How to Cast the Vision of Student Ministry To Your Church

How can student pastors get the church to buy into the vision of the student ministry?

If we want our your ministries to grow in a healthy direction, where students are being discipled holistically, then we’ve got to figure out how to cast the vision of student ministry to our church. Everyone from your pastor to the senior adults should be aware of the “why” behind the youth ministry.

When you’re in a church, what you’re trying to change is the culture.

It’s different than when you come in and they have that expectation. If you’re in a church and you have a certain job description, you start saying some of the things that we’ve been talking about, then it would be very easy for some of the people in that church to say, “Isn’t that what we pay you for?”

But youth ministry more than just a job description. It’s more than just pragmatism.

It starts with the senior pastor, you need to go through it and have conversations with him.

A great resource is Richard Ross’s The Senior Pastor and the Reformation of Student Ministry. It’s a great book that if you were to say, “Pastor, I respect your leadership and you swing a big bat in this congregation, now I know I’m never going to be able to out-champion anything that you do and I wouldn’t want to try. But I really want us to have a shared vision here. Would you consider going through this book with me over the course of several months and just discussing it together?”

That will unite your hearts and ministry for that.

Family Ministry Field Guide by Timothy Paul Jones is a good resource for your entire staff team, deals with the issue of breaking down silos, children’s ministry silos, youth ministry silos, and college ministry silos, to everyone kind of peeks out of their silo once a week to say, “Do we have any conflicts on the calendar? Great. Alright, let’s go back to our silo.”

We’ve got to see church ministry to the next generation holistically. Your weekly staff meeting is a great resource, if you wanna change the culture.

Go Deep and Wide

We take a deep and wide approach in our ministry.

Invest Deeply in a Few Families

Deep means that a small rudder can steer a large ship.

If you invest in one, two, or three families that are getting it and really invest in them. I mean, give them resources, make them your guinea pigs, then let them be your spokespeople to the rest of the church, the ones that stay in and give testimony about how this resource, activity or process that they did with their kids changed their family dynamics.

Antennas are going to go up all over your congregation when that happens, in a way that would never happen if you or I were up there pounding on the podium like Dwight Schrute trying to get people to listen.

Cast the Ministry Vision Wide

I’m going to give you two very practical ideas.

With wide you begin with what I would call a Discovery Team Process. Try to find a way during church meeting times to get with your senior pastor or church leadership, say, “I need four to six weeks.” Discovery Team is when you get together youth workers, children’s workers, parents of youth, and parents of children in the same room and you answer one question, “How would we do youth and children’s ministry at this church if all we had was the Bible?” You go through a process of going through Scripture in small groups, leading them to have conversations with one another, and that will snowball.

That is the number one way to get them to buy into a new vision of ministry, as if they’re part of creating it. They’re just getting into God’s Word and discovering it. You’ll have to hold some of them back if they get a hold of God’s Word in there.

Begin With Prayer

I’ve thrown so many grenades at you. Casting a new vision for student ministry in your church can start very simple — and still be effective. Here’s one softball I’ll leave you with.

Sunday at my church, we will have the ninth annual Pray For Me Sunday, where adults in the church commit to praying for a specific teenager. Groups of adults paired with groups of students of the same gender, and they pray for them throughout the whole school year. After that, they can re-up with that same student or re-enter and pray for a different student if they hadn’t connected with the first. That is the biggest softball I could give you.

What happens when you start praying for someone consistently? Your heart goes out to them. If you started with mentoring, who would be willing to mentor that skater kid who’s coming in smelling like pot on Wednesday nights? If you asked, “Anybody want to come up and mentor him?” Your church would probably begin studying their shoelaces.

But if you say “Who could pray for him?” Hands go up all over the place.

The more you pray for them, the more your heart goes out to that student. I’ve seen relationships that have been changed by prayer, and I’ve seen long-term relationships grow. One of our original students who were prayed for was this guy who was an unbeliever when he started, and recently he was a pallbearer at the funeral of the spouse of the person who first began praying for him eight years ago. That happened about six months ago. God works in those relationships.

Begin with prayer and see what God does from there.

My church website is embc.us. There are dozens of resources on there for parents, and not a single one of them has our church name on it, and the reason for that is that I want every church to be able to pick that up and use it with their own logo and their own stuff on it.

This panel discussion question was discussed during a previous youth ministry conference. Click here to listen to the entire panel discussion (of 6+ questions).