Something fundamentally wrong
with the church's drive to say, we can do a better job at raising
your children than you can. And God has appointed fathers
to lead their children, not for someone else to come and do it
just because they've had a college degree or some seminary training.
That does not qualify someone to all of a sudden become the
spiritual leader of your family. But if they can go and reach
their own children and then encourage fathers I don't think they'll
be unemployed. I think their ministry focus
will change. Listen, there's a lot of fathers
out there who need to be exhorted, who need to be trained, who need
to have an environment. I don't think they'll be unemployed.
I think they'll have their hands full. But here's the problem
with that. First of all, if a child is in an environment where there
is no stability in a home, the last thing he needs to be put
in is something that's more unstable, which is a group of peers. And
so if you want to follow what Psalm 68 says, he places the
solitary in families, the lonely in families, the single in families,
because to be a believer is to be in the body of Christ. And
so what tends to be the professional answer is let's put them in a
youth group and let the youth leader be the so-called dad of
the youth group. But that child needs to be placed
in a family where there's stability. If anything, the single parent
families with these children, or if there's a case where there's
no parent present, they need to be placed to work in a home
where they see the stability. So that someday when their parents,
they know this is God's norm here for a mother and a father
to live together, to be married and to raise children. They need
to see the stability of a home, not the unstableness of a youth
group where peers are the influence and the driving force as far
as what's right what's acceptable and that is it appears good at
first but the foundational problem is the youth ministry itself
does not create an environment that's going to be healthy in
the long term. You can't just say let's just
pull youth ministry back and You've got to, in turn, create
the right solution, which is equipping fathers, exhorting
fathers to lead their families and create an environment at
church, which currently does not exist in most churches, where
that is possible. So if you got rid of youth ministry
and said, we're going to do it with all these kids, let the fathers
lead their families. And for those who don't have
families or fathers attending, put them in your family. Adopt
them. If we just get out of our minds
that the professional way is not the way It's not what we
see in scripture. I think we underestimate our
children. I really do. I've seen it in my own family,
I've seen it in families in the church, where these young people who
used to be in the age-segregated Sunday schools and youth groups,
they learn from the teaching of the pastor during the worship
service. They learn. They take notes. We underestimate
our children, think we've got to dumb them down and it's got
to be all fun and games. And I have found it when you
raise that standard, you get a high result when you encourage
young people and children included in that to follow in the ways
of their parents. I don't question the heart of
most youth pastors, youth leaders. They're there because I believe
most of them love children, they love young people. They want
to see them reached. Now, at this point in history,
we've been doing professional youth ministry for so long, we
now have young people who have grown up in youth ministry, like
myself, where they think this is the norm, this is the way
it must be done, because the church has done it this way for
so long. And if that's the case, then they just continue to step
right into that pattern. If youth pastors would somehow
just back out of their training, just take a moment to try to
not think as someone who has been trained in youth ministry
or through seminary or college or whatever, and just open the
Scriptures and say, Lord, how did you reach young people? Look
in the Scriptures. What is it that we see? And what
we see, the pattern in Scripture is we see fathers. Malachi is
clear about that. His desire is to turn the hearts
of the fathers to the children. For those who are the outcasts,
the orphans, or the single families, you don't place them with a bunch
of other singles. You put them in a family situation,
something that is stable, something that they can learn from. I mean,
if a child is from a single parent family, I would think that child
desires to be in an environment that is stable, an environment
that they're not used to. To just pool them with all other
teenagers is going to, like I said earlier, is going to continue
to create that instability because they want something they can
hold on to. And even today, even though our young people are completely
different than they were 20 years ago, there's still an understanding
that they want relationships with their parents, regardless
of what they may do externally. But we have created an environment
to where, even in the church, that is so hard to do. And unfortunately, when it attempts
to be done, it's often criticized by the church. You know, you
want your children in children's church? No, I'd like for them
to sit here with me. Well, we've got a great children's
program. No, I want them to sit here with me. There's a lot of
pressure for those in churches today who do desire to see their
children. After being a full-time youth
pastor for five years, successful, youth ministry standards I look
back and realize I believe I did more harm to families than I
ever imagined and I see that more as I look back because I
was usurping the authority of parents especially fathers by
having their children's hearts turned towards me with their
permission and I look back and I wish I could go back and do
it all over. I can't. But today, I can make
a difference more with young people and the lives of young
people than reaching the lives of young people through the biblical
standard of fathers turning their hearts towards their children,
not the youth pastor, not the youth worker. God can work in
spite of many things. He can save someone out of the
belly of a whale, but we don't need to start a whale
