Family Based Youth Ministry Two

Mark DeVries himself did the second session on FBYM. It was good hearing him here in a short time, bc he was able to "get to the point".

He started out as defining successful youth ministry as "one failure after another without losing enthusiasm".

His main verse is Heb 12:1-2 - we are surrounded by a "great cloud of witnesses" in our faith development.

FYI: Mark is one of the most charming, funniest, easy to listen to people I have ever heard speak! We could actually invite him to our church to do a seminar! Ask me about it!

Mark said it is the responsibility of the youth worker to "build a constellation of relationships between youth and other adults in the church." He also said: "if you want to work directly with the kids, then DON'T be a church staff member, be a volunteer". The crisis in youth ministry is not getting kids to meetings - we can do that all day. The crisis is getting them to reach mature Christian adulthood.

Mark clarified some of the stats we heard. He said the "biggest predictor of sustained faith past the high school years was the degree to which the immediate family practiced their faith in the home." The biggest predictor that a teenager would reach faith maturity as an adult was the degree to which the teenager was connected to an extended Christian family.

So, any effort which promotes family home faith practice and builds the extended Christian family is what the youth worker needs to be doing. The notion that the family has to sit together in worship was never mentioned and did not really seem to fit his point.

Some youth ministers like to put guilt on parents for "not doing enough", but this does not help anybody. You can't assume that the parent-teen relationship is going magically change so that all of a sudden they are going to start communicating.

One of the best things a youth worker can do is to assist parents in "stacking the stands" with caring adults for those times when parent-teen communication is not happening.

Parents cannot carry all the weight and they don't need to. The youth worker has to influence the overall culture of the church to increase opportunities to build a web of caring adults. All of the load cannot be put on the "load bearing adults", such as youth advisors, sunday school teachers, youth elders. They are absolutely key parts of the web, but it has to be expanded to include a lot more adults. Mark tried a mentoring program, but it basically fell apart bc there were too many adults required who did were not able to carry on a conversation with teenagers. So, then they tried a prayer partner program where every youth was matched up with an adult. The adults could send notes to the youth, but there was no requirement or expectation set that they would have to have some deep spiritual interaction. There WAS an annual banquet for all the participants, but again no requirement that they had to talk. Now there was no rule that you could not talk. Basically, Mark said they had to set the bar of expectations "really low" - and only then were they able to "guarantee" a basic level of minimum participation.

How does the youth worker "influence the culture?" By becoming an interpreter, a "bard", walking and talking around the church, singing the songs, telling the stories; setting the expectations for the need for lots of caring adults to show love to the youth - and the hope is that the church will then "live into the expectations."

Mark has three components of youth ministry:

COWS - a great Cloud of Witnesses (see above)
HOGS - Habits of Godliness - some sort of "regular, portable, spritual practices" such as devotional, prayer, reading - things that they did in their own lives that involved more than "showing up at the building"
FISH - Families Initiate Spiritual Health

Mark's 100% no-brainer implementation plan:

Try. Fail. Learn. Try. Fail. Learn. Try. Sort of succeed. Try. Try. Learn. Try. Eventually something will emerge and stick. Note that being afraid of doing anything that is not wildly successful will probably lead you to do nothing. Or, try once and stop.

Two approaches: take something in place and endow it with an extended Christian family. For example, they had an annual banquet for seniors. They started including their parents and Sunday School teachers.

Or, try something completely new - like a parenting seminar.

The bottom line question is not: are they coming to youth group now, but will they still be participating in some sort of organized christian fellowship in 5 to 10 years from now?