Selected Quotes from Family-Based Youth Ministry by Mark DeVries, IVP 1994

The most substantial ministry with the most long-lasting positive result is that ministry that relates to young men and women as members of families. This means we who do youth ministry are really involved in family ministry. The African saying puts it well, "It takes a village to raise a child," and the first village for every human being is the family of origin (p. 14).

The first principle of family-based youth ministry is...to equip young people to grow toward mature Christian adulthood (that is, to present them "perfect" or "complete in Christ") (p. 73).

The primary task of a family-based youth ministry is to "pass the baton" of faith formation to the extended family of the church" (p. 157).

One principal goal: to see a personal faith in Jesus Christ become the controlling reality in kids' lives (p. 20, quoted from Kevin Huggins, Parenting Adolescents).

Family-based youth ministry is more an attitude than a programming strategy (p. 188).

Our goal is not simply to socialize young people into the faith, as if somehow, by finding the right production method, we could mass-produce mature Christians. We must not delude ourselves into thinking that we can "make" teenagers into anything, particularly mature Christians. What we can do is provide a context in which they can, to borrow Eugene Peterson's wonderful expression, "acquire a taste for grace"...All we can do is plant and water...We can work with God's process to support them in the growth that only God can bring. In this sense we do not "take Christ to kids." But we do have the privilege of being included in God's revelation of himself to them (p. 163).

Family-based youth ministry is not about abandoning traditional forms of youth programming as much as it is about building the foundation of solid connections with mature Christian adults (p. 141).

Unfortunately, contemporary churches have been much more effective in providing young people with meaningful connections to the orphaning structure of the youth group than to the lifelong structure of the church. As Ben Patterson argues,

It is a sad fact of life that often the stronger the youth program in the church, and the more deeply the young people of the church identify with it, the weaker the chances are that those same young people will remain in the church when they grow too old for the youth program. Why? Because the youth program has become a subsitute for participation in the church…When the kids outgrow the youth progam, they also outgrow what they have known of the church. (p.117)

(Deut 6:4-9) God's provision for the Christian nurture of children begins with families. No mention is made in this text of the priests taking responsibility!...The Sunday-school movement itself began as an outreach to unchurched poor children. Its founders never intended for it to take over the role of Christian parents (p. 165).

The contemporary crisis in youth ministry has little to do with programming and everything to do with families. Our culture has put an incredible amount of emotional weight on the shoulders of the nuclear family, a weight which I believe families were never intended to bear alone. One of the secrets to a lasting ministry with teenagers is to find ways to undergird nuclear families with the rich support of the extended Christian family of the church and for these two formative families to work together in leading young people toward mature Christian adulthood (p. 18).

Our program succeeded in leading her to become a mature Christen teenager, but somehow failed to place her on the track toward mature Christian adulthood....[an] inability...to translate our faith to our children (pp. 24-25).

It is precisely in these experiences that teenagers might describe as "boring" that Christian character is often formed. Christian faith may begin on the mountaintop, but Christian character is formed in the crucible of pain....When young people grow up to be reactive Christian adults, they are constantly waiting for someone or something to attract them, to involve them, to impress them...If our programs are training teenagers to be reactive, immature Christians, we can expect those young people eventually to become discouraged by the difficulty and boredom of the Christian life

(pp. 27-28).

Teenagers are increasingly isolated from the adult world...leaving little opportunity for the dialogue and collaboration required for youth to learn adult values (p. 37)....The church is the one place where teenagers could logically be linked to the world of adults (p. 41)....Teenagers grow toward mature Christian adulthood as they are connected to the total body of Christ, not isolated from it (p. 43).

Teenagers will not learn the skills required of mature adults in a peer-centered youth Sunday-school class. They will not learn these skills by talking with their friends. The process occurs as the less mature repeatedly have the opportunity to observe, dialogue and collaborate with the more mature (p. 49)....Young people learn to love through the long haul as they are surrounded by adults who, over and over again, demonstrate...enduring, long-suffering love (p. 50).

We have begun to treat adolescents as adults rather than as children in transition toward adulthood....Adolescence, like childhood, is a stage that one should outgrow. The result of successfully completing adolescence is to be no longer an adolescent (p. 54)...A separate youth culture has functioned to perpetuate adolescence (p. 55)...The structures that carry young people to adulthood must become the focus of youth ministry...The most important priority a church can have is providing them with opportunities for significant dialogue and relationships with mature Christian adults. This priority does not require a massive budget or an extensive program. It does require a group of adult leaders in the church who will make the creation of relationships between adults and teenagers the central priority of the youth ministry (pp. 56-57).

Almost without exception, those young people who are growing in their faith as adults were teenagers who fit into one of two categories: either (1) they came from families where Christian growth was modeled in at least one of their parents, or (2) they had developed such significant connections with adults within the church that it had become an extended family for them. How often they attended youth events (including Sunday school and discipleship groups) was not a good predictor of which teens would and which would not grow toward Christian adulthood (p. 63).

Priority Number One: Empower Parents...

Priority Number Two: Equip the Extended Family of the Church...

As youth hear adults speaking of their own faith experiences, they begin to learn how to describe their own experience of God....(p. 65 ff).

Bob Laurent, in his study of why teenagers feel alienated from the church, found a strong connection between problems at home and adolescents who felt acutely alienated from the church...For these young people, alienation from religion had little to do with church programming...The family has always been the central faith-nurturing structure (pp. 82-83).

Over 200 years ago, Jonathan Edwards made this...recommendation:

Every Christian family ought to be as it were a little church consecrated to Christ, and wholly influenced and governed by his rule. And family education and order are some of the chief means of graces. If these fail, all other means are likely to prove ineffectual. If these are duly maintained, all the means of grace will be likely to prosper and be successful.

Christian families provide one of the two most effective lifelong nurturing structures to carry young people to mature Christian adulthood....Doing youth ministry without parents is like driving a car without the engine. From the top of a hill, this kind of car can coast at high speeds. But only for a while. Eventually it will stop. A car without an engine simply has no lasting power (p. 85).

Any model that attempts to base itself on families must take seriously three factors affecting today's parents:

1. The Immature Parent...

2. The Helpless Parent...

Parents in the church today feel threatened and out of their depth when it comes to communicating the message of the Gospel to their children. They are not only insecure in their grasp of the Gospel, they are insecure in their grasp of their children....

3. The Decline of the Family...

These cultural trends..present churches with an unparalleled opportunity to impact entire families and thereby exponentially increase their ministry to teenagers....I have never seen parents more hungry for help than they are now (p.91 ff).

In and of itself, the nuclear family is not enough, particularly in light of the tremendous pressures of our time. Every teenager needs an extended Christian family of significant adults...For many, the church may be the only Christian family they ever know (p. 98).

It is important that our youth ministries not abandon the young people who may need us most simply because they are unable to participate regularly in our programs (p. 106).

It is crucial that young people from nontraditional families feel a part of the entire church and not simply a part of the youth program (p. 112).

Our goal is to expose young people not just to Christian teachings but also to real live adult Christians who call them by name and sit in the arena of faith to cheer them on (p. 118)....In the long run, the teenagers in our churches will be impacted by significant experiences with adults much more than by the mountaintop youth-group experiences that we spend so much energy creating (p. 120).

Early believers understood that to be a Christian meant being involved in a new family. The extended Christian family (that is, the church) is not simply a safety net for those people who do not grow up in Christian homes. It is a new family which affirms and focuses our identity as believers....Only in the church will young people move from the idealistic pseudo-faith of individualistic Christianity into the real world of following Christ alongside other imperfect people (pp. 121-122)

Christian discipleship is a team sport. It always happens in the context of Christian community (p. 148)....Because the god of individualism pressures us to program to the lowest common denominator, we seldom raise the expectations high enough for teenagers to experience real community. Real community means real responsibility for each other. It means a commitment to be there for each other even when the schedule is tight and when motivation is low (p. 151)...If we hope to move our young people toward mature Christian adulthood, the discipline of community needs to be a central focus of our program (p. 152).

We must move away from our traditional model of placing highly programmed youth activities at the heart of our work. Instead, we must give a central place to the more significant ministry of connecting young people to their own "great cloud of witnesses" (p. 126).

By the time teenagers are sixteen or seventeen, they will make one of two choices regarding the church: either they will become increasingly invested or they will drop out....Intentionally create opportunities for our older teenagers to be needed (p. 139-140).

Teenagers in our churches are being carried along by the strong currents of our culture and yet cannot feel it. Unless our youth programs work intentionally to resist these currents, our efforts at discipling youth may, in fact, simply entrench them more deeply in the very values that are in strongest opposition to the Christian gospel (p. 146).

If we train our youth to expect entertainment from church, we can be assured that when things get a little slow, they will be switching the channel to somebody else's show (p. 153)... Young people who develop a low tolerance for boredom will be unable to practice the disciplines necessary to grow in the Christian life. Prayer, Bible study, fellowship, witnessing, fasting and solitude are all disciples that have at their very heart the facing of our own boredom and restlessness (p. 154).

I stayed in the church not because I had made a genuine commitment (though I had), but because adults in the church continued to claim me even when I was an embarrassment to them (p. 169).

A smorgasbord of ideas to equip parents and bring families together to provide an extended family for teenagers in the church:...

Worship...Their involvement in worship is crucial to their own growth toward mature Christian adulthood...

Mission and Service...Christian service is proactive, not reactive...Plugging into... existing benevolent projects...

Education...[Segregation by ages] is efficient for the church, but in the long run it may rob young people of much-needed opportunities to learn with adult Christians...

Recreation...opportunities with adults in the church...can infuse them with hopefulness and enthusiasm about becoming an adult...Many teenagers never get to laugh with adults...(p. 177 ff).