How to Equip Parents to Disciple their Teens

Student pastor, if you want to be an effective shepherd, then you’re going to need to understand how to equip parents to disciple their teens.

We are fighting a culture where parents come, they bring their kids, they drop them off and say, “Hey, you work for the church, you’re a professional, disciple my kid, because that’s your job, and then we’ll pick them up after.” And we’re fighting against that because they have professionals they go to for every other thing, from travel ball team to AP teachers or whatever it is.

1. How can youth pastors help parents see their responsibility to discipline their own kids?
2. What about parents who are unbelievers?

We have to remind the parents that no one is better equipped to disciple their kids than they are.

God has put these students in their families, so we have to remind them that they’ve been given a biblical mandate. The big mandate is in Deuteronomy 6, and continually reminding them of that is so important, as well as Psalm 78 and also Ephesians 6 where Paul talks about disciplining them and raising them in the instruction of the Lord.

When it comes to students who don’t have a mom and dad who love the Lord, we want to as a student ministry, equip parents to disciple their students, and to disciple students whose parents won’t. We know that there are always going to be students in the ministry without believing parents. But we want to primarily equip those parents who are there because that’s gonna go a long way. If we invest our time in doing that, it’s going to go a whole lot longer than if we’re just spending time with those students.

We get one or two hours a week with them and there are 168 hours in a week, we’re not going to be able to disciple them in one or two hours. That’s the role of the family, the parents.

Practically Equipping parents

The church was never meant to replace the family, but to enhance it.

And so one thing we have done practically is once a quarter, we do a thing called Parent Equip Night. Everyone’s schedules are crazy, and everyone is busy. Between PTA call-ins, school call-ins, sports practices, and extracurricular activities, it’s difficult to add anything else. Adding even one more thing to the schedule is nuts, and nobody’s going to attend that. So we decided to do Parent Equip Nights simultaneously while students are meeting. Our parents are already coming to the church to drop their kids off, so why don’t we provide something for them as well?

Sometimes we heard that they were just sitting in the parking lot reading a book. Let’s equip them instead.

Equip Parents to Lead in Family Worship

So once a quarter, on a Wednesday night, we will have a Parent Equip Night and each time we choose different topics to cover.

For example, in the past few years we’ve done Parenting in a Pornographic Culture and Praying the Bible for Your Teens. We’ve covered family worship, how to lead spiritually in your home, how to come alongside teenagers, understanding their culture, loving them with the gospel, and Christ-centered parenting. We’ve done a lot of research, and every time we do one of these things, we provide resources for them. One of the things we do is remind them every single time, that we’re not trying to teach them how to raise their teenagers, we are trying to come alongside them and equip them to disciple their students.

That’s what the local church has been called to do. We can do that! We can resource them, and we can teach them.

Equip Parents to Understand Cultural Terms, Trends, and Nuances

One thing we’ve learned is that some of these parents don’t understand their students’ culture.

We’ve done a session on technology before and thrown acronyms on the screen, and many of these parents had heard their kids say these things without knowing what they meant. So we teach them the lingo. We teach them to look out for certain apps on their kid’s phone. You know the little app that looks like a calculator? That’s an app where you can hide secret pictures, and these parents never knew. We did a session on parenting in a pornographic culture, teaching them so that they’re not ignorant about the fact that students are learning about or seeing pornography as early as seven years old.

One mom called me that night and said through tears,

“Thank you so much for doing this. This is a crisis mode. We’ve been focusing on our 14 and 15-year-old boys, and we were totally overlooking our 11-year-old daughter. Because you told us to go look at all their devices, we found pornography all over her iPad, and she’s been addicted to pornography for two years.”

We got to walk with that family through that.

But if we had never done anything like that, we would never have been able to come alongside them and help them walk through that situation. As for praying the Bible for your teenagers, it starts with them. We can’t expect the students to do what we’re not doing as parents. If we’re not loving the Lord in worship, if we’re not growing in our own personal walk of faith, if kids don’t see us in the word or praying with our spouses or praying with them, then why would we expect them to do that? And so we teach them. A lot of people don’t know how to pray through the Bible, how to pray the Psalms, and how to use what God has given us.

So we teach them, but we’re also equipping them at the same time.

Additional Resources

Here are a couple of books that will help you equip your parents to disciples the students in your youth group:

Alongside: Loving Teenagers With the Gospel

One of my buddies wrote a book called Alongside: Loving Teenagers With the Gospel, and I highly encourage it, it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read on student ministry. He’s extremely practical, and will have you laughing and crying. In the book, there are practical things for parents, as well as for youth leaders or youth ministry workers. It’s very simple, very down-to-earth. So I highly recommend it.

Christ-Centered Parenting

And then Russell Moore and some guys in the ERLC put together Christ-Centered Parenting, which deals with complex cultural issues, and that book is incredible. Whether you’re in kids’ ministry or student ministry, really any ministry, I highly encourage you to pick that up. It’s very practical, talking about things like:

• This is how you have a conversation with a kid at this age…
• This is what you can ask them…
• This is what you can expect…”

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