Youth Ministry Health 101

Here is the typical question that you will hear amongst youth pastors when in  ministry, “So how many youth are you running now?”.

That very question can do either one of two things. The first thing that it can do is cause you to want to shrink your head back into your shell because your youth ministry isn’t in the 100’s or for that matter it might not even be in the double digits. If you’ve ever been here than you know that the urge to exaggerate your numbers has run across your mind before.

Now if you have a larger youth group the 2nd thing that runs through your mind is “I can’t wait to share how many kids come to my youth ministry because we’re BIG BALLING right now”. Whatever the case may be numbers is always a factor, whether the pressure comes from your senior pastor or whether it comes from your own desire.

I have sat on both sides of the spectrum but my goal today is not to focus on how big or how small your group is, but rather to get you to think about something else and that’s “Health”. Many times we in ministry overlook this very thing because the focus is growth, events, fun, not crashing the church van, and picking up pizza off of the floor in the youth room after service. That’s all fine and dandy, but we must look a little bit deeper if we want to have a successful youth ministry.

You see the by-product of health is growth. If you were to plant a seed in the ground, the growth of that plant would be determined by all of the right conditions and of course and most importantly healthy soil. Healthy soil yields great results. In the same way a healthy ministry will yield healthy leaders, disciples, and ministry.

When Jesus was getting ready to perform a great miracle of feeding 5,000 people by multiplying five loaves and two fish He did something very significant prior to performing the miracle of multiplication and that was putting the people in order. Jesus instructed the disciples to place the people in groups of about fifty and after there was order Jesus took the five loaves and the two fish,  looked up to Heaven, thanked the Father, and began to distribute the food as it was multiplied.

The great lesson that we as youth workers can learn from this is that Jesus placed things in order before He multiplied them. We as youth workers must work at setting things in order by nurturing our youth ministries towards health, and as a result the harvest will come. The Lord will not bring growth to something that is not healthy, but remember that health begins with you.

Lets set out priorities on the right things and the rest will follow….