Home Grown

It started simply: two hours. If my young people came to church or youth group every week, I would get them for two hours a week. That’s 104 hours a year to share about Jesus, disciple those who know him, release them into leadership, and do all the weird and quirky fun stuff that teenagers love. That’s 104 hours a year to create a kingdom culture and train them to love God with all their heart, soul, mind and strength. I worked really hard to make those 104 hours count. I crammed a lot into those precious few hours. But what I missed was the maths. 

While youth workers get 104 hours a year of influence, parents of young people get 2000. It appears that God’s main plan to achieve a passionate next generation isn’t youth leaders… it’s parents. In Deuteronomy 6:4-9 God spoke to the nation of Israel and explained to them how to disciple their children to love him and his law, saying, ‘Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.’ As a youth pastor, I realised that I didn’t have access to any of those places in my young people’s lives; only their parents did, and they had 2000 hours a year to do it in.

A sick feeling hit me. If I truly wanted to see the young people of my church and community transformed by God, then why was I spending almost all of my time focused on the 104 hours I have with them instead of helping parents make those 2000 hours count? What would happen if I began to minister to and equip parents?

When parents are passionate and equipped to spiritually disciple their young people, something huge shifts. Within a year of beginning to work with parents, young people were beginning to come to groups with questions about God because of conversations they had had with their parents. They wanted to serve in church, lead more in sessions and wrestle with big questions. Their spiritual lives took off. Parents would stay after church to grab me for advice or to have a conversation about how they could help their children spiritually. They began to volunteer to mentor young people and support the ministry more practically. Groups of parents began to talk to each other about the spiritual lives of their children and seek out how to encourage and equip their young people’s faith journeys more and more. Excitingly, non-churched parents began to become Christians and attend church as a family. 

So how can we create good relationships with parents? How can we resource them to disciple their children? How can we work together to see young people flourishing in faith?

STOP MAKING YOUTH MINISTRY ABOUT US

Almost all youth leaders struggle with parents in some area, whether we think they are too passive or over-demanding, intrusive or absent, disinterested or just accidental obstacles to the youth ministry. Parents may not encourage youth to come to the events, don’t sign up for things on time or just complain about things. When this happens, our frustration becomes focused on how to get parents to do what we want them to do, to get on board with our programme and do their part. Changing the parents’ behaviour isn’t the solution. Changing our approach to parents is.

In our hearts, we often see ourselves as the spiritual experts on young people’s spirituality. We feel the burden of discipling them and can often feel that their current and future spiritual lives rest on our shoulders. Through how we approach ministry, share notices and testimonies and talk about young people we can constantly communicate to all around us that young people’s spiritual lives rise and fall on the strength of a great youth ministry.

The Church has inadvertently trained parents to feel disempowered in spiritual parenting. If the parents we serve aren’t parenting their teens for a life of faith, part of the reason is because we as a church have told them that we are better at it than they are; so we shouldn’t be surprised when we get parents either passively observing their children’s spiritual lives or demanding from us better and more detailed programmes to achieve great results in their teens’ lives. Many times they just feel powerless to influence their children spiritually and look to us to sort it out for them. The first step to working with parents is to train parents to see themselves differently, and for us to treat them as the powerful influencers of faith that they are.

YOU MIGHT WANT TO:

Seek parents out after church or youth group to spend time with them. Ask them how they feel their children are doing spiritually, and how you can support them in what they are trying to develop in their children.

When they ask for your advice on a situation in their children’s lives, don’t make the main solution you talking to the young person for them. Ask, ‘How can I help you in your conversations about this with Callum?’ Affirm the good stuff they are doing in the situation. If you have suggestions to help, start with, ‘You may have tried this already, but if it was me, I might…’

Affirm parents’ main role in their children’s spiritual lives from the front of church and in written communications. ‘You are doing great things with your young people spiritually, and we want to encourage, support and challenge you and them in this great adventure of life with God’. This is better than, ‘Spark Lava Ministries will disciple your young people into towering pillars of godly man and womanhood.’

ENCOURAGE THE RELATIONSHIP

Young people are naturally developing independence through their teen years, and that requires a shifting in the relationship parents have with their children. That relationship, though, is still vitally important for young people, and we interfere with God’s discipleship plan when we try to insert ourselves too far into the spiritual parent role. What we can do is help encourage their relationship in healthy and spiritually impacting ways, demonstrating both to parents and young people the benefit of their relationship.

YOU MIGHT WANT TO:

Praise young people to their parents, highlighting the godly character you see developing in them.

Create events that put parents and young people on teams together. Make the events adventurous and new for all participants, so they are partners on a journey together. Whether on a ministry trip, a fun night or a camping weekend, create times for parents and teens to laugh, tell testimonies, talk and learn side by side, see new things about each other and delight in being a team. Make opportunities for them to tell life stories. Once I even made a game that involved parents and young people asking questions like, ‘Tell me three ways you think I’m brilliant’, or ‘What is one thing that you want me to do more often with you?’. Years later, I heard that several families still used those cards on road trips.

Enable opportunities for young people to spiritually minister to the church and to their parents. Whether it is a youth service, or just individual situations, encourage young people to preach, lead worship, and minister to people older than them, including their parents. Something significant happens when young people see the impact God has on their parents, and when parents see their young people as ministering and powerful members of the body of Christ.

PASTORALLY CARE FOR THEM

Part of parenting is living with a bit of fear. The most precious people in existence to parents are walking around in a big horrible dangerous world that seeks to crush them. They have wills of their own and parents can’t control their choices or protect them from harm. It’s scary. Parents need some love and encouragement. They need you to look in their faces and say, ‘Your kid is great, and God is faithful to hunt her down and speak to her when you can’t,’ and, ‘Even though it is super hard and there are no guarantees, you are doing fine.’ If their child is struggling, don’t feel the need to inform on the young person or break confidences, but please do go sit next to them, give them a hug and ask how they are doing. Support them, cheer them on, and pray with them. Listen to them. Romans 12:15 tells us to, ‘Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn’, and in youth ministry, sometimes we are the ones who get to do that with them most in regards to their children.

EQUIP PARENTS

We have to remember that this is the first time these parents have parented these specific children through this age. It’s all new to them. They have a 1000 things to think about between work, life and home, and often have multiple children to parent. It is their deep desire for their children to love God, but they often just haven’t been given the time or the tools to do it with confidence. Our role is to give them tools and skills to use in the large realm of their influence.

You have spent years refining how to ask God questions to teenagers, and how to explain the trinity or suffering to a 17 year-old who is questioning their faith. Parents may never have had to develop that tool. The great thing is that they know their children better than you do, so when we give them the right tools, they can use it to much more effect than we can.

YOU MIGHT WANT TO:

Run a ‘Parenting for faith’ course, or start up parenting nights that look at equipping parents to spiritually influence their children. Pick one tool at a time, and let them try it out. From ‘Resources to empower teens spiritually’, to ‘Talking about beauty, sex, and the internet with God in the picture’ or ‘Helping your young person engage with church’, topic nights or spiritual parenting courses are great ways of equipping and enabling parents to feel confident to still be deeply involved in the spiritual development of their children.

Let parents know the subjects that groups are going to cover ahead of time. Include some good God questions parents can ask their kids to start discussions the week before if they want to. ‘Did Jesus fancy anyone, why or why not?’ ‘Do you remember when we had that car accident? Where was God in that situation?’ ‘What movie character do you most picture God like?’ Questions with no right answer can be great tools for parents to open spiritual conversations with their young people.

NON-CHRISTIAN PARENTS

All this is great when it comes to Christian parents, but what about the parents who aren’t interested in God at all? What about the teenagers who show up off the street, whose parents have no contact with church? So often in these situations, we tend to write off the parents and step into the spiritual parenting role quickly; but scripture doesn’t say that if parents aren’t Christians, then they abdicate their influence in their children’s lives. We are called in these situations to walk a fine line; to spiritually care for and encourage young people, while still blessing their relationship with their parents in whatever form that is. If we neglect the unchurched parents of our community’s youth, then we run a massive risk of making faith a wedge to divide families, instead of it being a blessing to encourage and transform families. Do home visits, call them up and tell them how much you appreciate their young people. Invite them to everything you do so they always feel that there is a relationship with you and an open door into the community. Be transparent with what you teach, and why. As they see their young people change, they will have the relationship with you to respond to the God they see that is real and active in the life of their child.

When parents feel connected to you, supported, encouraged and equipped, then we can begin to see the Church arise in strength and power and the young people in our ministries flourish. It is well worth the time and effort!