Youth Ministry Done Well for the Benefit of the Church

In my last article, I argued that the family—not youth pastors—must come first as the church seeks to disciple and evangelize its children. Christian fathers and mothers must both be called to these spiritual responsibilities and intentionally equipped by the church to perform them.

One might get the impression, however, based on the family-centered emphasis of this article, that the biological family is a kind of atomistic entity somehow more fundamental and basic than the church family. In other words, one tendency for people who strongly agree with the family-focused idea is to begin seeing the family as the place for one’s fundamental spiritual identity, with the church existing merely to provide some “spiritual tools” as the real work gets done in the home. That is not a correct understanding of the family’s interaction with the church. The primary and most fundamental “family” for a believer in Jesus is the church family. My identity is as a child of God through Jesus, even more than as a child of my father and mother. Indeed, many people come to faith as children in homes where their parents do not know Christ. Their most fundamental “family” becomes the church, the family of God in Christ. The argument made in the previous article is for the primacy of the Christian family’s role in shaping, teaching, and training children, even as those children belong to the family of the church in a far more fundamental and eternal way.   Keep Reading...