I took a 20 year old course on youth ministry and here are my thoughts.

 

In the spring of 2020, when most people were finding more free time in their schedules thanks to a greatly minimized commute to work, social media began to fill up with all sorts of ideas on what to do with all of this extra time (in addition to Tiger King hot takes). One of these ideas that piqued my interest came from The Gospel Coalition. It was to take online classes to develop more skills and grow in knowledge while you had the time. Along with this idea, they shared several courses that were freely available on their website, one of which was a course on youth ministry from Covenant Theological Seminary. I wanted to take the course since ministering to youth is how I want to spend my life, but I did not have the newfound abundance of free time. I had just started a new job learning the meaning of "essential worker" and quickly learning how to do high-tech ministry, so I saved the course for later.

"Later," came around after the big post wedding move across the state to my wife's new school. I wanted to have the freedom to look for a great job instead of being subject to the first available position, so I planned for a "mini-retirement" — an idea from Tim Ferris's The Four Hour Work Week (which was part of my pandemic reading). The short explanation of a "mini-retirement" is to save up money to cover expenses during a temporary period of intentional unemployment during which you can focus on personal projects, goals, or luxury. Luxury isn't my thing, so personal projects and goals were my focus, the main goal being to find a great church to minister with. It would be hypocritical of me to look for the "best" church to work at if I'm not working on growing to be the "best" pastor that God intends. So, since I now had the time and the proper motivation, I dug the youth ministry course out of my archive, sharpened my pencils, printed off the study guides, and got to work.

This is not meant to be a comprehensive review of the course or even a distillation of the main points (though the packet of volunteer job descriptions is worth the cost of admission). I'm really just using this as a way to process my thoughts, so please enjoy this flow of consciousness meandering.

I have the sophomoric tendency to doubt the validity of youth ministry trainings that are older than a decade, because each new generation has their own quirks, so methods of ministry that worked in the past may not work today. At the time of this writing, I am 24 years old. I would have been in pre-k when this course was originally taught. Following that line of thought out, the students in this class would have been preparing to minister to students like me. How can something written before the first YouTube video help me minister to teens with TikTok accounts? Can I minister to students the same way that my youth pastor did? Or the same way that my grandparents did with their Sunday School class? There was an answer to those questions given in this course, and it greatly challenged that sophomoric tendency.

In a lecture early on, the professor proposed the idea that the best book (outside of the Bible itself) for youth ministry is your high school yearbook. The homework assignment was to take a look at your yearbook and to think about what life was like for you back then. What did you want in life? What did you think about? What did you feel like you needed most? While they might not be identical, as a youth pastor, your students will be going through the same phase of life as you did. They think about the same things. They might want the same things. They definitely need the same things as you did. Ultimately, for all of their quirks, idiosyncrasies, new technologies, slang, and cultural differences, each generation has the same core needs.

There are two things that every generation of students needs. Every generation of students needs to be loved and every generation of students needs the salvation that Jesus offers.

You could look to the psychological hierarchy of needs to see that love and acceptance are one of the first necessities in life, but I find it better to look inward and see the need in yourself. Think about the first time your voice cracked when you were talking to a crush, or when you hit a growth spurt and your feet suddenly didn't work right at soccer practice, or when you had the mood swings that come from a brain set on fire by new hormones. All of the changes going on are saying that something must be wrong with you. If you are anything like me, you wanted to hide under the largest rock in existence until it is all over. Or maybe you had the opposite response and started experimenting with behavior to see what made the cool kids like you. Both responses, hiding away or acting out, are rooted in the need for love and acceptance. Youth pastors have the unique opportunity to love their students through the most dense period of change in their lives and remind them that the best part of puberty is that it doesn't last forever. But love and acceptance from other people isn't enough to meet the needs of their soul.

Every generation since the first has dealt with the same problem of sin. This sin separates them from God's acceptance, because a perfect God can't accept imperfect followers by their own merit. Every generation reaches toward perfection, but it is just out of our reach. Think about when you were a child and you had the picture in mind that you wanted to draw, but when you put the pencil to the paper, your hand couldn't cooperate with your brain and the pencil never made the right lines and you ended up with a picture that was less than perfect compared to the idea in your mind. No generation has been able to be perfect enough for God without Jesus. Youth need love and acceptance, but they need Jesus even more. The gospel is relevant to every generation of students, because every generation of students has the same need for the salvation that Jesus made available when He took the punishment meant for us on the cross.

I guess if I were to tie this up with a bow, I would say that my biggest takeaway from this two decade old course is that methods may need to change for different generations, but the principles guiding youth ministry are good for all generations. Like I wrote earlier, every generation needs to be loved and every generation needs Jesus. Both can be met by the Spirit-filled church.

As a post-script, the course can be found at: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/course/youth-ministry/

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