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Ministry By Teenagers

Youth Ministry. It's kind of a funny term when you consider it. Is it ministry to the teenage crowd or ministry by the teenage crowd?
Modern youth ministry seems to have started when some cool hippie started some fires and gathered teens around it to sing Kumbaya. To hear Greg Steir, president of Dare 2 Share Ministries, talk about it, Jesus was the first youth pastor, since most of the disciples were teenagers.

As the lights have gotten brighter and the technology cooler, there is still an ongoing debate about how youth ministry is accomplished. As the offerings for educating youth pastors increases, the expectation of being professional rises. Although, how professional can we seem when Chubby Bunny is still an approved game? But I must admit that the last time I was with some of my church leaders, I did tell them that youth pastors are like specialists, much like podiatrists, dentists, and pediatrists are considered specialists. And since they make more money than general practitioners, logically, youth pastors should get paid more than senior pastors. (In case you're wondering, they didn't buy it.)

All of this debate aside, I think I have to agree with Jonathan McKee and David Smith in their book, Ministry By Teenagers; Developing Leaders From Within. Most of our jobs should be training teenagers on the how and why of serving. And it's not just giving them to-do lists. It's instilling in them the passion for why ministry is important.

Reading a book by McKee (this is not my first) is like sitting down to a ministry roundtable discussion. Of course, since it's a book, he does all the talking. But even in this format, he encourages discussion through questions and even offers a few exercises while you put the book down. This book is co-authored by David Smith, another regular from The Source For Youth Ministry, and nothing is lost. Both do a great job of providing examples for every truth they wish to convey.

Ministry By Teenagers offers it all, from the purpose to training teenagers to handling the pitfalls that come once you have started training them. I tend to fold over pages so I can more quickly find things that I want to revisit and my copy now has plenty of pages folded over.

Training teens isn't something new to me, so I found I was able to plug-n-play some of the help right away, while other stuff will have to wait for me to implement. They even include a planned out retreat in the appendix. I have a feeling I will be referring to this book over and again for quite some time.
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