A subtle shift of attention, applied energy, and an investment of time has lead to ministries becoming infected with the disease within youth ministry. Is your ministry infected? Find out:

4 Symptoms of The Disease within Student Ministry

1. Raising Leaders

Do we want leaders? Yes. But not everyone is a leader. God uses both the outspoken extroverts AND the quiet introverts. We are called to make disciples, not leaders. Leadership is a byproduct of first being a faithful disciple.

2. Retaining Students

If your whole goal in ministry is to add numbers, you are missing the point and have the disease. There are a lot of fancy sayings like “Living things grow, dead things don’t” “If we’re counting people, and God cares about people, then I care about numbers.” These are fancy ways to say, “we care most about numbers.” Focusing on growth can take our attention away from faithfully preaching the gospel and get us looking for tactics and gimmicks that will get butts in chairs.

3. Developing Behaviors

We shouldn’t focus our time and attention on making good kids (modifying behavior). We should focus on getting students to fall in love with the person and mission of Jesus Christ. When students fall in love with Jesus they will naturally chose to live in a way that brings glory to Him. Simply teaching them obedience to the law will lead to spiritually dead pharisaical students.

4. Placing Students First

Placing students first means catering to their whims in ministry rather than championing Christ and allowing ministry to flow forth from there. Once again, this is subtle shift in focus that can happen unintentionally. So we must be intentional in the ways that we structure our ministries. Having a mission statement through which to run all ministry decisions can prevent us from simply throwing an event for the sake of making students and parents happy.

Want to do more reading on the Disease within Student Ministry? Check out our previous posts on this subject:
The Disease within Student Ministry: Part 1
The Disease within Student Ministry: Part 2

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