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“Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right . . . Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Eph 6:1, 4).

I remember the days of Girls in Action and Royal Ambassadors. Those were the programs most Southern Baptist churches employed in the 1970s-80s to disciple teens. And every church I knew growing up had some kind of “youth program” that ceaselessly planned fun activities, cool outings, plenty of concerts and camps, and so on. But, if you were to ask me to assess the fruitfulness in terms of salvations that produced mature disciples of Jesus who hate sin and live on mission with God in this world, I would be hard-pressed to say anything positive.

In other words, our relentless pursuit of the most fun, exciting, youth ministry led by the hip, Converse-wearing Youth Pastor who plays guitar and has a goatee, has not made an everlasting difference in our churches. Pulling kids out of worship services to Children’s Church and Youth-led worship gatherings where the music is raucous, the message relevant, and the fun, snacks and games endless, has not impacted souls for Christ. These kinds of things do not prepare a young man to live in the jungles of Madagascar or Suriname in order to preach the gospel to a tribe that has never heard of Jesus, nor seen a cell phone. Programs do not make disciples. People do. And in the case of children, parents and pastors do. By spending time with them in prayer, in singing, in reading and learning the Word.

 

That doesn’t mean I, or we at Corydon Baptist Church, are totally against ministry to Children and Youth (or what we call young adults). We have classes for children and youth during our Sunday School. And we gather whole families around open Bibles on Wednesday evenings, all ages together. What do we do in those classes? Open our Bibles and teach the Word of God. Highlight the great doctrines of the faith. Sing songs and memorize Scripture. Urge repentance of sin and faith in Jesus. Pray. Call children and young adults to follow Jesus whatever the cost. Challenge them to serve Christ in His Church, and go to the nations with the Name of Jesus on their lips. And continually uphold the discipleship authority of godly parents. That’s Children & Youth Ministry done God’s way.

 

In the Bible, God places the primary responsibility of teaching children upon parents and pastors. So, it is incumbent upon us to work together, to equip Dads and Moms first and foremost, to disciple their own children faithfully. And then to respect those godly parents’ decisions as to what teachers they place their children under, and what classes they attend. Some of our parents choose to keep their children with them in adult classes. Others send their children to be taught by our church-vetted teachers. We love and respect both these decisions. We love working alongside parents to help them develop as leaders of family worship in their homes, and as teachers of the Bible to their children. We believe emphasizing this is more explicitly biblical than expecting a Youth Pastor or VBS to carry the full load of raising up the next generation for Jesus.

 

Children discipled well at home, and regularly placed under the faithful preaching of the Word in the church, simply do not require all the “bells and whistles” of the standard Children’s and Youth Ministries. And, to be blunt, most churches of moderate size that have committed to the standard “Bustling Children & Youth Ministry” model are wearing their volunteers out.

 

Two examples: one from the past and one very recent.

 

A year or so after I became the Peaching Pastor here at CBC, I began asking questions about the annual summer VBS. What curriculum did we use? Who attended? How did we get volunteers? What fruit or results had we witnessed in the past? And so on. The sister who had been the Director for several years gave me very honest answers. It was obvious only our own CBC children attended our VBS. And, I wanted to establish the expectation at CBC that parents must disciple their children faithfully so that a VBS would really not be needed. Parents simply cannot farm out discipleship of their children to VBS workers! And, our VBS wasn’t really evangelistic, nor had any observable, long-term salvation fruit been seen. This is all very typical for churches who are willing to take a hard but honest look at such programs. But, what sealed the deal in my mind was when the Director said, “Honestly, it’s just exhausting. I am not sure I can keep doing it, and getting volunteers is harder every year.” Nuff said. I canceled it. Permanently. And began the long but rewarding work of equipping parents for biblical discipleship, and of training children and youth teachers to be faithful Bible expositors.

 

Very recently, I sat with a Pastor friend who was also weary. He is plodding faithfully in a church that has given itself for many decades to a programmatic, committee-led approach to nearly everything. He was receiving harsh criticism for giving a few months break to exhausted children and youth workers. In this church, they spend $6,000 / year on Word of Life curriculum. It requires non-stop volunteerism to do all sorts of biblically good things. But they’re all things that God actually commands parents to do. Not Word of Life volunteers. The Pastor told me that the couple who leads the program said, “If we pause the program the children will suffer.” Aside from the emotional manipulation of that assertion, to help my friend process that criticism, I simply asked him, “What if you could know that the children in your congregation were being discipled faithfully at home by their parents?” He sighed as if that were an unobtainable dream. And, I confess, in far too many churches it does seem all but impossible. But, “with God all things are possible.”

 

What if pastors relentlessly gave ourselves to equipping parents to do what the Bible explicitly commands them to do? How many children’s and youth programs could we simple cancel? How much money would be saved? We could send that money to a missionary! Or, use that money to pay a pastor to focus much of his time on cultivating godly marriages and homes in our churches. But as it is, we keep our church volunteers (many of whom are young parents themselves) and children so busy with “church stuff” that they cannot possibly obey Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and Matthew 28:16-20 and James 1:27.

 

And that’s a problem.

 

I know. The biblical model I am upholding here is not “fun.” I mean, how can we expect to reach kids if we don’t amuse them and give them badges and make sure all their preferences are catered to? Well, I have found that faithful plodding at home, by parents, in close cooperation with their pastors and under the authoritative preaching and teaching of the Word, produces young men and women who build their lives around Christ and His Church, and who want to shine the Light of Jesus into this dark world.

 

So, at CBC we keep it simple and Biblical. As Mark Dever often says, “God’s work, God’s way.” After all, God calls His Church to be faithful. Not fun. Holy. Not happy.

 

Plod on.

 

P.S. For those who think me a killjoy, you should come watch our children practicing for the Christmas Cantata. They are learning to sing Scripture passages, put to music by one of our amazing Moms. She took what God had gifted her to do in her home with her own kids, and extended it to all our kids. And it’s “joy unspeakable and full of glory” to hear these children and youth sing the very words of God!

 

 

 

by Keith McWhorter