Stop Segregating Youth

WHEN TEENAGERS MATTER

They Become Part of the Church

Time and again people say, “We are losing our young people from the church.” It’s time for a reality check. In many cases, our young people have never been part of the church. Even when we have developed seemingly strong comprehensive student ministries, we often relegate teenage contributions to areas of service within the student ministries themselves.

More often than not, teenagers are segregated from the adult population of the church into specialized, “age-appropriate” programs and are only occasionally put on display for the adult congregation during a Youth Sunday or a mission-trip commissioning ceremony. They have grown up in the church building week after week. They know the church property like their home. They participate enthusiastically in their specialized programs. But they have never been assimilated into the larger intergenerational community of the church.

Many teenagers in the church rarely attend an intergenerational worship service, opting instead for the homogeneous youth worship program that has become a church of its own within the church. In at least one instance, I have witnessed a church move Sunday morning student ministry programs to the same hour that the contemporary worship service was being held in the sanctuary for logistical reasons. The result was that the vast majority of teenagers no longer attended the church worship service, rejecting the earlier traditional style service and choosing their youth program—consisting of worship, teaching, and small groups—over the contemporary service in the sanctuary.

This phenomenon is nothing new to student ministry, as the seeds of this separatist culture are planted early on in children’s ministry. In decades past, it was common for children to participate in the first part of a worship service, come forward for a children’s sermon and then leave for their age-appropriate programs. While some churches still follow this pattern, more and more churches—often growing churches in need of seating for adults—have chosen to remove children from the worship service altogether. Children are provided with their own specialized programs that include worship, teaching and small groups. Parents drop their children off before the worship service and retrieve them afterward, thus providing both adults and children with highly satisfying worship experiences on Sunday morning, albeit in different locations.

The pattern then becomes one in which children grow up in a “children’s church,” then move into the “middle school church,” and then to the “high school church.” The tragic result of this trend is that students graduate from high school having outgrown the “high school church” and having rarely experienced an intergenerational worship service or “adult church” and they have no place to go. If they go to college, they may replace their student ministry with college Christian fellowship but rarely attend church. Once they graduate from college, with few age-appropriate options remaining, these emerging adults find themselves orphan Christians without a faith community. Keep reading