Youth Ministry and the Means of Grace

The practices we perpetuate in our youth ministries teach and form our students in their Christian walk. What we teach as important, and what we demonstrate as vital, shapes our students in powerful ways. Because of this, we want to make sure we’re thinking holistically and critically about the different methods and practices we use in our ministry to students. We might ask questions like: What is this teaching students about sanctification? How are my students being taught to grow in godliness? Can my students see from the Word how they are to grow in godliness? Are my methods contradicting my theology? Does my ministry demonstrate my trust in Scripture? How are my methods being influenced by the surrounding culture?

The Need for Change

With these questions in mind, we should take a snapshot of current youth ministry methodology. There is a strong tension that exists. Suffice to say, there is a vast difference between what young people want and what young people need. That tension is often what lies at the heart of youth ministry. Due to our consumer-driven culture, the desires of youth are often fed through entertainment. As we’ve already discussed, this isn’t a recent development—the blood has been in the water for some time.

During the 1940s, the Youth for Christ movement pioneered entertainment-driven youth ministry. They tried to Christianize the youth entertainment of their day with a set list of vaudeville-style gimmicks: a performing “gospel horse”, a faux Frank Sinatra, and a fun-focused message. Thomas Bergler states, “For the leaders of the Youth for Christ, Christianity was increasingly becoming a product to be sold to customers via entertaining promises of personal fulfillment—with an added benefit of saving the world”.(1)

It’s easy for us to identify these approaches as “gimmicks”, being removed by several decades. However, hindsight is always 20/20. It’s especially difficult to identify such forms as “gimmicky” when we’re immersed in them. And today, many youth ministries are immersed in an updated version of the same thing. Yet, we often lack the self-awareness to realize when we’ve been guilty of the same thing.

The numbers show us that we’re in a crisis mode, both yesterday and today. Study after study, from LifeWay to TIME magazine, states that the church is losing youth in droves. This can easily put us in panic mode, and often cause us to double-down on our current youth ministry practices. With no other options, and numbers staring us in the face, we are given to reinforce what we’ve always done. However, it has become increasingly clear that the silver bullet of youth ministry is not found in these past approaches, or our current manifestations.

Fast-forward to today, many are lamenting the state of an entertainment-driven youth ministry. Any minister trying to chase a higher shock-factor will quickly come to the realization that the law of diminished returns applies to youth ministry. Each time we do something bigger and better, we are then expected only to top it with the next activity. Entertainment-driven models attract by promising short-term, numeric results, while claiming to “reach kids for Christ.” 

However, these same ministries often vacate the second half of the Great Commission: “teaching them all the things [Christ] has commanded [us].” With such an emphasis on engaging the students and grabbing their attention, we’ve often failed to lead them into a deeper discipleship. This forces us to ask, how do we know we are reaching students if we are unable to see them mature in Christ?

To steal a phrase from Brian H. Cosby, we can begin reform in our youth ministries by “giving up the gimmicks.” Founder of Young Life Jim Rayburn infamously wrote, “It’s a sin to bore a kid”.(2) While Rayburn was most likely advocating for entertainment, Cosby notes, “[Youth] are bored because they are living from one pleasure high to the next. They’re not encouraged to live out, for example, the content and method of ministry service.” He continues, “America’s youth not only need a ministry that seeks to communicate God’s grace through the teaching of the Word, administration of the [ordinances], a life of prayer, gospel-motivated ministry, and grace-centered community—they actually want such a ministry”.(3)

What is better than giving students what they want is giving them what they need—and a holistic means of grace ministry does exactly that. We might pause here and ask, what are the means of grace? These means of grace include the Word, ordinances, prayer, service (ministry), and discipleship in the church. These are the very means by which God reveals His steadfast, committed love and grace to those who put their faith in Him. That is not to say that they work ex opera operato, or magically produce results. Rather, God will and does work through these means because He has ordained them for the building of the church. These are the means we see prescribed in Scripture for not only teens, but all Christians, to grow in godliness. These are not common grace means, but special grace means—that is, grace made effectual in believers’ lives via God’s redemptive grace. As a Christian is made new by Christ and His Spirit participates in each of these means they will begin to love God’s Word more, love their neighbor more, and hunger for God more.

What is undergirding these means of grace is an unashamed commitment to the sufficiency of Scripture in the life of our ministry. One should note that all five of these means of grace are biblically founded and were at work within the early Church. One of the clearest places that this is seen in Scripture is in Acts 2:42, “And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (emphasis added) While we see each of the means clearly laid out through Scripture, we see here how the early church practiced these in conjunction with one another. As we allow these means of grace to become our “strategy” for ministry, we begin to see their sufficiency, and ultimately the sufficiency of Christ and His Word.

This article is a slightly-edited excerpt from Christopher Talbot’s book: Remodeling Youth Ministry: A Biblical Blueprint for Ministering to Students (Welch College Press, 2017)

[1] Thomas E. Bergler, The Juvenilization of American Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2012), 35, 52.

[2] Jim Rayburn quoted in Andrew Root and Kenda Creasy Dean, The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press 2011), 51.

[3] Brian H. Cosby, Giving Up Gimmicks: Reclaiming Youth Ministry from an Entertainment Culture (Phillipsburg: P & R Publishing 2012), 18.