Category: Great Commission

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Great Commission Next Generation Ministry

Reaching the Next Generation (Part 1)

Millennial1

If you hang around long me enough, you will hear me say, “to reach the next generation, you must know who the next generation is.” This task is easier said than done.

The next generation, also known as Generation Z, the iGeneration, or the Centennials is a complex group that can be divided and appropriated into various subheadings. As it pertains to church attendance, the next generation can be classified into the unchurched, de-churched, re-churched, never churched, or found faithful to attend church.

In their book UnChristian, David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons claim that unbelievers are a set that “includes atheists, agnostics, those affiliated with a faith other than Christianity (such as Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Mormonism, and so on), and other unchurched adults who are not born-again Christians.”[1]

Lifeway’s research concludes that “more than two-thirds of young churchgoing adults in America drop out of church between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. Thom Rainer in Essential Church says, “the church is losing this generational battle on two fronts: (1) An increasing amount of young people are deciding to live according to a secular mindset, thus dropping out of church and not returning to church as previous generations did (2) An increasing amount of young people are deciding to drop out of church and not claim the Christian faith of their parents or their grandparents.” [2]

Kinnaman categorizes generational dropouts into three groups: (1) Nomads (2) Prodigals (3) Exiles.[3] Kinnaman describes nomads as those who walk away from church engagement but still consider themselves Christian. Prodigals are those who lose their faith, describing themselves as “no longer Christian.” Exiles are still involved in their Christian faith but feel stuck or lost between culture and the church.

What possible explanation exists for why so many young people are leaving the church today? Perhaps it is because the church has presented the next generation a false gospel. In Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling The American Church (written by Kenda Dean), Christian Smith and Melinda Denton are given credit through their National Study of Youth and Religion (NYSR) in stating that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is “colonizing many historical religious traditions and, almost without anyone noticing, converting believers in the old faiths to its alternative religious vision of divinely underwritten personal happiness and interpersonal niceness.”[4]

Smith and Denton conclude that “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is supplanting Christianity as the dominant religion in the United States.”[5] If this takeover is happening, what are the guiding beliefs to this new religion? Dean lists these beliefs in five summary statements: (1) A god exists who created and orders the world and watches over life (2) God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other as taught in the Bible and by most world religions (3) The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself (4) God is not involved in my life except when I need God to resolve a problem (5) Good people go to heaven when they die.[6]

To follow up on groundbreaking research released in SoulSearching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Teenagers, Smith wrote Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults revealing that 18-24 year-olds comprise six religious types; (1) Committed Traditionalists – no more than 15% (2) Selective Adherents – perhaps 30% (3) Spiritually Open – about 15% (4) Religious Indifferent – at least 25% (5) Religiously Disconnected – no more than 5%, and (6) Irreligious – no more than 10%.  These findings show that 40% of all “emerging adults” (meaning prolonged adulthood) are clearly distanced from religion. Practically speaking, adults are not coming back to church once they marry and have kids  like they once did.

Believe it or not, I am only scratching the surface of who the next generation is and how the church can reach them. This is why I am making this post into a three part series.

[1] Kinnaman and Lyons, UnChristian, 17.

[2] Rainer, Essential Church, 8.

[3] Ibid, 25.

[4] Dean, Almost Christian, 14.

[5] Ibid.

 [6] Ibid.

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Great Commission Next Generation Ministry

Down, Set, NGM NGM, Hut

orange football

My favorite time of the season is just around the corner.  I am not talking about the seasons of fall, winter, spring, or summer.  I am talking about football season!  I travel to nearly all home and away local high school football games on Friday nights and love to watch college football games on Saturday.  I am not as big a fan of the NFL as I am the NCAA game, but I do like to watch the NFL come playoff time.

Though I never played a down of organized football, I played in the roughest and toughest league around.  On various weekdays after school and weekends, my neighborhood teenage friends and I would assemble a game of tackle football.  We would play come rain, wind, or snow.  Our playing surface was a back yard with all of the rocks included.  We did not have helmets to put on and we sure did not use pads.  We became familiar with the ground.  Scrapes and scratches were just a normal part of the routine.  When tackling, we would sling each other around, often going in circles, until one or both players fell down.  Age divisions did not exist.  High school students could toss the middle school students around and middle school students could gang up on a high school student in an attempt to bring the big behemoth down.

Having watched hours of football games and having played hours more of real football and football video games, I have become an expert in understanding the inner workings of the game.  Although watching giants knock the breath out of each is other is appeasing to the eye, what I have really to come to enjoy about football is the strategy employed by coaches.  A team with less talent, less strength, less speed can still win football games if they have the right strategy in place and if their coaches teach proper technique.  As unorthodox as it may sound, football is really just a chess match using people in the place of a pawns.

Strategy is important in ministry too.  If you are a ministry leader and you are not obtaining the spiritual results you desire, you may be in need of adopting a new strategy.  Typically, a lack of effort by ministry leaders is not the problem.  A lack of prayer is another matter, but even with substantial prayer, a weak strategy can produce weak results.  Take the veer offense, for example, in football.  You can pray three times a day to score more points on the field on a Friday night, but chances are that once the game is over, the score on the scoreboard is going to look the same.  Why?  Because the veer, used in the 1970s, has a hard time of keeping pace with the high speed, no huddle offenses used today.  There are always exceptions to the rule, but generally speaking, your strategy determines your score.  And your score determines your wins and losses.

I would agree with Thom Rainer in Transformational Church that churches often measure success by the wrong scorecard (bodies, budgets, and buildings).  But I would also suggest that churches measuring success with the right scorecard (read Rainer’s book) are often stuck with weak results because they are using the wrong strategy.  To reach the next generation, church leaders must begin to meet together to discuss the best strategy for this all-important task.  Since the next generation is not coming to church, the church must find ways to GO to the next generation (Matt. 28:19-20).  I would advise the evangelistic method or technique (since I am writing about football) called servanthood evangelism embraced and taught by ministry coach Steven Sjoren (he’s really a pastor).

James Emery White chronicles how evangelism is now both a process and an event in his book The Rise of the Nones.  White declares that the typical unchurched person is no longer simply unchurched, but more than likely is a “none”, meaning that person is unaffiliated with any religion.  Churches and church leaders must be innovative in strategy and patient in work as they help a generation who claims to believe in nothing.  It is not that the next generation will not go to church or will not believe in Christ as Savior.  It is just this process of becoming a church member or even considering the claims of Christ often takes longer today.

Let me option back to football for a moment.  National attitudes about youth participation in football are evolving.  A study conducted in July came out of the University of Massachusetts finding that four out of five parents expressed the opinion that children under the age of fourteen should not play tackle football.  Many rule changes have been adopted by football legislative bodies to make the game safer at all levels.

As a football traditionalist, I do not like all of the rule changes and I think that in some ways the legislative bodies have crossed the line and ruined the game in certain aspects.  But I also have to admit that football is a safer sport and that this is good news overall.

Now, I am going to throw it back to NGM.  It pains me to see the changing spiritual landscape of our great nation.  I would desire that the next generation were already familiar with the Bible’s content and the man named Jesus.  However, 42 BLUE, 42 BLUE – if the sport of football can change for the better, I do not see why churches cannot do the same.  We have the best news in the form of the gospel and we have to find the best and safest way to hand the gospel off to the next generation.  My strategy of choice is NGM!  Let’s circle up and call the right play, BREAK!

 

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Great Commission Next Generation Ministry

Scorpions and NGM, oh My!

I live in the country and am surrounded by trees.  I see all kind of critters.  At times, I observe beautiful animals at work in nature that are rarely seen by others such as woodpeckers, finches, red foxes, and chipmunks.  At other times, I encounter hideous animals which I wish had not crossed my path.  For example, a large oak tree stands next to my back porch.  This tree has a dark hole in it whereby I can stand on my back porch and shine a flashlight down into the hole to see what has crawled inside.  Over the past two years, the hole has been occupied by a rat snake, a possum (which jumped out at me), hornets, and creature(s) you will discover below.

Seeing the best and the worst just comes with the territory.  What I am about to tell you next is the worst and reads like a horror story.  A few nights ago, I was walking in my bare feet in my house with the lights off around midnight when I nearly stepped on a scorpion (think tail up and pinchers out).  As you can tell from the above excerpt, this sighting comes as no surprise.  I knew what needed to be done.  I immediately went to access my pocket knife so that I could divide the scorpion into two.  What happened next, however, is something that I would not have predicted.  Think about the movie Alien (or Tremors) with the little mouth (or worms) coming out of the alien’s (or tremor’s) big mouth or what happens to Gremlins once they touch water.

scorpion

Scorpion babies are born alive and not hatched from eggs like insects (sometimes, mother scorpions even eat their babies).  Once I pressed my knife blade on the back of the queen scorpion, seven baby scorpions jumped out and scattered going in all directions. Now, it was incumbent upon me to save my feet and at the same time track down and kill eight scorpions.  The beast had multiplied in front of my eyes.  To make a long story short, my precious feet were not harmed and I won the crusade by massacring the scorpion empire.  But you may be asking yourself at this point, “what does this horror story have to do with next generation ministry (NGM)?”

Before I give you the “what” answer, you need to understand that any ministry or desired ministry outcomes that you have must start with the question, “Why?” I learned this “what’s your why” principle from next generation guru Dr. Jeff Lovingood, author of Make it Last.  Likewise, Simon Sinek, who wrote Start with Why, says “the why” provides a framework upon which organizations can be built, movements can be lead, and people can be inspired.  “The why” has nothing to do with money or making a profit.

The purpose or “the why” of NGM is to make disciples (Matt. 28:19-20).  Dr. Aubrey Malphurs has correctly stated that a Christian is a disciple.  Jesus expects disciples to grow in their faith from the moment they become his follower.  Next generation ministry is a discipleship process whereby students from the cradle through college worship, study, and serve together as they transition from one life stage to the next.

NGM produces a unity and cohesiveness between age-graded groups.  Overlap occurs in and between preschool, children, youth, and collegiate ministries making the discipleship strategy a team approach.  Since no age group or ministry is left out or considered less than another, disciples are made.  NGM is about multiplying disciples, not dividing ministries.  Students who have been discipled then develop into adults who marry and multiply in the form of Christian families, beginning the discipleship process all over again in next generation ministry, this time with their babies.

Unlike the horror story I shared, the gospel represents a beautiful awe-inspiring redemptive story.  Multiplication is a theme in both stories, but multiplying disciples, not scorpions, is what Jesus has commanded his followers to do.  NGM is a strategy used to accomplish the end-goal of making disciples.

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Great Commission Next Generation Ministry

What color is NGM?

 

orange

Reggie Joiner, founder of the reThink group and Co-author of Playing for Keeps/Losing your Marbles, has noted how church, represented by the color yellow and family, represented by the color red combine their influences to make the color orange.  The light of the Lord (yellow) and the love of the home (red) “collide” to make an influence that is greater (orange) than either unit operating in and of itself.

Some studies suggest that anywhere from 70-80% of students raised in church drop out of church after high school graduation, with many to walk away from their faith altogether, never to return.  Joiner calls for new strategies to be developed within this church/family partnership paradigm so that young people continue to attend church as they enter college and adulthood.

I believe the comprehensive strategy that Joiner is calling for is Next Generation Ministry (NGM).  NGM encourages the next generation to worship, study, and serve together as they transition from one life group to another.  Joiner emphasizes that once a child is born, a parent has 936 weeks with his or her child until he or she graduates from high school and moves onto college or young adulthood.  In contrast, next generation ministry leaders (pre-school, children, youth) only get 52 weeks (36-40 weeks if you take out holidays, sick days, vacation days, sports, etc.) to influence a toddler, a child, or a teenager for Christ.

In any given year, a parent or guardian has 3000 hours to teach their child the ways of the Lord whereas next generation leaders are given an average of 40 hours at church.  Well-documented research by social scientists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton have taught ministry leaders that parents are the primary disciplemakers of their children.  Long before this groundbreaking research was completed, however, God gave families this time-tested directive in Deuteronomy 6:4-9.  Parents were to have faith talks with their children when the child awoke, at their house (breakfast/dinner table, etc.), on the way (to and from school, etc.), and when the child went to sleep.

Psalm 78:1-8 adds that parents were to tell the next generation of God’s commandments and glorious deeds.  There is a faith legacy or torch that needs to be passed down to the next generation and grandparents are often involved in this faith process (2 Tim 1:3-7).

Often included within next generation ministry are milestones, phases, or rite of passage ceremonies.  Milestones can play out differently depending on church context and philosophy. Rather than give you a full myriad of options, I have chosen to list just one faith journey that churches and families can walk together on.  Brian Haynes in his book Shift details seven rite of passage events that the church should partner with the family to celebrate as a student develops through his or her life stages;  (1) The Birth of a Baby (2) Faith Commitment (3) Preparing for Adolescence (4) Commitment to Purity (5) Passage to Adulthood (6) High School Graduation, and (7) Life in Christ.

Next generation ministry encompasses smooth transitions as handoffs are made when a preschooler moves into children’s ministry, a child moves into student ministry, or a teenager moves into a church’s collegiate/young adult ministry.  Rite of passage ceremonies come naturally and assist the discipleship process.  In next generation ministry, a “student” is a baby, child, or a teen.  Next generation leaders work hand in hand with parents and guardians to make disciples of students (Matt. 28:19-20).

 

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Great Commission

Ministry to the Next Generation and Beyond

star trek

The Great Commission lies at the heart of next generation ministry.  Before Jesus ascended into heaven, He commanded his closest followers and friends to go and make disciple of all nations (Matt 28:19-20).  What were these band of brothers to do without their leader?  Thankfully, Jesus had promised to leave his band a Counselor, the Holy Spirit, who would guide them to reach their Master’s goal.

The Church of the 21st Century is no different than this original band in that The Church has a timeless message to proclaim.  The Church of the past 2000 years has been led of the Spirit to incorporate different methodologies to spread the gospel message over this vast span of time.  Like a spaceship, the 21st century Church has need of God’s Spirit to guide it into new frontiers.

God’s Spirit can lead the Church to use new tactics to accomplish a mission.  A word that is emphasized in 21st Century politics, warfare, and business is the term “strategy.”  What is the United States of America’s strategy to defeat ISIS?  What strategy will Republican and Democrat candidates utilize in order to win the presidency?  What is Apple’s strategy in creating the next great gadget?

Methodologies or strategies change over time.  But the message of good news that Jesus handed down to his disciples to share throughout the ages in word and in deed never changes.  It had to be reassuring to the original band and the early church when they learned that the message would never change.  Imagine how much more assuring it means to the 21st Century Church that this timeless message remains the same in a world where technology, media, and ways to communicate are changing every nanosecond.

The American church faces a dilemma today.  Traditional children and youth ministry is not achieving the same successes it has enjoyed in the past.  I submit to you that I believe the Church is in need of a new strategy, a better strategy.  I, myself have achieved many victories using the older paradigm of children and youth ministry, but have found myself waiving the white flag in the face of new challenges today.

Today’s economy, world, and people are different than in previous generations.  The next generation is a complex group that must be paid attention to.  Yes, the notion that the Bible is all that the Church needs is correct in one sense.  However, if the church does not keep pace with the culture by understanding who this new generation is, the church will lose this generation.   To reach the next generation, the church must know who the next generation is.

The next generation hungers after a vision that is bigger than themselves.  There is no greater mission for the next generation to fulfill than the Great Commission.  Establishing a caliphate pales in comparison because fulfilling the Great Commission requires a God and a Church that spans generational ages themselves.  If ISIS can lure young people into its strategy for achieving global jihad, then the Church can have a strategy that is effective at making disciples for Jesus Christ.  Both ISIS and the Church want to grow in number.  Does ISIS have a better strategy for accomplishing its mission than the Church?  I think not!

Next Generation Ministry advances the Gospel through a biblical strategy, collaborating through the local church with parents, leaders, and students for the spiritual formation of those from birth through college.  Next Generation Ministry is a comprehensive strategy that creates smooth transitions between the various stages of life contained in Next Generation ministry (pre-school, children, middle school, high school, college), and yet operates as one.

Next Generation ministry is in-reach but not to the neglect of outreach because Next Generation Ministry is both family-oriented and missional.  Next Generation Ministry aids singles and young married couples without kids to prepare them for a missional future with their kids.  From the cradle through college, Next Generation Ministry does not overlook any age category in its mission to go and make disciples.  In next generation ministry, “students” are anyone from birth through college.

Too often, traditional models of children and youth ministries overlook certain age-graded departments to the detriment of others.  Most often, this devastation occurs in the Pre School and College departments when churches hire ministers for certain age groups to the neglect of others.  As a result, would be disciples drop out of church when life stage transitions take place.  For instance, a high school senior drops out of church because the church does not offer the same quality of ministry for its college-aged students . . . or a child does not join the church’s youth group because he or she has not made adequate friends or connections within the church’s children ministry.

In the meanwhile, silo departments and leaders squabble over time, money, and resources.  Instead of making disciples, these churches are making enemies with each other.  Their goals have become sidetracked and their missional targets are now off base.

Next Generation ministry is a new tactic that God is using today to keep his Church focused and on-mission.  Ministry leader (“Live long and prosper”), would you consider jumping ship?