Eastern University :: Major in Youth Ministry

Eastern University :: Major in Youth Ministry: "Eastern University Department of Youth Ministry"

I ran across a Bachelors program in Youth Ministry at Eastern College. I don't know anything about the school or the program but it might be worth investigating.

I ran across this program while researching Duffy Robbins, the author of a very good series of articles entitled: "How to Evaluate Your Youth Ministry—Part 1" (follow the links on the article for parts 2-3)

Listening to Students About Leaving the Church, by Jeff Schadt

 

While doing this study, we found that many individuals, churches, and ministries are already actively engaging the Church Dropout problem. I think you will see many similarities between the Church Dropout Study LifeWay Research released this week and the experiences of Jeff Schadt from Youth Transition Network. We at LifeWay Research were encouraged to find so many diverse ministries working together to address the transition issue.

Meet Jeff and then visit the Youth Transition Network:

Over the past 18 months, the Youth Transition Network has held open forum discussions with over 500 high school students from across the country and interviewed 140 college students about their transition from high school to college.

This article will review the most frequent and compelling lessons learned from our interaction with these students.

High School Students
First, most high school students were not planning on leaving the church; second, few had given any thought to finding a new ministry home upon graduation. It was simply not on their radar screen.

In our sessions with the high school students, they have echoed each other when asked why they believe so many leave the church. The transparency of their answers has been both heartfelt and alarming. These discussions with them have resulted in between 20 and 25 reasons each session, with answers ranging from busy-ness and priorities to guilt and hypocrisy.

The top responses include:
• Sex
• Guilt
• Judgmental
• Hypocrisy
• Strict environment
• Freedom
• Deceptive dual life culture in the youth group
• Lack of a safe place to address failure

The story that has emerged from these sessions, which has been confirmed by taped follow-up interviews, has a similar pattern. It goes like this:

“We entered the youth group with a moderate faith. We enjoyed the program and the leader and found it fun to be involved in our youth group. Yet the messages we heard were primarily focused on sin avoidance, which we perceive as sin intolerance, leaving little room for failure.”

“Then we discovered that the subculture among the upperclassmen was unhealthy and alluring. The obvious hypocrisy of seeing the upperclassmen singing and going on mission trips and, yet, leading this hidden life was disillusioning.” (In the sessions they define this as an intentionally deceptive dual life, one that youth leaders and parents often have no idea is occurring, according to the students.) “Eventually we gave in to the subculture, resulting in guilt and a sense of being unacceptable to God.”

In these sessions high school students consistently said that they cannot share their failure with parents or youth leaders. Parents will punish them and they have seen such information leak into their youth ministries, resulting in significant social ramifications for students within the church.

Once participating in the subculture in their youth ministry, they find it hard to escape because it keeps pulling them down. They helplessly try to extract themselves from the situation by themselves, while being told they should be able to avoid sin. The level of defeat that results, leads many we have encountered to say that, they “never feel successful in their faith”. In our sessions we have asked the students to estimate the percentage of students from their own youth group that are leading this intentionally deceptive dual life. At Urbana, a national mission conference, high school seniors started their estimates at 75% and ranged to 95% as they reflected upon the students in their youth groups!

High school students also report that as they look forward to graduation. They do not expect they will encounter anything different in college, career or military ministries, leaving little motivation to seek them out.

College Students
Our interviews with college students who have made the transition, some successfully and many through the fire, give more room for hope that something can be done. In these interviews, students consistently brought up three main issues with transition.
1. Aloneness
2. Making friends
3. A desire to find a church, but not knowing how

The relational connection is critical as students are separated from many of their anchor points: friends, parents, their church, and their own room, resulting in a heightened need to fit in, be accepted and be loved. Many college students have told us that the result of this stress for them was that they bonded to the first group that accepted them on campus. This could mean at a party, a boyfriend/girlfriend or a ministry.

In fact, in our interviews we found that only 7% of college students knew the name of one college ministry before arriving on campus. 93% did not know the name of any of the college/career ministries, creating a credibility problem for the college ministries. These ministries are desperately trying to find the freshmen before they get sucked into the black hole of collegiate culture. This desperation has led ministries to more overt tactics to identify Christians during the first week of school. In the eyes of our high school students just arriving on campus, they perceive these tactics as strange or aggressive, since they do not know the names and, thus, do not perceive them to be reputable. In some instances, this actually causes our graduates to avoid the very ministries we hope they will connect to.

The consequences of taking a break from the Lord in college are significant, as it is during these critical years that students will set their life trajectory apart from their parents’ influence. In these years they set their lifestyle, career and often find their spouse. Doing so, apart from the Lord, often has life-long consequences.

For those that did connect to a college or military ministry, they give three reasons why being involved in a college ministry was different from their youth ministry.

1. All the students who come want to be there!
2. The leaders want to help with the real issues you are struggling with.
3. The ministries care about you, will disciple you and are not concerned with how cool you are.

We can influence the course of our graduates during their junior and senior years, given that many have not consciously decided to walk away from the church. Helping them understand the challenges, stress and loneliness they can face when leaving home and educating them about the ministry options can go a long way in itself. Further, students who have participated in “Be Prepared” sessions and watched the consequence video produced by YTN reported a significant increase in their desire to connect with a college/career ministry, find Christian roommates and to continue walking with the Lord. One high school senior summarized it well when he said, “Up until I watched the video, I had not even thought about connecting to a ministry when I got to campus. Now it is my top priority before I leave home!”

The Youth Transition Network is a coalition of our nation’s denominations, youth, college and career ministries working together to motivate, prepare and transition our youth to their next spiritual home. The coalition includes: Baptist Collegiate Ministries, LifeWay Research, The Assemblies of God, Campus Crusade for Christ, Youth for Christ InterVarsity and the Navigators, along with many more. YTN has assembled two sites to aid in the preparation and transition process: one for leaders (YouthTransitionNetwork.org) and another for students (LiveAbove.com), which has 5,400 ministries on over 3,000 campuses for students to connect with before they leave home. Preparing our youth for the future and connecting them through LiveAbove.com will help the middle 50% of youth group students that have not set the course of walking away, but are vulnerable without a relational connection in transition.

http://blogs.lifeway.com/blog/edstetzer/2007/08/listening_to_students_about_le_1.html