Jr High). And it was my grade level that was the first to make this transition…
I still remember being so excited to join my older brothers at youth group, and yet so nervous about all the big teenagers I now had to be around.
I remember the games, the food, the lessons on puberty and purity, the looking up to older teenagers and wanting to be like them, and of course the big events and trips — 5th quarters after Friday night football being some of the best.
And I especially remember my first youth pastor who always made sure we knew he cared. Still to this day I can hear him say what he always said at the end of every youth group gathering: “Even if no one else tells you today, I want you to know I love you.” And he meant it. He is still one of the “good ones.”
I actually have very little bad things to say about my time in youth group.
My reason for writing isn’t some sort of negative experience that now I want to project onto church in general. Even though I certainly have my share of stories that I can’t believe happened…
But my goal in writing these reflections is to look at how what was meant to be a transitionary version of ministry for teenagers (youth group culture) actually became a permanent framework for ministry for many churches today (church growth strategy and megachurch or contemporary culture).
And that because this has happened, that is why I think we now have a very immature (and sometimes heretical) version of American Christianity that has been popularized today.
lock-ins and lights down low
Lock-ins. Summer camps. Worship nights with the lights down low. Altar calls that felt like the most important fifteen to thirty minutes of the week.
I won’t say I didn’t enjoy it. I did. I was swept up in it all.
Early on I learned how to be a “leader” by fully engaging in whatever it was we were doing — from the “innocent” pranks on trips to the serious prayer times during worship nights.
I don’t regret being fully “in” on youth group. But somewhere along the way, as I grew up and engaged in college ministry and then eventually became a leader in church ministry as an adult (especially church planting or large church ministry), I started noticing something.
It felt familiar. It no longer felt like “big church” used to when I was a kid. It felt much more like youth group did.
The songs had the same emotional arcs.
The sermons had the same focuses, stories, and calls for response.
The “big moments” were engineered the same way my youth pastor used to engineer a Wednesday night: build the energy in the room and then land the ask.
As I grew up, it turns out church didn’t grow up with me. Church just became an adult version of youth group, with a bigger budget.
a transition became a destination
Youth ministry, at its best, was never meant to be the model for the whole church.
It was created to be transitional.
A way to meet teenagers where they are – because teenagers many times need novelty and energy and belonging – and to point them toward something deeper. Toward a lifetime of ordinary, unglamorous discipleship among people of every age.
Well, that was the theory when it started anyway.
Somewhere in the last few decades, that transitional version of ministry became the destination.
The methods people built for us as teenagers, followed us as we grew and got implemented into “big church.”
Nobody voted on this. Nobody announced it from a stage. It just happened.
Partly because the youth pastors of old worked their way up to become lead pastors or church planters. Partly because the youth group kids of old became the adults churches were then looking to attract to “come back” to church with their kids.
Either way, churches becoming adult youth groups started to “work.”
Attendance went up. Energy went up. Budgets went up.
And slowly, without a single decision anyone could point to, many American Churches became larger versions of the youth groups a lot of us grew up in.
Adult mission trips started looking a lot like youth summer trips. Church events started looking identical to youth conferences. And lead pastors starting dressing and acting just like youth pastors used to.
The youth group didn’t transition us to “big church.” The church transitioned to becoming a youth group. And almost no one seemed to see it happening, or seemed to care.
three things we traded in the process
I’ll spend the rest of this series unpacking what this has meant for what the church is today. But here is an overview of what we’ve traded in this transition:
We replaced discipleship with spiritual entertainment.
We embraced emotional highs as if it equates to spiritual growth.
We created groups based off ages, stages, and preferences instead of forming a spiritual family.
Somewhere we decided the goal of a gathering was to keep someone’s attention rather than to form them.
We started measuring whether people encountered God by whether they felt something.
And we got very good at manufacturing experiences instead of developing spiritual awareness.
The mountaintop experience became the metric.
Just like youth camp was always followed by a crash (and nobody in youth ministry ever seemed to solve that problem but just planned the next thing) now churches just run on the same roller coaster spirituality:
The worship night. The mission trip. The men’s or women’s event. The sermon series built to climb toward a climax. The next Sunday you just don’t want to miss.
The crash still comes every time. We’ve just gotten better at scheduling the next experience or emotional high before anyone asks questions.
not nostalgia
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to write this as things were better in the old days.
They weren’t.
The pre “youth-groupification” of the American Church had its own problems. Formality without formation. Moralism without mercy. Communities that pushed people into cultural conformity as easily as into Christ.
I’m not asking us to go back.
I’m encouraging us to notice what we’ve actually built. And to ask honestly whether it forms the kind of people the New Testament describes, or whether it’s just really good at getting people to show up, show out, and shell out money.
Because those are not the same thing.
A youth group can be full every Wednesday and still fail to produce a single disciple that will follow Jesus in their twenties and thirties.
A church can be full every Sunday, with all the same slick production, gifted communicator, and talented band, and also be producing the exact same result.
Just with better marketing and more expensive equipment.
built for a stage nobody was meant to stay in
I don’t think most pastors have created the problems we are now seeing on purpose.
I simply think they were taught (or caught) a style of ministry built for a specific, temporary developmental stage of life, and then they just kept doing that kind of ministry when everyone grew up because it seemed to “work” and it’s what they knew.
But it doesn’t mean we should just accept it as normative for the Church.
We must ask difficult questions:
- Have we mistaken entertainment for formation?
- Have we trained pastors to know how to fill a room but not how to sit with someone in their real relationship with God?
- Have we built churches that feel exciting over churches that make ordinary disciples?
It’s worth asking what the church should look like if we formed it to make mature disciples. Not just grown-ups performing a polished, entertaining, emotionally-cued version of a group of teenagers at youth camp.
Mature disciples. Formed slowly. Known deeply. Led by people who have done more than survive their own adolescence.
That’s the church we should want to attend. That’s what we should want to lead.
And this series is my attempt to identify what we have allowed to be built instead…
This post is a part of the “Big Church, Same Games” series. The next post is “Lock-In Gospel.”
