Incentivizing Discipleship
How do we motivate students to read the Bible, invite friends, and participate in youth group consistently? This is an honest challenge many youth workers have asked for decades.
Rewarding students with incentives has become one of the more common methods employed by churches. When they memorize Bible verses, they earn a small reward. When they report a “gospel conversation” with someone at school or bring a friend to an event, their name gets entered into a raffle to win a pair of airpods. These kinds of incentives are intended to encourage students to test the waters with practices we’ve encouraged them to do, in order to help them begin a meaningful habit that will continue after the incentive is offered.
This article was spurred on by a question asked in the YPT Facebook Group that received a lot of insightful comments from other group members. Kyle Bailey, a youth pastor in the Chicago area, asked (shared with his permission):
Hey all! I am wrestling with adding incentives into our group of students. I am being asked to consider rewards and prizes (money off of camp, airpods, etc.) to incentivize students to engage in quiet time, inviting friends to Jesus and/or youth group, etc. It seems like I am using shallow motivations to get engagement from the kids. I care deeply about the gospel, discipleship, and kids’ spiritual growth. I think I can do this in a way that does not make us a shallow youth group, but I don't want the shallow messaging to undercut the deep discipleship that should take place. I would like your thoughts. Have you done this? Is this a great idea? Terrible? Is there a way to do this well?
Even the way Kyle asks his question shows one of the things I love about this YPT group - a desire to be thoughtful and intentional about the theological foundation driving our ministry. Youth pastor theologians want to think biblically and theologically about their ministry.
Here are a few of the comments (slightly edited) from others in the group.
“I would also argue you have to be really careful about what this is and how you achieve it. Many ‘reward’ systems don’t just build healthy habits; they indoctrinate in gross materialism, build a consumer mentality to church, and don’t train for long term intrinsic motivation.” (Tim Beilharz)
“I have used incentives for getting money off camp costs. For example, read this book and you get x amount of money off your camp cost. It went really well and bore good fruit in the students taking ownership over their summer camp. I get the heebie-jeebies about doing this for the spiritual disciplines.” (Derek Brown)
“Our greatest objective should be for our students to treasure Jesus above all else. I have never been able to see how external incentives help us pursue that objective. THAT (knowing and treasuring Jesus) is the WHY. Do these things so that you may receive the essence of blessing, the essence of treasure, God himself.” (Jason Engle)
“I would steer away from incentives for spiritual growth (quiet time, Bible verse memorization, leading someone to Christ). It also depends on age group, for middle school maybe for things like inviting a friend, answering a question, being willing to read a passage to the group - I would consider it and do sometimes use these methods. In high school, incentives, especially big and expensive ones, really don't work and come off a bit childish. Accountability and relational encouragement is a far better incentive.” (Dan Istvanik)
“A fundamental problem, as I see it, is that while we intend for incentives to be means to the end of God, students can too easily get it backwards, against our intentions: *God becomes the means* to the end of the incentive. e.g., ‘I will give them gift cards so that they read their Bibles’—while they think, ‘I will read my Bible so that I can get a gift card.’” (Chad Ryan)
“Jesus is both the incentive and the reward. By incentivizing something that should be a learned discipline you are simply modifying behavior instead of developing character and competency. If Jesus himself is not reward enough, then your students will never understand the Gospel nor will they desire to grow in maturity. They will remain nominal Christian’s who are always looking for “what’s in it for me” benefits. Reinforcing behavior modification in kids and youth only reinforces our sinful nature, our own selfishness, which is also completely contrary to the Gospel.” (Craig Vickerman)
“I've had some strong Christian parents try this with their children. I am not planning on doing this for my children, but their thought was that if they can get their children experiencing connection to the Holy Spirit by reading their Bible then that will catch their hearts. And then this will last into adulthood. Sometimes we just need to experience reading the Bible before we know how powerful it can be. But generally speaking, and speaking from a programmatic point of view I don't see this being a great idea. ‘What you win them with is what you win them to.’” (Josh King)
Reviewing these comments (and others I didn’t have space to include) I think there are a few guiding principles to inform the way we promote spiritual growth in students.
You cannot love God and money. Using material rewards for spiritual disciplines will feed materialism, not spirituality. Teenagers are already wired to crave worldly goods. Let’s not confuse them by making worldliness seem like a spiritual reward.
Christ is the best reward. Let’s lead and teach in a way that holds out the beauty and faithfulness of Christ to students, so they desire intimacy with him.
Not all incentives are the same. There’s a difference between incentivizing the spiritual disciplines and incentives to defray the cost of camp. There’s also a difference between tossing a students some chocolate for reading that week’s Bible passage and offering a big prize for students who read the Bible every day for a month.
Once again, theology drives methodology. This mantra has proven true over and over again… moving both forwards and backwards. Moving forward, this means our theology drives our ministry practice; and moving backwards, it means our ministry practices reveal what our theology really is. There are times when our professed-theology and actual-theology are misaligned, and it seems the issue of incentives is one of those areas when this can become apparent.
I trust this conversation will help youth pastor theologians think carefully about what discipleship looks like in your ministry, evaluate where your students’ spiritual maturity currently lays, and then build a biblically-sound plan to help them start moving forward.
