Perspectives on Family Ministry

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Timothy Paul Jones, Timothy Paul Jones

• Publisher: B&H Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781535932806
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Every church is called to some form of family ministry, but this calling requires far more than adding another program to an already-packed schedule. The most effective family ministries refocus every church process to engage parents in discipling their children and to draw family members together instead of pulling them apart. In this second edition, Jones expands the definition of family ministry, and broadens the book's focus to address urban perspectives and family ministry in diverse settings.

PART 1

Foundations for Family Ministry

by Timothy Paul Jones

Chapter 1

Confessions of a Well-Meaning Youth Minister

“THIS IS WEDNESDAY night youth group. We don’t do Bibles here.”

After six years as a pastor, perhaps my life had grown too predictable. For reasons that weren’t readily apparent at the time, God had moved me from the pastorate to youth ministry. It wasn’t quite the move I had anticipated as I completed degrees in pastoral ministry and biblical studies with an abundance of electives in church history. Yet it was, without any doubt, God’s direction. I was confident that I would do well. I had, after all, been trained in the latest and best methods of Christian education during the studies that led to my master of divinity degree. So, I began the process of searching for a student ministry position.

A few months later, a midsize congregation near Tulsa, Oklahoma, called me as their youth minister. I moved from proclaiming the Scriptures from the pulpit each Sunday morning to routing hormonally charged couples out of closets during lock-ins, coming up with mathematical formulas for how many middle schoolers it takes to consume a medium pizza, and explaining to the maintenance committee how the moshing that resulted in a six-foot hole in the drywall really was congruent with the church’s overall ministry strategy.

It was a promising position. The youth had their own activities, separate from the rest of the congregation, and the church budget provided funds to support these activities. The church was in the process of building an exclusive domain for the youth in an upper floor of the family life center so that neither youth nor adults disturbed one another. What’s more, my predecessor in this position had attracted 60 or more students each Wednesday evening, and more than 100 students each year for church camp. Attendance on Wednesday nights had dropped into the twenties after the previous minister’s departure, but everyone in the congregation seemed certain that, as soon as they called a new youth minister, the numbers would race back to their previous peak.

They were wrong.

On my first Wednesday evening at the church, I received my first hint that this task might be more difficult than I’d imagined. After a couple of games, I gathered the students for some high-energy worship songs. Worship didn’t seem to be part of what they expected, but I persisted anyway. At the end of the musical set, I leaned my guitar against an amplifier, lifted my Bible over my head, and asked, “How many of you brought your Bibles?”

At first no one responded. And that’s when he said it.

A senior in high school, a five-year veteran of this particular youth group.

“This is Wednesday night youth group. We don’t do Bibles here,” he said. “And we don’t come here to sing either. We’re here to have fun.”

In the silence that followed his statement, my first thought was simply, God, what am I going to do?

Doing My Best

That question would wend its way through my mind many more times in the upcoming months. Over the next few weeks, I persisted in my focus, and I discovered that this high school senior wasn’t alone in his motivations for attending youth events. Numbers plunged into the low double digits. Parents complained to the pastor that their children weren’t having enough fun. Church members who were unaware that the previous minister’s weekly program mostly consisted of an hour of games, horseplay, and occasional hazing, with a devotional tacked at the end, wondered why youth attendance on Wednesdays hadn’t spiraled into the seventies and beyond.

What’s worse, it wasn’t only on Wednesdays that fewer youth were showing up. The previous youth minister provided pizza and games after church nearly every Sunday evening. Wanting to train students in spiritual disciplines, I plugged a Bible study into that time slot. Only a couple of students were willing to engage in such an endeavor, despite the food and snacks that my wife and I prepared each week. Once the students discovered I didn’t plan to sponsor such a free-for-all fun event every Sunday night, youth attendance plummeted on Sundays too. The ones who did make an appearance on Sundays huddled together in a corner in the back of the worship center, with a strong interest in whispering and little interest in anything the pastor had to say.

I spent most of that first year torn between the conflicting expectations of the pastor, parents, students, and my own conscience. The pastor wanted greater numbers of youth and peace with the parents of these youth. The youth wanted a constant string of entertaining events. The parents wanted entertaining events too, but they also expected these activities, in some inexplicable way, to result in their children’s eventual spiritual maturity. It seemed as if, from the perspective of these parents, I was a professional provider of goods whom they had hired for the tasks of discipling and entertaining their children.

For a while I remained passionate about my perceived responsibility to serve as the professional disciple-maker in these students’ lives. Then, after a few months of frustration, I just wanted out. I tried to quit perhaps a half dozen times during the first couple of years. I searched for other positions, but God persisted in interrupting every escape route. So, I stuck it out, torn amid conflicting expectations that I could not seem to fulfill.

Near the end of my first year, I turned toward the heavens and raised a white flag of surrender. Maybe, I concluded, I’m just not cut out for this ministry; but God, until you move me, I will do my best to do it well. No matter what, I will work my hardest to do in this place whatever it is that you want me to do.

And I did.

What If Boredom Isn’t Always Bad?

The founder of Young Life once commented, “It’s a sin to bore a kid with the gospel.”¹ Is this statement true? How has this statement been applied in youth and children’s ministries? How have these attitudes affected ministries to children and youth? After considering your own response to these questions, read what Mark DeVries has to say in response to the Young Life attitude: “It might be more of a sin to suggest to young people that the Christian life is always fun and never boring. Keeping teenagers from ever being bored in their faith can actually deprive them of opportunities to develop the discipline and perseverance needed to live the Christian life. It is precisely in those experiences that teenagers might describe as ‘boring’ that Christian character is often formed.”² Do you agree with DeVries? Why or why not?

Questioning the Assumptions

The student ministry did seem to improve during my second year. I established relationships with the administrators in a nearby public school and led many middle schoolers to commit their lives to Christ. I trained a tiny cluster of committed youth to serve as spiritual leaders. The youth group grew not in leaps and bounds but in a steady and sustained way. From the perspective of my congregation and other nearby churches, I seemed to be building a successful student ministry. Growth was happening more slowly than the congregation had hoped, but it was happening.

And still something wasn’t quite right.

In the first place, so much of the student ministry seemed to center on my capacities to disciple the youth. At first this felt quite pleasant. After all, when students had needs, many of them came to me first, even before they went to their parents. Yet, as the youth group continued to grow, I quickly discovered that I could not sustain the spiritual lives of this many students. There was also the fact that the fragmentation in so many students’ families overwhelmed our efforts to effect transformation in the students’ lives. And then there was the way the youth identified anything involving the adults of the church as “boring.” My first response was to create youth-focused alternatives to every adult activity, but somehow this didn’t draw the students to deeper commitment. In fact, it actually seemed to fuel their immaturity.

Over time I realized that the problems ran deeper than the spiritual immaturity of this particular group of youth. The difficulties ran even deeper than my immaturity—though, admittedly, that had been a factor as well. The problems had to do with how I and the church envisioned and defined successful student ministry.

That’s when I began to ask some painful questions about student ministry that my classes in Christian education and church leadership had not equipped me to answer. What if, I wondered, this separation between students and adults—something that I was trained to see as a solution—has actually been part of the problem? What if God never intended youth ministry staff members to become the primary sustainers of students’ spiritual lives? What if something is profoundly wrong with the entire way the church has structured ministries to youth and children? What if the reason so many ministers are bordering on burnout is because our ministry models are fundamentally flawed?

I didn’t find answers to all of these questions during my years in youth ministry. Some of the answers came later, after I was privileged to become the associate pastor and then the senior pastor in the same congregation where I first served as youth minister (a church that, to this day, remains one of the most wonderful congregations of believers I have ever served). Truth be told, I’m still working toward complete answers to a couple of the questions. After a decade of research and consultation with hundreds of pastors, churches, parents, youth, and children, however, I have made a good bit of progress. It’s my hope that my progress on this journey will help you serve more effectively in the church where God has placed you.

The first step on this journey may sound a little macabre, though: It entails learning how to murder a one-eared mouse.

What Causes Youth Ministers to Quit?

For many years youth ministers tended to remain only a year or two in the same congregation. In the twenty-first century, youth ministers are staying longer in their congregations. A 2002 survey of full-time youth ministers revealed an average tenure in each congregation of four years, seven months. The most frequent reasons given for leaving a church included inadequate salaries and conflicts with a senior pastor.³

One-Eared Mice, Well-Meaning Ministers, and the Octopus without a Brain

In the late 1980s, one student minister depicted the relationship between his ministry and the rest of his congregation as a “one-eared Mickey Mouse.”⁴ To understand this analogy, imagine with me the most basic depiction of Mickey Mouse in three circles—the two smaller circles represent his ears, while the larger circle is his head. Now, in your mental image, lop off one of those ears. Suppose that the head of the cartoon mouse represents the church as a whole, and the one remaining ear represents the church’s student ministry.

That’s the “one-...

Table of contents

• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Part 1: Foundations for Family Ministry
• Part 2: The Practice of Family Ministry
• Conclusion Pursuing and Practicing the Discipline of Diversity
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index