One of the claims that is often thrown at modern youth ministry is that it just trains a new generation of consumerist Christians, and there is some merit to this claim. Cliff Olsen says, in an article at Youth Specialties.com,

During the cleanup, I was struck by the students’ inbred consumerism. We leaders set up, led games, taught the lesson, and cleaned up when it was over. The youth simply “consumed” the program and went home. Why couldn’t they feel more like it was their ministry? Why couldn’t they lead most, if not all, of the activities? We decided to give it a shot.

This is the model that a lot of youth groups run with, where adult leaders do everything, and in an effort to be up front and honest about it, the youth group I run currently functions a fair bit in this way. HOWEVER, as Olsen asks, why couldn’t other students lead a lot of this?

One of the major changes that we have made at Sync Youth this year is we have ‘graduated’ our 16 and 17 year old’s into a new Young Adult group. As part of this I have offered our new young adults the opportunity to be Youth Leader Apprentices. The aim of this position is to start to HEAD in the direction where we get more of our younger youth/young adults developing in their leadership and helping take charge of their own youth program. Though for now we still require quite a bit of adult help, my goal is to get to the place where our Adult Leaders can do more of the relationship building and allow some of our older teenagers the opportunity to help set up and lead the games and activities.

Why?
You might be asking why is it important to get our students in their final years of high school involved in leadership? Don’t they have enough to do already? Isn’t there a problem because not all students are equipped or gifted with ‘leadership’. Well, yes and no.

I definitely believe there is a ‘gift of leadership’ that not everyone possesses, but I am starting to come to the belief that all of our kids can, if they want, help grow our younger youth in some way. They won’t necessarily be ‘leaders’ in the strictest sense of the term, but I am finding that some kids who otherwise wouldn’t be seen as leaders, are really great at ‘serving’…is this not one of the main roles of leadership? They may not all be the up the front, loud, proud leaders…but some of the better student leaders I have seen have quietly gone about cleaning up, making sure all the new kids feel welcome, encouraging the other student leaders. These are leadership qualities often missed when we look for up and coming leaders.

I had a really good discussion today with a friend on many of the topics I am mulling over for my book. We were particularly talking about rights of passage and effectively transitioning teens from youth group to adult church. One of the biggest problems I think we have had is in the ability to help our teenagers see themselves in 5-10 years time as they will be. NOT so much what they’ll be doing, will they be a Doctor etc…but more who they will BE as people. Student leadership, in many ways, is about helping equip and empower our teenagers in their giftings NOW, so that they can start to operate in them and see a glimpse of what they could be like in 5 years time. Not that they will see themselves as youth leaders, though they might become that, but that they can see they can be loving or they can be caring, or they can serve, or they can insert character trait here. A lot of what we have NOT done, from my observations, is help our teenagers to start operating in their adult ways earlier.

I believe this is an important step in moving INTO adult hood, as opposed to following the Peter Pan idea and never growing up. As much as there is a lot of talk about ‘our kids are being turned into adults too fast’ I almost wonder if that is only a half truth? Yes, we have tweens now (pre-pubescent teens, so 8-12ish) acting ‘like adults’ or dressing ‘like adults’ but equally, we have 20+ adolescents who have never grown up. Perhaps we need to help them around the ages of 16-17 start to OPERATE in some ways like their adult selves, so they can actually start to grasp what adulthood means for them. I believe this would help adulthood be less of a scary thing, which it is to many teens, and more a natural progression in life.

The more I think about all of this, the more I see how intricately everything is linked. From channeling the passion of teenagers for good, to transitioning them from teenagerhood to adult church and adult life, to creating and continuing rights of passage for our western cultured teens. And in all of this I believe the Church can play a pivotal role in helping to positively influence youth culture. To be known for how it is changing the lives of teenagers for the BETTER rather than what it is stopping teenagers from doing.

And in all of this I believe equipping our older teenagers in leadership, or possibly more truthfully just in their giftings, should play a large role in the future of our youth ministries.