Leadership & Message

Equipping Leaders with the Right Message

The last article in a series on the six systemic issues of youth ministry.
By: Ron Luce

A vision to grow a youth group from 10 to 100 is one thing. Making it happen is a completely different story.

Many youth pastors have never received any formal training. They might have all the desire in the world to minister an entire town of young people, but when it comes to doing it, they come up short. A dozen teens that grew up in church are easy enough to handle, but attracting more is a difficult hurdle many youth workers are simply unprepared for.

What about those home-grown church kids? Why aren’t they going out and bringing in their friends? The reason is the type of Christianity that is preached. When the messages they hear and the examples they see don’t challenge them to live a life radically committed to the Lord, they have no reason to do anything except whatever is easiest and most comfortable for them.

Systemic Issue #5: Youth Pastor Leadership Skills

Some youth workers start out thinking that they are only helping out while the church is “in-between youth pastors” and looking for a new one. Before you know it, they have been running the youth group for a year or more with no help in sight. They have never been trained and are still not sure what they are doing.

Other leaders have taken classes or even graduated with a degree in youth ministry. But they were taught by youth ministry professors who have had youth groups of less than 20 people for more than 20 years. The principles they teach help youth pastors do the same thing: maintain the status quo while not reaching out to the surrounding community. In these circles, youth group growth is not much more than a theory.

Youth pastors and youth workers must develop their leadership skills. Our ability to lead others is like a cup. A cup can only hold a certain amount of water. If you try to add any more, it will overflow. In the same way, we can only lead as many people as our leadership skills allow. If we try to lead any more, others will slip out of our grasp. In order to lead more people, we must develop our leadership skills.

Revolution YM: The Complete Guide to High-Impact Youth Ministry is a powerful book packed with leadership principles and practices, specifically designed for youth ministry. It is a must-have for any youth group leader. Youth leaders can also use BattleCry youth group curriculum such as Rise Up to effectively minister to their teens.

In addition, youth pastors, church leaders, and even senior pastors should attend a BattleCry Leadership Summit. These eye-opening events will not only expose adults to the incredible need to reach young people, but also train them in what it will take to effectively reach the youth in their community.

Systemic Issue #6: Type of Christianity Preached

For years, from the time they were very young, many of the teens in your youth group have been exposed to countless messages of passive Christianity and leaders who did not even practice what they preached. This influence has led to teens with a spiritual speech on top of a very unspiritual lifestyle.

If you get a bunch of passive pew sitters because of the passive way they heard about Christ, of course they’re not going to pass it on. They don’t have anything worth passing on! They don’t have anything that they’ve given their life to.

We need to make sure that we don’t do all this work to pass down a passive Christianity and create a new generation of passive pew sitters. Our messages must be a call to a “no holds barred,” leave-it-all-behind Christian lifestyle. Most importantly, we must be a people that recognize the incredible gift of God and respond out of a grateful heart by giving away our entire lives. Only then will we be able to take part in the incredible revolution God has in store for our young people.

Youth ministry has impacted many lives throughout the years, but many teens remain untouched. If we are to turn this generation around, we must focus on the systemic issues of youth ministry that hold it back. In this series of articles, we have explored six of those systemic issues. Now, it is our responsibility to commit these things to prayer, learn all that we can, and do what it takes to be wise in our ministry to young people.


Additional Resources:
Revolution YM: The Complete Guide to High-Impact Youth Ministry
Revolution YM Curriculum (Coming Fall, 2006)


The Systemic Issues of Youth Ministry series:
Part 1: Building Youth Ministries that Change Lives
Part 2: Engaging Pastors and Parents in the Fight
Part 3: Inspiring Involvement and Financial Support
Part 4: Equipping Leaders with the Right Message


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