While regularly playing golf for several years, I learned an important lesson applicable to youth ministry: If you want to improve, you must keep an accurate count of your strokes. By keeping score, you will know whether you are improving or getting worse at the game.
I took that golf lesson and applied it in useful ways for self-reflection. Faithfully keeping track of our youth group attendance on Sundays and Wednesday gatherings became a way to care for all the students in youth group. It was important to know who was showing up and who wasn’t.
Of course, we must avoid idolizing attendance numbers in youth ministry. Still, I realized I needed to know when a student was missing and why. For example, if I knew a student was sick, I could reach out to her. Or, if I learned that a student had stopped attending because of a particular issue, I could offer counsel or find a solution. One year, we had a middle school small group whose attendance dropped off a lot over the semester. Carefully observing attendance helped me realize that the adult leader for that group was better suited for high school students.
As those serving teenagers, we must take care to guard our hearts against pride or insecurity regarding the size of our youth groups. Hyper-focusing on how many teenagers are gathering—or not gathering—at our youth group each week can be harmful to our view of faithfulness in ministry. But if we ignore numerical growth all together, we may also be inclined to neglect evangelism in our ministry, which is an essential part of our call.
Who Gives the Growth?
In his introduction to his book Center Church, Tim Keller talks about a pastor’s role as a calling as God’s fellow workers (1 Cor. 3:9). He explains that God’s work is to be fruitful (and he alone determines the fruit), while our calling as God’s workers is to be faithful to him.
In the same spirit, I often preach Paul’s words from 1 Corinthians 3:6 to myself: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” It is great relief that growth in ministry is ultimately dependent on God, while our calling in ministry is simply to be faithful. Remembering this truth helps us to avoid allow our self-worth to rise and fall with attendance numbers.
Similarly, Jesus teaches “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Matt. 9: 37-38). Faithfulness in ministry is about answering the Great Commission. God calls us to “go” and he works to bring a harvest through us.
I was reminded of this recently when a close youth pastor friend of mine issued a challenge to his youth group for each person in his youth group to bring one new friend to youth group to “double” their youth group. Knowing his heart, I was aware this challenge wasn’t about numbers or ego, but about inviting his students into gospel multiplication. This friend was leaning into his calling to join God in the kingdom work of outreach and evangelism.
As youth ministers, God invites us to “go” to teenagers in our churches as well as in our broader communities. As we work to include outreach in our ministries, we respond to the call of Jesus in the Great Commission.
The Programming Funnel
Longtime youth ministry professor Duffy Robbins has written about “the programming funnel,”1 based on an idea from Dennis Miller. He outlines the different audiences a youth ministry should seek to reach, which he says is “wide enough at the top to bring students in, but intentional enough at the bottom to accomplish our objectives” (i.e. discipling teenagers to lifelong faith in Christ). The funnel depicts students moving through various levels of Christian growth, with the “come” stage at the top, then the growth, disciple, develop, and multiply stages. This is a helpful picture that reminds us to be just as intentional of the “come” stage (i.e. outreach and evangelism) as we are of the later stages of discipleship. We want to give teenagers without churches or those who do not know Jesus to have opportunities to to hear the gospel and respond.
As a youth pastor, I emphasized relational discipleship, student leadership, and small groups. But we also always had a few formal and informal activities in our youth ministry, to which we encouraged teenagers to invite their non-Christian friends or friends who did not have churches. We used this particular wording because we never wanted to “steal” students away from other churches. Instead, we wanted to focus on sharing the good news of the gospel with those who might not know Jesus, nor have a regular place of spiritual nurture and growth.
Our formal outreach events included an annual fall picnic with a girls powderpuff football game and a winter retreat, both of which were intentionally set up for unchurched teenagers to attend. We also regularly communicated to our students that their friends were always welcome at our small groups and informal gatherings.
Gospel Harvest
If the harvest is plentiful as Jesus, says, then how are we considering that harvest in our youth ministries? In our focus on small groups, discipleship, and teaching, we can too easily neglect the Great Commission call to “go” to students who are not yet in our youth ministries. I want to encourage my fellow youth leaders to prayerfully make evangelism part of your youth ministry mission, trusting God with the growth. May you press on to endeavor in ministry that is evangelistically minded.
With our foundation in the gospel, we do not need to fear attendance numbers, but can observe those numbers with a heart to serve the students God places in our care. Knowing we are loved in the gospel, as well as called and commissioned to “go” with Jesus, frees us to trust that he will give the growth.
- Robbins, Duffy, Youth Ministry Nuts and Bolts: Mastering the Ministry behind the Scenes, (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Pub. House, 1990). ↩︎
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