Differently — Youth Ministry needs to be different

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to teach to our students on a Sunday morning. There is always something about Sunday mornings that makes me think about a few things:

1) How do youth ministries really reach students on Sunday mornings without a large scale program?

2) How do you make it a fun time and time that is attractive?

3) What do we teach?

While all of those questions came into my head, there was something else coming into my head. We were 2 days away from the launch of Advance and we were talking about Caring about people far from God. It was an incredible opportunity to challenge the students to bring a friend to Advance just 2 days later. However something happened that morning that  I wasn’t expecting.

We started our conversation out with a group question: What are the groups that you have in your school? 

The blank stare was inevitable, once I received I explained that I wanted to know the different kinds of groups of students that are in their schools.

Here are just a few of them:

- Druggies     

- Grass Fairies (Soccer players) 

- Jocks 

- Pop’s 

- Cheerleaders 

- Dancers 

- Drug Dealers 

- Nerds 

- Gamers 

- Mexicans 

- Puerto Ricans 

- Suck Ups ( or Kiss butts as one group wrote) 

Pretty interesting, isn’t it?

I have a feeling if we sit down and think about when we were in high school, there may have been this many groups. Maybe not. No matter the amount, I think we can all agree that there were multiple groups of students in our schools.

So coming out of that part of our conversation, I asked them: where do you fit? What group would you say you belong too?

It was an interesting experiment that came out to a good result. I had them think about that for a moment and then to make a point about the lesson, I split them up in different categories. So I had students all over the room that held a different group.

How do you feel when you are thought about differently?

Here were some of their answers:

Hated 

Rejected 

Angry 

Lonely

Normal 

Fine 

Confused 

I think this is even more interesting than the groups. Probably for the first time, they have been in a position where they were not sure about who they were, where they belonged and what they were going to do.

I wonder how much of this is true in our youth ministries?

The cliques, the groups, the classification.

Is that the way it should be?

I am not really what to follow that with because I truly believe it is an unfortunate truth for a lot of youth ministries and a lot of students.

They are looked at differently, they are treated differently, they are talked to differently, they feel differently( not sure about that phrase).

I think the big question is what do you to counter this natural progression of classifying groups?

In Student Life here at Suncrest, we have made a large change this year to adding a whole new aspect of our ministry. We have added a First Impressions teams, which consists of a welcome team, cafe team and games team. All of which have to do with making people feel welcome. We have dedicated multiple people to making each and every student feel welcome and loved as soon as they get on the property.

I am not saying that it works perfectly at all, but it is a start.

I wonder what it would look like if as youth ministries, we programmed times for students, that instead of making them feel different just like they do every where else. They feel loved, welcomed and a part of a family?

How do you handle welcoming students in your youth ministry?