Really Radical Youth Ministry - another perspective

When a nationally renowned and respected youth worker in the U.S one day paid a visit to Mark Dever's Capitol Hill Baptist church youth program in Washington D.C. he was shocked. They were studying Wayne Grudem's "Systematic Theology" quietly and earnestly and discussing the subject of the atonement on the book of Romans

He admitted a little embarassedly that at his church, he had to rely on all the normal stereotypical elements to keep the youth interested in church; loud music, games, drama skits, exciting topical sermons etc. When he asked Pastor Dever about what special planning he instituted to get the youth to be like this, and what program he put in place - this was his response:

" I have 150 youth doing bible study on a Saturday afternoon and after that, we sing hymns written by people who have been dead for over a 100 years. And you ask me if I planned this? "

The ironic point here is that we have been conditioned to believe that the youth of today cannot take bible study, that the old techniques are passe. And we need a new approach, radical ideas and constantly changing techniques to keep them interested. Thus, a whole new industry based on keeping the youth in church has surfaced. And it is based on the premise that youth today have short attention spans, an incapacity to digest complex and tedious information and are inclined to the experential rather than the intellectual.

Mark Dever's approach takes the opposite approach, and it is a uniquely Calvinist one. God is sovereign. He does not need to pander to you, or study you. You need to study him. And worship him reverentially.

Thus, the program (if I may call it so), has the paramount aim of going back to the basic fundamentals of knowing God through his primary source; The Bible. All other stuff is then built on it. How different this is from the modern day church where it is the other way around. We design our activities first, then fit the Bible around it, or as an afterthought.

I admit that as a one time youth counsellor, I have been guilty of doing that. In an effort to keep the youth interested, I had committed the gross sin of putting God into the background, and then wondered why the program was ineffective. But there was this great fear that every counsellor felt, that if they did what Mark did, then the youth would find it boring, irrelevant and leave for another more fun church

In the end, I realised that if this was the case, then so be it. The Word says : "The heart is deceitful above all else, who can understand it". We have made the classic error of thinking that the heart is essentially not-too-bad, and that if we tweak it through some cool church programs; the youth will see that Jesus is the way to go.

Not so. The heart is deceitful. Mine, yours and that seemingly innocent kid in your youth group. All of us deserve God's wrath, and would surely get it if not for his amazing and salvific grace. That is the failure of modern programs. Man, or in this case, the youth is placed first, not God. I don't care these days if your youth assembly is growing by the multitudes or even if they are laughing and crying in the streets. If God is not primary, all is secondary and an illusion; no matter how real it seems

I don't know whether the youth worker went back to his church and instituted a program like that. More than likely, he would have been shouted down by the church board and deemed a heretic for curtailing their 'dynamic' youth ministry. I hope not but I am not too optimistic. Which is why I still pray for really radical youth ministry like Mark Dever's to have more followers, and more truly radical youth to follow

SDG