Family Ministry is currently comprised of three workable models. The Family-Integrated Ministry model is characterized by its removal of age segmented activities with all families, infants to parents, worshipping together. The Family-Based Ministry model maintains the age segmented programs and activities of most churches, yet intentionally provides curriculum, activities, and events designed to draw the generations together. The Family-Equipping Ministry model may retain youth ministry and the Sunday School hour, but every activity and function of the church is focused on championing the parents as the primary disciple-makers in the children’s lives, while at the same time the parents recognize and embrace the church as an active partner in the process. At The Journal of Family Ministry, and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, we are training ministers in the Family-Equipping Model, but we believe we can learn from other models which have similar goals.
Read more about the three models in “Perspectives on Family Ministry”.
Contributed by Brandon Shields
Dr. Brandon Shields is the teaching pastor at First Baptist Church, West Palm Beach, Florida. Dr. Shields has established himself as the spokesperson for the Family-Based model of church ministry. Read more about the Family-Based model as well as other helpful insights in “Perspectives on Family Ministry”.
Continued from previous post.
As a fairly novel model of ministry, the Family-Equipping approach stands in a robust stream of youth ministry history that it can learn much from. At the current moment, the movement has yet to graduate its first youth ministry class and has no documentable data to assess its effects on families and the youth culture found within those communities. While this does not negate the potential success of the model, it does suggest that Family-Equipping churches would be wise to learn from the wins and losses of past generations.
Holding on to the Good
While I do agree in principle with the fundamental premise of the Family-Equipping movement, I think we need to be careful not to throw out the proverbial youth ministry baby with the bath water. Sometimes, in our reactionary efforts to correct a perceived strategic weakness, we can go too far and actually create new unforeseen problems.
Let me give a quick example of how this can occur. Beginning in the early 1990s, a group of researchers and former youth pastors began to decry some traditional forms of youth ministry, in essence saying that youth ministry is broken and is primarily responsible for raising a generation of young people (upwards of 90%) that abandon the church after high school.
In the wake of this so-called “research,” youth ministry conferences and youth pastors across the country abandoned old models and began propagating dozens of divergent models (i.e., emergent, contemplative, family-integrated). These models, though radically different, were united in their use of the “Dropout Statistic” and in their disdain for the structures, programs, and methods of traditional youth ministry.
The call for an end to traditional youth ministry turned out to be premature, however, as several research-based studies contradicted the infamous statistic. One conducted by LifeWay Research found that while 70% of youth from all denominations do drop out of church for a period of time, over two-thirds come back to active involvement during their twenties.[1]
The second study, which I conducted as part of my doctoral dissertation, found that 88% of students who graduated from conservative Southern Baptist megachurches with a more traditional approach to youth ministry stayed actively involved with church after high school graduation.[2]
While neither of these studies serves to validate the effectiveness of youth ministry across the board, it does warn us that we need to wise in our use of statistics and thoughtful as we seek to learn from the past in order to forge a better future.
Family-Based ministry strives to achieve an appropriate balance between traditional strategies aimed at young people and the biblical mandate to support parents in their role as primary disciple-makers. To those ends, things like public school ministry, evangelistic events, age-appropriate Sunday School, and youth camp can be effective tools if they are used purposefully and flexibly.
Missional Youth Ministry
One of the key benefits to the Family-Based model is that it leaves room for a youth pastor and youth ministry to aggressively evangelize a youth culture that is hostile to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Since its inception, youth ministry has been a missiological enterprise - that is, the real trailblazers in early youth ministry saw themselves as missionaries, young people as the largest unreached people group in the world, and youth culture as the greatest mission field on the planet. This mentality among those working with youth launched the modern era of youth ministry, led to the conversion of countless thousands of teenagers, and inspired the greatest generation of global mission work ever witnessed in church history (20th century missions).
My greatest fear is that some of that evangelistic edge will be lost or blunted with the Family-Equipping movement. As I wrote to Jay Strother, “The result of actively promoting the family as the centerpiece of the church’s mission is a built-in neglect of the larger community and of non-intact families present in the church. It is difficult to reach out aggressively in one’s own ZIP code when most of the church’s resources, energies, strategies, and leadership efforts have been targeted at intact families inside the church walls.”[3]
Now, don’t get me wrong, I believe wholeheartedly in supporting and equipping families. However, I think this is only part of the youth ministry task - historically, youth ministry existed for the evangelization of young people. Family-Based churches, I believe, are well-positioned to pursue the missional task because they champion three important institutions: church, family, and community.
Family-Based ministry allows churches to ask two strategic questions: “How are we reaching and discipling families?” and “How are we accomplishing the mission of Jesus with the young people in our community?” These twin tasks of youth ministry, though not always mutually exclusive, must be held together if we hope to be faithful to the entirety of the Great Commission of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Post 4 of 4. Read Post 01, 02, 03
Dr. Brandon Shields is the teaching pastor at First Baptist Church, West Palm Beach, Florida. Dr. Shields has established himself as the spokesperson for the Family-Based model of church ministry. Read more about the Family-Based model as well as other helpful insights in “Perspectives on Family Ministry”.
[1]LifeWay Research. “Reasons 18 to 22 Year Olds Drop Out of Church,” www.lifeway.com/lwc/mainpage, 2007.
[2]Brandon Shields, “An Assessment of Dropout Rates of Former Youth Group Participants in Conservative Southern Baptist Megachurches” (Ph.D diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2008).
[3]Renfro, Paul, Brandon Shields, Jay Strother. Perspectives on Family Ministry(Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2009), 177.
