Chap Clark on Youth Ministry in the Church

Chap Clark in the Professional Inaugural Lecture to Fuller Theological Seminary said this about youth ministry:

Chap Clark

The social hierarchy that we’ve handed off to our kids, it starts as early as preschool, kindergarten, first grade. We learn there are some cool people and not so cool people and we figure out our place as we go on our own way to assimilate ourselves into society, a society that is fragmented and abandoned us. This has happened in the church, as we sought to care for kids in the church, we actually fragmented ourselves away from any sort of community. And we are creating a system where we teach kids, we love you enough to hire someone to listen to you, but we don’t what to take 10 minutes to be your friend. And we are paying a price for it…Why do such huge percentage of kids that are deeply involved in youth ministry when they hit college they tube their faith…they are never grounded in a community, even while they are growing up in the church. Adults don’t know how much abandonment has cost us. Adults are so busy and so survival oriented that we rarely have the time to step back and reflectively consider how our lives and structures are affecting our young. We are simply trying to take care of ourselves out of necessity.

I am a seminary professor [of youth and family ministry] because this matters. Our kids have been cut off. And even in the body of Christ where we proclaim the truth of community and integration, and love, and care, and knowing one another, and having space, and a sense of the sacred. We don’t live that. First we don’t live it with ourselves and secondly we don’t live it with our kids, and they look at the adults in the church and they say, “What a fraud!”

I had one of our d-min students that did an interesting deal, he was doing a study of a very large church of the Jr. High kids in their program, and he gave them a survey on how they are feeling, and all the things you would think they would say, nobody listens to me, nobody takes me seriously, I hate the service, I hate the music, the preacher never talks about anything involved in my life, and it was typical, he read that and thought, I’m going to give this same survey to the senior [citizens]. Statistically the results were identical. Children, adolescence, the elderly, fragmented isolated, systemically abandoned from the church. Divorced folks, single folks, people struggling with identity issues, people that are struggling with their own sense of self, folks that have addictions, we can go on and on and on of all the ways that we somehow pushed to the corners those things are going to be costly to us as we try to do church in the 21^st century. We have failed to receive and embrace those people that need the church of Jesus Christ.