The Best Way to Keep High Schoolers Involved In Your Church

The Best Way to Keep High Schoolers Involved In Your Church June 28, 2016

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With my background as a youth pastor, the age-old question of keeping high schoolers involved in your church is a familiar one. The lament is the same: once our high schoolers get their driver’s licenses (or when they become old enough to make their own choices), they don’t want to come to church anymore. That obviously is alarming because many high schoolers follow that track straight into college and a potentially vast spiritual wasteland in their 20s.

So how can churches keep high schoolers involved? Many theories have been thrown around and implemented. One popular one is to throw more entertainment at them. Do more stuff. Build them a youth building. Have more trips. That may work for some but will ultimately be unsuccessful, because if you try and compete with the world in the field of entertainment, you’ll always lose. You can’t ‘out-entertain’ the world to capture the hearts and minds of high school students. A similar approach is to create a contemporary worship service. Surely it’s the hymns that are driving young people away. Splash a little Hillsong on the walls and that should bring them all back, right? Teenagers do tend to worship in a style of music that matches their generation (surprisingly enough), but that’s not the best way to keep high schoolers involved in your church. So what is it?

The best way to keep high schoolers involved in your church is to have them serve in meaningful roles within your church. It’s as simple as that. By the time your church teenagers get to high school, they’ve sat long enough. They’ve been entertained, sung to and preached at for over a decade. They want to stop sitting and start doing. If you give your high schoolers meaningful roles, they will plug in and stay there. But it has to be meaningful (letting the youth be the ushers for Youth Sunday won’t cut it). High Schoolers want to be treated like adults. So treat them like adults.

Here’s how I’ve seen that play out in my current environment: we have over 100 involved in our student ministry (for reference, our average total weekend attendance is around 500). High schoolers are a vital part of our volunteer force. Not only do they volunteer every week in our preschool area, they help lead and teach in our kids ministry. They sing on stage in our worship services on Sundays and Wednesdays, and they help run our Production/Tech ministry. (Several weeks ago an 8th grader ran our sound board on a Sunday morning, because he’d been given meaningful opportunities to train on that board during our Wednesday night youth services).

This truth hit home for me recently on Memorial Day weekend (a habitually low turnout day for most churches). I knew many adult volunteers were out traveling that day and we were going to have to cover some spots. Twenty minutes before our earliest service, on a Sunday when many of our adult volunteers were out, I saw one of our 10th graders pull up to the church. His parents weren’t there yet. He had gotten himself up early on a holiday weekend and beat most everyone else to church. Why? Because he leads a small group in our kids ministry. He is responsible for them. They look for him every week, and he won’t let them down. Trust high schoolers. Believe in them. Give them meaningful responsibility and hold them to high standards, and then watch them soar.


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