00:01:28.520I think a lot of people ask us this question.
00:01:30.580What do we think about youth ministry?
00:01:32.820So we're going to dive into that in a second.
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00:02:07.720But let's start this conversation about youth ministry.
00:02:10.800and I'm going to talk a little bit from my just experience in the institutional church
00:02:16.880and what I've seen and what I've read in the Bible and then kind of contrast the two.
00:02:22.720So, you know, coming up this Sunday, you guys have seen this picture that I'm going to paint
00:02:27.900right here. There's these Christian families that park their cars. They get the kids out of the car.
00:02:32.980They unpack the strollers, grab all the stuff, and they start walking towards the church building.
00:02:37.640But then something just kind of strange actually starts to happen, almost kind of like there's a fork in the road, I guess, depending on the age of the kids here.
00:02:47.000But the kids kind of go to the right and the adults kind of go to the left.
00:02:51.760And most parents, I think, are oblivious to the kind of spiritual reality of what's happening right here, this detour.
00:02:59.200and something's being taught to these children and to these adults that happens every Sunday
00:03:07.460when this occurs, right? To the children, it's kind of this indoctrinating journey that tells
00:03:14.220them something, and it tells them three things. One, it says, my church is here and my parents'
00:03:20.620church is there. It says, my church is fun and my parents' church is boring. It tells them,
00:03:28.480my church leader is my pastor and not my father, right?
00:03:32.740So there's a couple messages that are being kind of sent without even realizing them.
00:03:38.580But I actually don't want to talk about as much about the kids as how really the parents' issues today.
00:03:43.960And so the parents also get some subliminal messages that are a part of this kind of Sunday morning ritual.
00:03:52.440What it says to them is, my children aren't ready for, quote, real church yet.
00:04:00.280I'm not qualified to teach and disciple my children toward biblical understanding.
00:04:07.240It's not mine, but the church's responsibility to develop my child's spiritual growth.
00:04:17.640I, unlike my youth pastor, am incapable of relating to and understanding the spiritual journey of my child.
00:04:28.240These are some of the messages that are being sent.
00:04:34.800It's acceptable for me to not grow in my role as the primary spiritual teacher for my child because the church is going to do it for me.
00:04:44.100So there's a lot of things that are being taught in this fork-in-the-road divide when it happens over and over and over every single Sunday.
00:04:54.980And if I can be frank, I think the church has really embraced a system where parents can outsource their responsibility for the spiritual leadership of their children to the youth pastor, to the youth program, to the youth camp.
00:05:09.260But again, what if the modern Sunday school was more harmful than it was helpful for the spiritual development of your child?
00:05:19.680What if this kind of cultural church tradition really had nothing to do with the Bible?
00:05:28.400What if the Bible's instruction for teaching your children spiritual stuff was actually in conflict with what's being practiced at most churches?
00:05:39.260Now, again, I'm not saying that youth ministry is unbiblical, but I am saying that it's extra
00:05:45.440biblical. And there isn't one lick of scripture that talks about parents sending their children
00:05:52.620to someone else to be discipled. And if, again, if we just use the Bible as our blueprint to
00:06:00.440establish the practices at a local church, we probably wouldn't end up with what most of us
00:06:06.580do today. So as believers, we've kind of become enamored of like this good intention, let's
00:06:15.360innovate and renovate great ideas for quote, doing church. And, and, you know, the only question
00:06:22.440that's really being asked by church leadership is how can we do this better? That's the question,
00:06:28.460like bigger and better. But when it, you know, comes to extra biblical stuff, I think we need
00:06:35.060to start asking the question, should we be doing this at all? You know, just because we can do
00:06:40.540something doesn't mean we should do something. And I'm going to say another one, just because
00:06:44.580something seems smart doesn't mean it's right or biblical. You know, but again, you know,
00:06:52.760much the same way that we expect a door to have a doorknob, we absolutely expect a church to have
00:06:59.580youth program. And you can ask any kind of church shopping couple at the top of their list, you know,
00:07:07.360or at least the top three points of their list they're looking for is this, you know, gold-foiled
00:07:13.260youth ministry or Sunday school or midweek youth group or, you know, weekend youth programs or
00:07:19.540children's church or young adults group, you know, whatever, you know, they want to call them. It'd
00:07:23.880be very weird if a church didn't have those things, you know, because they're just so
00:07:29.420critical for the modern church today. But the big question is, how did something that isn't
00:07:37.180found in the Bible become so central to what the church does? And so I'm going to give you guys a
00:07:42.920little, I guess, historical journey. We're going to go back to 1760 to 1840. We're going to go back
00:07:49.880to the Industrial Revolution, Great Britain. And this is actually the birth era and the birthplace
00:07:55.840of the now Universal Sunday School. And so, at this time, you had lots of homeless,
00:08:04.720poor children, or children of the poor. You know, again, mostly orphans. And at the time,
00:08:15.500they provided the cheapest labor that could be found in the factories.
00:08:19.700And so they started exploiting these children, the industry did.
00:09:33.480to instruct them in spiritual and moral matters.0.92
00:09:36.300And so you have this need, right, which is thousands of illiterate, homeless, immoral orphans.
00:09:42.460And the answer was, for the missionaries of the day, was the gospel, moral education, and instruction in reading by learning how to read the King James Bible on Sunday.
00:09:55.560And so Sunday school was literally a school.
00:09:57.880It was a place where illiterate, poor children would be educated and evangelized through the reading of the Bible.
00:10:07.140And so the creation of Sunday School was, again, just a missionary effort to evangelize the working class orphans of London.
00:10:15.900Now, within a few decades, the missionary movement became, it's pretty fascinating.
00:10:22.420we don't have time to go into it, but really became like the modus operandi of generally
00:10:27.620every church in the developing West. And not just for the less fortunate or the orphans who didn't
00:10:34.920have parents to teach them these things, but for like every Christian family that existed.
00:10:40.900And I was reading some stuff from J.C. Ryle, who's a 19th century pastor writer. You guys
00:10:48.320heard me talk about him on the show before. I really love his books. And he actually has a
00:10:53.680great quote. He says, experience supplies painful proof that traditions once called into being are
00:11:02.300first called useful. Then they become necessary. At last, they are too often made idols and all
00:11:10.520must bow down to them or be punished. I think we can almost look at youth ministry like that.
00:11:17.160it was a useful thing. Then it somehow became a necessary thing. Now it's become like a protected
00:11:23.380idol of the church. And anybody that wants to tear it down or question its existence or anything
00:11:30.120is going to be, you know, punished or yelled at. And so again, you know, youth ministry isn't
00:11:37.240unbiblical, it's just extra-biblical. And, you know, I also want to say that I'm not anti-youth
00:11:47.620ministry in terms of its existence in some formats, but we'll get to that later.
00:11:53.960Hey, Dale Partridge here. We hope this podcast has been a blessing to your walk with God.
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00:12:48.900relearnchurch.org forward slash donate. Thank you so much for your consideration.
00:13:00.160But I do think that youth ministry is actually, at least the way that we see it here in the West,
00:13:06.140is actually at odds with how the Bible calls parents to disciple their kids.
00:15:33.340You guys might have seen it, I don't know, maybe a year ago, about the idea that, you know, the chances of your child becoming famous are like one in so many hundred thousand.
00:15:44.460You know, the chances of, you know, your kids becoming, you know, a certain level of athlete, you know, a certain level of professional athlete, the chance of your child becoming, you know, a musician or becoming a celebrity, you know, are so rare, right?
00:16:05.980But the chance of standing before Jesus Christ is 100%.
00:16:11.420And there's a guy that kind of wrote this original, this post.
00:17:04.860I don't know if you've looked into this, but they're putting their children through like 40 plus hours a week of training in the Quran.0.99
00:17:11.680And Christians, you know, parents expect that, you know, 50 minutes of coloring Noah's Ark on Sunday is going to be a sufficient thing for them to, you know, how to deal with all the, you know, ridiculous things that they're growing up in.0.99
00:17:27.780And, you know, when I was a little kid, I didn't have to think about which bathroom I had to use0.99
00:17:33.440or which gender I was or worry about my fourth grade teacher showing me how to masturbate.0.94
00:17:38.620Okay, there's a lot going on here.0.94
00:17:42.220And again, I'm not saying this isn't necessarily a numbers game.
00:27:22.640Thank you for joining us on this episode of Real Christianity.
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