Developing a Missional Student Ministry

Note: the following is a summary of my notes for my Foundations of Student Ministry Class. It summarizes some of what I hope to see happen through the student ministers trained at Southeastern. I pulled the information from a variety of sources, all noted at the end.

1. A Missional Student Ministry is founded on the missionary nature of God and His church.

The church must not be seen as a place where religious goods and services are provided, but instead it should be understood as the gathered and sent people of God.

Student ministry must move from the 3 Es: Events, Entertainment, and Enthusiasm, to the 4 -als: Biblical, Spiritual, Intentional, Missional (from Evangelism Handbook).

We must constantly ask ourselves whether our student ministry is:
A. Biblical: Gospel-centered, focused on the Mission of God, not on:
Moralism – using fear, rules, and commands as the basis for discouraging sin and encouraging holy living, which sadly results in increased self-righteousness among rule-keepers and absolute despair in those who are unable to live up.
Pragmatism  -when in an effort to reach new people, church leaders spend more time teaching helpful techniques or useful principles than actually pointing people to the only thing that has real power to change both hearts and lives.
Political agendas –  out of a desire to get involved in the public square and to influence policy, Christians of every political stripe often begin to equate the spread of the gospel with the growth of a specific political party or platform.

Instead, we focus on:
-Reading/teaching all Scripture with gospel lenses
-Preaching the gospel to believers AND unbelievers
-Leaders demonstrating this, emulating a lifestyle of repentance
-Cultivating a culture of wonder at the gospel
-Being a safe place for those who do not yet  ”get” the gospel (radically unchurched and radically churched or steeped in religion)
-Creating disciples who not only know the gospel but who live it.
Taken from http://www.rethinkmission.org/about-rethink-mission-what-is-a-gospel-centered-church/

B. Spiritual: Focusing on the supernatural, Spirit-led work of God. This means a ministry less about sensational events designed to draw a crowd and based on the ingenuity of the leaders, and more on prayer, witness, the power of the gospel, and the work of the Spirit.

C. Intentional: Creating a culture that sees the proclamation of the gospel the center of both the lives of the students and the ministry of the church/student ministry.

We are intentional because we have come to understand life as worship: by the gospel we can know, serve, and worship the God of the universe! As a result we long to see unbelievers know and worship too: By nature
we are worshipers, by conversion we have become rightly ordered missional
worshipers. Therefore, the result ought to be that each one of us becomes a
more proficient and intentional missional witness. (Convergent Church, Chapter 10).

D. Missional: We seek so create the posture of a missionary in every student, in fact in all who follow Jesus.

Stetzer and Dodson give a basic definition of missional: “In its simplest form, the term ‘missional’ is the noun ‘missionary’ modified to be an adjective. Missional churches do what missionaries do, regardless of the context. . . . If they do what missionaries do – study and learn language, become a part of the culture, proclaim the good news, be the presence of Christ, and contextualize biblical life and church for that culture – they are missional churches. ” (From Combeback Churches)

2. Missional Student Ministry will focus more on being incarnational than hosting attractional events.

Those with a missional perspective no longer see the church service as the primary connecting point for those outside the church. The missional church is more concerned about sending the people in the church out among the people of the world, rather than getting the people of the world in among the people of the church. Others have described this distinction as a challenge to ‘go and be’ as opposed to ‘come and see.’ (From http://www.rethinkmission.org/about-rethink-mission-what-is-a-gospel-centered-church/)

Stetzer and Dodson give three marks of a missional church. The same apply for student ministry:
(1) “Incarnational-missional churches are deeply entrenched in their communities. They are not focused on their facilities, but on living, demonstrating, and offering biblical community to a lost world. (2) Indigenous-this means taking root in the soil of their society and reflecting, appropriately, their culture.” They note how hard this is for established churches since they already have a culture of their own and find it hard to change when what they find meaningful no longer communicates to a changing community around them. Instead of expecting lost people to become like the church culture, “missional churches are driven by Scripture, but people from the community see people like them just radically different in the way they live.” (3) Intentional-”In missional churches, biblical preaching, discipleship, baptism, and other functions are vital. But worship style, evangelistic methods, attire, service times, locations, and other matters are determined by their effectiveness in a specific cultural context.”

Students can and must learn these principles while young. Student pastors must increasingly devote time to missionary thinking and related matters such as contextualization.

3. The Missional Church is about actively participating in the Missio Dei, or mission of God.

We assume God is at work in His world, not just in the church (especially the church building!). Rather than having a missions committee as a part of the church, or a missions focus as part of student ministry, we see the mission of God as being the center of all we do: every activity, trip, what and how we teach, everything from calendar to content, flows from the redemptive mission of God.

4. This means we seek to create a missional posture in the students we lead. How?

A. Spiritual formation/transformation. How we teach believers, whether in middle school or senior adults, will focus on life transformation, not merely information dissemination. Spiritual formation becomes the goal more than teaching a lesson. This will mean a radical refocus on how most churches do Bible study, weekly meetings, etc.

B. Emphasize the Priesthood of Believers. Martin Luther in using this expression meant that Christians are to live out their faith in every area of life. Whether you are a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker, a student, an athlete, or a teacher, your life and ministry is as vital as the pastor or anyone else.

This applies particularly to current student ministry since most youth are treated like grade school children more than young men and women. Helping them to see the value of their lives spent for Christ no matter what their career may be can be vital to a growing missional reformation in the Western church.

C. Change the scorecard. Student ministry is too often measured by numbers and events. Numbers matter. The Scriptures record a lot of numbers. But we are in danger of becoming like David who sinned when he numbered the people if we rate our success on our numbers in the building rather than the lost around us.

Our scorecard should measure the impact we are making in the local public school as much as (or more than!) the numbers we have in our youth gathering. How many students are sharing their faith? How many are volunteering at the school? How are students in your ministry cultivating relationships with unchurched youth? How are their families doing? How are they living for Christ after leaving the student ministry?

D. Value “third places.” Starbucks has become the epitome of a third place for students. Everywhere I go I see students passionate about meeting friends there. They do not go to Starbucks because of the products they sell, but because of the environment they create.

Our culture has become post-Christian. More and more unbelievers must be engaged for the gospel away from a church building. If we are serious about reaching youth, this is critical. This includes understanding the place of hospitality and the need to love and welcome unchurched students who may not “get” everything we do.

E. Give students the metanarrative. Help them see that although Jesus certainly came to give us the hope of heaven after death, He came to give us life now as well. Showing them the great drama of redemption: Creation, Fall, Redemption, New Creation matters. See http://yourpartinthestory.com/ as a great example of how to do this.

I close with the closing paragraph from “What Is Missional” at http://missionalchurchnetwork.com/cp-in-kc/:
The greatest challenge facing the church in the West is the “re-conversion” of its own members. We need to be converted away from an internally focused, Constantinean mode of church and converted towards an externally focused, missional-incarnational movement that is a true reflection of the missionary God we follow. This conversion will not be easy. The gravitational pull to focus all of our resources on ourselves is strong. My prayer, however, is that a clearer understanding of the word “missional” will help to form us and ultimately move us in the proper direction.

Doing this in student ministry can only accelerate this change.

The above is taken from:

http://missionalchurchnetwork.com/cp-in-kc/

http://www.rethinkmission.org/about-rethink-mission-what-is-a-gospel-centered-church/

Ed Stetzer and Mike Dodson, Comeback Churches
Mark Liederbach and Alvin Reid, Convergent Church
Alvin Reid, Evangelism Handbook
Alvin Reid, Raising the Bar