Family-Based Youth Ministry Chapter 5

This chapter was titled "The Critical Care Unit." In this chapter DeVries exposed and addressed a critical weakness that youth workers today overlook rather easily. Many youth ministers and youth workers can grow very frustrated at times whenever he/she is working with youth. For me, it can happen a lot (even so when I work with college students here at school). I've often thought to myself, "Why can't they just understand that growing mature in their faith is VITAL to honoring God with your life and living a successful Christian life?"(Disclaimer: My definition of 'successful' might be different from yours.) I never understood why I couldn't get through to them like I want and help them to grasp hold of the concept. Then I read what DeVries had to say.

"According to the 1990 Search Institute report, only 15 percent of men between the ages of forty and fifty-nine have a mature, integrated faith. Stated another way, it is likely that 85 percent of our young people come from homes without a father to set an example of faithful discipleship." (pg 73)

The largest obstacle that we are facing today, is that many of our youth do not have parents who are mature in their own faith. It's amazing to me the affect that a parent's attitude toward their faith can have upon their children. So what now? Based upon the statistics from the research, I'd say that the church has a new mission in its ministry to youth, and it's exactly what the title of this book is, family-based youth ministry. What the church was able to put on training classes or Sunday-school classes where parents were taught how to mature their own faith and pass that desire on to their children? What if the youth ministry handed out topics of the week that the youth will be covering in youth group time, so that the family as a whole can discuss it at home together? An idea that a close friend and I have that has turned into a dream is to plant a church somewhere where the need is great for one, that does just this. Our dream is to see a church where every ministry is related and involved with the others. No ministry is off doing its own thing. We could sit down and plan congregation-wide themes for series, allowing for the whole family to be growing in the same areas at the same time. This is just the surface of some of the ideas that we have had to taking this idea of "family-based youth ministry" and applying to something that I might call "family-based church ministry."