Parents Standing In The Gap

Many of you who frequent this blog know that Blake and I are active youth ministry leaders. Blake is a middle-school pastor and I am a Discipleship Coordinator for both middle and high school. We have shared our philosophy of youth ministry in many of our blog posts since we started. In a nutshell, the Bible teaches that parents are the primary disciplers of their children and youth pastors should equip parents to play this role instead of usurping parental authority.

Last night Blake, Steve (our head youth pastor), Joel (our high school director), and myself put our money where our mouth is. We had a discipleship kick-off reception and invited parents and students to come. Our intent was to initiate a Bible study/reading plan and to inform parents of what we expected of them. Going into last night we were short leaders for some of our discipleship groups. So we informed our parents that it was primarily their job and not ours to see that their kids get discipled. We told our parents that we will not exercise a drop-off youth ministry and that we expected them to volunteer to fill in gaps in our leadership team. We raised the bar and God has blessed us for it. We had over 270 parents show up for the meeting, and the vast majority of them instead of chafing at our admonition, became engaged and energized. I would have been happy if only 10 or 20 families had come on board, but God had other plans.

My point is this, had we continued to do youth ministry at the status quo, we would never have seen the overflow of parental support and engagement like we saw last night. If you are a youth pastor and are doing the dog and pony show to keep kids engaged, stop. Stop now. Read Deuteronomy Chapter 6, challenge your parents to fulfill their God-given role, stop running a drop-off youth ministry, place expectations on your parents. If the baseball team, the soccer team, the pta, and all the other groups have expectations of your parents why should we as pastors be any different. If anything we should be at the top of the pecking order because the future of their children hangs in the balance. It's time that we demand that our parents stand in the gap. And the good news is I think that many of them are ready.