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The Problem with Youth Pastors
September 14, 2006

Greetings in the Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ,

I believe I’m old enough to have seen the advent of the youth pastor in the Assemblies of God. Maybe not its inception but the time when every church thought they had to have a youth pastor. It was the early 70s and youth were rebelling everywhere. Including kids in church. A/G leadership fell into line with the panicky leadership across the American church. I remember hearing the adults talk. The conversation flow went something like this: “I’m so glad we have young Pastor Smith. I think he’s young enough to get through to these wild kids in our church. And I’m having so much trouble with Jimmy. Now that he’s 16 and has that sports car we bought him, he’s gallivanting all over the country with a different girl every night. And some of those girls are not good girls. I think they may be a bad influence on him. But, I think that new youth pastor will really help!”

What was mainly a parental line of thinking has now graduated to institutional thinking. The youth pastor is now a must for any congregation if they’re to be successful! Didn’t you know?

First, let me say that this is NOT an attack on youth pastors. Not even close. I thank God for every godly young pastor that comes to a church and inspires the kids there to get hold of God Himself! No, this is an attack on the parental and institutional line of thinking behind what I call the “youth pastor security blanket.”

The reason behind those “wild kids” back in the 70s was never the lack of youth pastors. It was parents! It is still parents…pastors! Consider this: when I was a kid attending Youth Group (back then we were still hick enough to call it Christ’s Ambassadors), despite the best efforts of a VERY involved youth pastor and his wife, the bad kids pretty much stayed bad. And the funny thing is that the good kids stayed good. And every youth pastor I’ve talked to since then validates that experience. And they’re frustrated by it. They tell me that if the parents had paid more attention to their children and put more emphasis on their own marriage and their kid’s spiritual upbringing when they were toddlers and elementary school kids, then these youth pastors wouldn’t have to spend so much time trying to bail Youth Group kids out of jail, finding them homes for unwed mothers and getting them off of drugs. The bad kids wouldn’t have turned out bad the youth pastors say! Hmmmmm.

Makes me think of a boat load of Scripture. For example, Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” And then Deuteronomy 6:4-7 says, “Hear O Israel: THE LORD our GOD is ONE LORD. And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.”

It was my father who taught me about God. Oh, to be sure he talked about God all the time. When we played ball, he’d see the hand of God. When we walked in our big garden, he’d remark about the amazing Creation of God. He’d point at a sunset and tell me that God did that. But, even more than that, my dad lived what he talked. I remember him finding someone’s cash on a grocery store floor once and he figured out a way to get it back to its rightful owner. I saw him countless times telling a cashier that they’d given him too much money back. I remember when I stole a candy bar at age 4. He heard me unwrapping it in the back seat of the car (it was dark; I just knew that there was no way my parents would find me out). Was he too embarrassed to do anything? No! He marched me right back into the store with my once-bitten candy bar. At the possible expense of his good family name, he made me apologize to the cashier that served us for stealing “her” candy bar and made me give it back and pay for it! As you can see, I never forgot that lesson. I learned that “Thou shalt not steal” was a sacred commandment to my pa.

I learned the commands to husbands in Ephesians 5 by watching how my dad treated my mom. If you wanted to shorten your life, all you had to do in my family was sass my mom in my dad’s presence. Ouch! I watched how he would always open the door for my mom, would always seat her first at a restaurant. I used to tease him, but watched with great security as he would give my mom a “mushy” kiss every time he headed off to work in the morning and when he came home at night. And it was my dad who led family devotions. I saw that it was important to read the Bible and to memorize it by watching my dad insist on the same for himself.

Pastors, have you taken steps and preached sermons to ensure that your parents (especially dads) understand how serious their responsibility is? There is no youth pastor alive that will cure the ills caused by spiritually neglectful and lazy parents! Have you told them that God will hold them accountable for the eternity of their children? And more than catching them with great preaching about parenting on Sunday morning, have you instituted intentional parent mentoring opportunities in your church? Do you have a parenting Sunday school teacher in your adult Christian education curriculum? Or several if you have a larger church? Is attending a parenting class mandatory for membership in your church? And since a bad marriage makes for the worst parenting, do you also make a marriage class prerequisite to church membership? Further, do you start with young parents of toddlers? New parents are the children of the parenting crowd. The principle of Proverbs 22:6 applies to them too—it’s best to teach ‘em when they’re young!

And if you have none of these, it’s not time to panic. God is not caught by surprise. He knows what you need. Ask Him to provide you with a godly couple or couples who are passionate about each other and their own children to teach other couples how to be the same. God cares about this a lot more than we do…appeal to Him. Your greatest evangelistic tool will never be TV ads, radio spots, gimmicks and marketing that are so slick and popular today. Instead, healthy rams and ewes produce the most lambs. Healthy families beget healthy churches. Sick families make for sick churches. And lots of sick families just mean that we have a great, big sick church! Healthy youth groups have the best chance of winning lost kids from bad families by outnumbering them with godly kids. And what happened to the idea of the really godly parents in the church adopting and teaching the potentially wayward friends of their children how to follow after God? By feeding them pizza and the Bread of Life often and regularly…

Here’s a message for my friends at A/G headquarters: what about instituting a call for parenting pastors and marriage pastors as assistants to our pastors out there? And if a congregation can’t afford more than one assistant, encourage them to get a marriage and parenting pastor BEFORE they get a youth pastor. My dad used to say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And what about encouraging pastors everywhere to make marriage and parenting classes as prerequisites to church membership? Are we truly serious about the sanctity and importance of marriage? Are we truly concerned about the eternal importance of parenting? Then, let’s put our money where our mouth is! And since we don’t have this yet, what about a massive prayer campaign asking God to raise up pastors whose calling is to teach good marriage relationships and proper parenting?

Senior pastors--make your youth pastor’s job easy: fix your parents!


Your Humble Servant for the Gospel’s Sake,

Brother Mike

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