Helping Students Know and Follow Jesus

Andrew Zokoe • April 13, 2024

“Love won’t guarantee the young people will never walk away from the church, but it will make it a lot harder.” This line comes from an article written by Kevin DeYoung that was shared over the weekend in an RRC staff group chat (the article is brief but important - I would encourage you all to read it: “Win the Next Generation With Love”), and it highlights the disposition I try to embody and the culture I aim for in Rockford Reformed Church Youth Ministry (RRCYM). Paul expressed a similar ethos throughout his letters, including in his first letter to the Thessalonian church: “Because we loved you so much, we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well” (1 Thess. 2:8).

The common and implicit conceptualizations of “youth ministry” are often simultaneously reductionist and overly pessimistic. On the one hand, common misconceptions reduce a youth ministry to “games and pizza.” On the other hand, some might view ministering to the next generation as such a complicated and messy task that “doom and gloom” becomes the dominant narrative (spend some time with the middle and high schoolers at Rockford Reformed - I promise if you fall into this latter category you will be filled with hope).

While fun is something that we hope permeates our time with students, and while we do take the task of ministering to this demographic seriously, our task and goal is both more significant and less hopeless than either of these extremes. Ultimately, the goal is to help students know and follow Jesus.

With this goal in mind and operating from a foundation of the sort of love that DeYoung and Paul (and Jesus - I’d provide a textual reference, but I mean come on, it’s all over the place in the Gospels!) espouse, while wholly leaning into our dependence on the Holy Spirit, we come alongside students on their journeys of faith, discipling them as they seek Jesus and what it means to follow Him. We point them towards God and provide a listening, compassionate, loving ear when they have questions, doubts, concerns, triumphs, or joys.

We seek to show every student who walks through the door the love and affection of Christ. We seek to create an environment for students to feel safe to struggle with, wrestle with, and ask deep questions in a context where they know they are cared for (because they will inevitably face those tough questions). We seek to create a space without the fear of rejection, where students are not hindered from opening up their lives, asking questions, or sharing their struggles. We seek to embody the love of God, to help students navigate adolescence and all of the challenges that they face, to love students because Christ first loved us. 

To expand upon this idea, our aim is to disciple students to:

• develop a relationship with God, 
• to develop Christlike relationships with others, 
• to know and use their gifts for the benefit of the Church and the glory of God, 
• to share their story, and 
• to begin to develop and inhabit a rhythm of life oriented around and conducive to faith formation. 

Specifically, we seek to help adolescents find and follow Christ through a relational process of discipleship that seeks the “Someday” through “every day.”

I’ve used “we” throughout this (overly) lengthy description of what youth ministry at Rockford can and should look like on purpose. And you may have unconsciously or automatically filled in “we” with “the youth director and youth ministry volunteers” or “RRC’s staff” or “the parents of middle and high schoolers.” I get that impulse and am not here to admonish you for it - those directly involved with RRCYM have more regular and intentional touch points with students and parents certainly play the most important role in the discipleship of their children, but I would encourage you to read yourself and the whole of Rockford Reformed Church back into the many “we”s above. For the entire community plays a role in this task.

DeYoung’s article makes reference to this: 

“It’s not liberal professors that are driving our kids away. It’s their hard hearts and our stale, compromised witness that open the door for them to leave. One of our problems is that we have not done a good job of modeling Christian faith in the home and connecting our youth with other mature Christian adults in the church.”

Or to put it positively:

“Almost without exception, those young people who are growing in their faith as adults were teenagers who fit into one of two categories: either (1) they came from families where Christian growth was modeled in at least one of their parents, or (2) they had developed such significant connections with adults within the church that it had become an extended family for them.”

So, if you’ve read up to this point, thank you for sticking with me! And if you’ve read up to this point and now think, “how can I be involved?” Here are four quick and very practical thoughts:

• Strike up a conversation with a middle or high schooler on Sunday morning and show genuine interest in them and their lives (obviously there are appropriate contexts in which to do this and other contexts in which it may be less appropriate)

• Consider volunteering to lead a small group within the RRCYM programs (email andrew@rockfordrc.org if the Spirit is nudging you in this direction even a little - I think he’d love to talk to you at more depth about what this would entail and there might be a meal or coffee in it for you)

• Not someone who feels called or gifted to lead a small group? Offer your home, your lake house, your connections, or some other resource to bless the Youth Ministry

• For example, I would love to put together a bonfire or a day on a lake with students in the Summer as a meaningful point of connection. Do you have a killer backyard/boat/meeting place/you-fill-in-the-blank-here and a constitution for middle and high schoolers gathering there? Please let me know!

• Pray! For RRCYM, for students, for parents, for teachers, for RRC’s volunteer youth leaders, for your own capacity to demonstrate and embody love to the next generation - I could go on and on here. If you were immediately struck by one of the other options proposed above, bathe that in prayer as well!

One last quote from the article shared at the beginning of this note (I know, that was like 20 paragraphs ago), because Kevin puts it better than I likely could: 

“The take-home from all this is pretty straightforward. The one indispensable requirement for producing godly, mature Christians is godly, mature Christians. Granted, good parents still have wayward children, and faithful mentors don’t always get through to their pupils. Personal holiness is not the key that regenerates the heart. The Spirit blows where he will. But make no mistake, the promise of 2 Peter 1 is as true as ever. If we are holy, we will be fruitful. Personal connections with growing Christians are what the next generation needs more than ever.”

Andrew