I sometimes post the youth ministry questions readers submit, with permission, of course. Figured I’d turn it into a regular series starting today. Please voice your answer in the comments below.

Wes Olsen of Seattle, WA, is currently leaving his Christian school junior high teaching position to enter full-time vocational youth ministry. As he and his family begin the transition, he asks:

What is the strain that being a youth pastor has had on your family?

Hey Wes! That’s a great question. The strain youth ministry has on my relationship with Dana is actually pretty minimal. I think there’s a couple reasons for this.

1. Before we met, we were both youth workers at different churches. I was working part-time at a church while attending seminary and she was the interim youth director at a church near Houston. When we started dating we both already had an idea about the demands of ministry, expectations, and pressure of working in a church environment. There wasn’t a whole lot of adjustment required for her except to shift from being the main Youth Director to being my main supporter.

2. We’re both P.K.’s (Preacher’s Kids), so we each grew up having a “behind the scenes” outlook on ministry. We married somewhat knowing what to expect and how Pastor marriages work.

3. We’re intentional about not letting it strain our marriage. I say “no” all the time, not because I don’t love people or want to serve them, but because I already spent 5 hours in the office and 3 hours out with kids that day. It’s time to go home and hang out with Dana. Rarely do I have meetings in the evenings. In fact, I have an evening meeting at church about once every 3 months or so and that’s it. I arrange my schedule so I’m either home with her or she’s out doing ministry with me.

4. She’s involved in the youth ministry with me, so she has a handle on what’s going on, personalities I work with, and has the same heart for the kids that I do. She understands what I’m talking about when I ask her opinion on various issues we’re facing. Since we do ministry together, it’s less of a strain and more of a mutual affection.

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Have a youth ministry question you’d like me and other readers to answer? E-mail it to me! Please keep your question brief and to-the-point. Thanks!

NOTE: This is not an actual letter I ever plan to send to my youth group parents, nor do I currently experience all of these problems in my youth ministry in the first place. It is a fictitious letter based on common issues many youth workers would love to address but often don’t have the guts nor freedom to express.

Dear parent,

It seems like more and more of your kids are coming to church without you. I know you see this as a pretty good deal for your student since you get some quiet time at home and most of the events we do are paid-for, but you should know that there is no greater influence in your child’s life than you. Whether they tell you or not, your kid actually wants you involved in their life, even here at church. Come visit us sometime with your student and see how your relationship can grow together!

And then there’s some of you who actually forbid your teenager from attending youth Bible studies. You should know that the church is one of the last places on earth where basic morality and values are still taught, since schools are now forbidden to do so. We teach your teenager to obey you and respect you because that’s what the Lord expects from them. We also help your teenager address matters like relationships, making good choices, and setting priorities. With all the negativity and lies the media is using to bombard teenagers, we remain a light to help steer your student toward a growing relationship with the Lord.

Parents, please guide your child to be faithful in church attendance. Teenagers aren’t allowed to choose whether or not they want to go to school. Neither should you assume that they are mature enough to decide for themselves about church. Please, do not enable them to form the idea that church involvement should be based on the level of entertainment it provides. Teach your student not develop a consumerism mindset of, “What can the church do for me?” but instead approach church with the biblical mindset of, “How can I serve the body?”

What I don’t understand is how you’ll never ground your student from school, yet grounding him/her from church is acceptable, as if academic education is more important than spiritual training. You keep your student at home to watch TV, play on the Internet and listen to the radio when they actually need a good dose of spiritual encouragement. Maybe you should ground them to church instead of away from it.

We love going on trips and pulling off events for your student, but please ensure that he/she honors their commitment. The church invests many resources into these activities and when your child drops out at the last minute, it wastes money that was sacrificially provided by others.

The most important thing you can do is communicate with your student’s youth leaders. If you’re struggling with your child in a specific way, we’d love to pray for you! If you’re trying to teach him/her something at home, we’d love to help reinforce that at church. What you have to share with us can be critically important to how we interact and teach the student at church. Plus, the youth leaders may see and hear things that you should know about, too. Team up with us!

Whether you’re supportive of the youth ministry or not, please do not gossip about it or spread your negativity unless you’re speaking directly to me about it. Especially do not share your “critical evaluation” of the ministry or about individuals in it when you’re at home. You’ll only raise your children to be cynical and negative toward the church. They will grow up viewing church with the perspectives you model, so please be a gracious in your speech and attitude.

I’m actually not against criticism at all. In fact, I embrace your loving and respectful feedback since you can often see important issues I may never notice. However, please come straight to me with your concerns. Going to anyone else first is what the Bible calls gossip. When you come to me with a problem, also come prepared to offer a solution and the willingness to be a part of resolving the issue.

Thank you for your support! I pray for you regularly and hope we can continue to partner together in seeing your students’ lives transformed into a reflection of Christ.

– Your Youth Pastor

I love it that a lot of the content generated here at Life in Student Ministry is based on my interaction with you guys (or “ya’ll,” depending on where you’re from!). If you have questions or ideas for me, please contact me at any time.

One question that’s popped up several times lately is what to do when parents use church as a form of punishment and ground their kids from youth group activities. GiGi Logan, the Children’s and Youth Ministry Director at All Saint’s Episcopal Church in North Carolina, writes in an email, “…parents don’t realize that they’re teaching their kids that church is like a cell phone, TV, etc. and that’s SO NOT COOL!”

Honestly, I don’t really have a lot of advice on this subject, so I’m hoping many of you will pool your wisdom in the comments below. I’ll just make a couple observations:

1. While I’m excited that a teenager enjoys youth group enough for the parents to see it as a significant loss for their child, it’s still exactly that — a significant loss. Kids are not usually grounded from going to school because it’s both a privilege and a responsibility. Church is no different. In fact, maybe if a parent is having trouble with their kid at home they should send him or her to more church, not less. (As long as that’s not perceived as cruel punishment to the opposite extreme! lol!)

2. I’m against using church as punishment not because I’m the youth pastor and youth group happens to be “my baby.” I’m against it because the church is instituted by God and every student here is part of the body.

3. My dad is a pastor and despite my parents’ stance on enforcing church attendance over anything else, there was a time during my early teen years when they grounded me to my room for an entire month, including no church. In that case, it communicated that my punishment was a HUGE deal.

What do YOU do when a youth group student is grounded from church? Your advice on the matter is greatly appreciated.

Actions speak louder than words. Whether parents like it or not, kids see the priorities and values they set for the family and it makes a difference on how kids live their lives.

All the hype over the past couple years about the student drop-out rate from church seems to be focused at the church, specifically the youth workers. Almost every other week I see a new Chicken Little article about how the sky is falling and that youth ministry is failing miserably. However, the biblical structure of raising kids is through the parents, not church youth workers. Statistically, the kids who graduate from high school and stay in the church are not those who had a super-dynamic youth group. Rather, it’s those whose parents have intentionally passed on the faith. Of course, this assumes that parents have a living and vital faith that’s worth passing on. As much as we hate to admit it, we have a lot of parents who are sold out to the world and give lip-service in church, so their kids see that and do the same. Teenagers reflect what they see in the church.

According to the Family Driven Faith audio series by Dr. Voddie Baucham Jr., 92% of families don’t have devotions together even once a year. He also says that the average Christian family has less than 30 minutes of spiritual discussion each week. Maybe the church should focus more on discipling parents who will in turn pass that on to their kids.

I wish we heard more Deuteronomy 6:1-9 values being passed along to students by parents, but instead youth workers hear, “We won’t be at church for the next couple weeks because Jonny made the traveling baseball team.” Actions speak louder than words! Students learn that sports trump God so they can collect trophies that will collect dust in the basement in 40 years. And then we say idolatry isn’t alive in our churches? No wonder church is often a student’s last priority.

Even our homes communicate something about priorities. In most American families, the TV is the focal point of the living room. Notice that all the furniture is arranged around the room to focus on it, as if it’s the alter of our homes. Maybe family priorities need to change, not just “We go to church once a week unless something better comes up,” thinking that will somehow teach our kids that God is important, but in integrating God into daily life and decisions.

Lest I be misunderstood, I am not trying to blame parents as many have done to youth workers. Rather, youth workers need to consider parents as a vital contact for reaching students for Christ knowing that they have a much bigger impact in their lives than we ever will.

My Personal Story
My parents definitely didn’t do everything right, but one thing they did get right: they communicated by their actions and decisions that God always comes first. As kids, we noticed that and learn valuable lessons from it. When my brother was invited to join the travel soccer team, my parents made him turn it down because their games were on Sunday mornings. When we had wrestling matches on Sunday mornings, we’d always go to church instead. We often saw financial priorities when they spent money on helping other people even though we knew money was very tight at home. My dad taught us the Bible almost every day, including lots of scripture memorization (that I still use today!). Now that we’re grown and out of the house, every one of us are leaders in either vocational or volunteer ministry. Coincidence?

I understand this is all by God’s grace, not a formula with guaranteed results, but following God’s family principles definitely seems to have a better rate of return than any other alternative.

As someone who usually enjoys The Simpsons on TV, the movie wasn’t quite as good as I hoped. In fact, I was little disappointed. It had all the normal jokes and parodies of religion, environmentalists and the government as you’d expect, but there were several clips that were just unnecessary that kinda ruined the whole thing for me, like men kissing, exposed private parts and attention drawn to a woman’s chest. Thankfully there wasn’t really any swearing, but still, why can’t they just keep it clean? Half the theater was kids aged 9-14!

Overall, it has a good theme about the importance of family and spending time with your children, but it seemed to be shadowed by making light of physical abuse and marital disrespect.

Although a plot line was definitely present and very random at times, as The Simpsons are notorious for, it wasn’t as gripping as your average movie. Fortunately, there’s a lot of consistent laughs and chuckles throughout the film, which holds your attention for the hour and a half.

The wit and “Dumb and Dumber”-like humor definitely shines in The Simpsons Movie, but if you plan to see the movie you can probably get away with waiting to rent it on DVD.

[tags]The Simpsons Movie[/tags]

For our one year wedding anniversary, I made a nice DVD of our wedding for my wife. A guy from my father-in-law’s church who shoots and edits TV commercials for a living was gonna do the whole thing for us for free, but a year later here we are and it doesn’t look like he’s going to get around to doing it. So, I got my hands on the raw video footage and did the best I could with what I had. Unfortunately, the audio is poor at parts, but it still helps remind us of what actually happened on that day. It all went so fast.

Here ya go:

This Sunday is my one year wedding anniversary! In this podcast I quickly recap our past year, ministry together, a conversation I could’ve had before dating and what Dana probably thought after she married me.

Subscribe to my podcast in iTunes

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Dana and I are home from vacation and ready to get back into a routine. It was nice to visit her family and old friends of ours in Texas, but it’s also nice to be home again. We’re so tired from traveling so much the past couple weeks that it was nice to just sit last night and do nothing. Tonight youth group Bible studies start up at our house twice a week, though, so the break is over. We took about 700 pictures or so over vacation and put 211 of them online. Check out all the fun!

It looks like I was tagged by Chris at serialyouthpastor.com to list the first 10 songs that come up on shuffle in iTunes. I normally don’t really do these blog tag things (they remind me of lame email forwards from back in the 90s), but for Chris I figured, why not? Here ya go, Chris, just for you:

1. How deep the father’s love — Skillet
2. Mighty good leader — Audio Adrenaline
3. Now I sing — Out of Eden
4. Drunk in tha spirit — T-Bone
5. My hell — Disciple
6. Pressing on — Relient K
7. Blessed be your name — Tree63
8. Readyfuels — Amberlin
9. Bring it on - Steven Curtis Chapman
10. Violently — The Benjamin Gate

If anyone else wants to do it, consider yourself tagged by me.

We’re finally back from our trip to New Jersey where we put on a camp for inner-city Angel Tree children and I have to say, my youth group kids did an absolutely outstanding job of working with the children. They stepped up to the plate during stressful times, handled difficult situations with great wisdom and poured 110% of themselves into the campers. The most encouraging part was that the impact they made on the kids’ lives was visibly evident throughout the week. We could literally see the life-change taking place as some of them heard about God for the first time and experienced love an affection from the nine youth group counselors. I posted several hundred pictures of the trip on my youth group website, for anyone who’s interested.

We returned to Minneapolis Thursday evening and now, after one canceled flight and another delayed two hours, Dana and I are in Oklahoma for her family reunion for a couple days. We’ll also spend some time in Dallas visiting friends and our old church before heading back to Minnesota next week. Until then, it will probably be quiet around my site here. Time for some good ol’ vacation.

One of the cool things about the lake house we’re renting is that half of the other houses on our lake are owned by people in our church. Dana and I don’t have any big water toys, but most of them do. Yesterday was such a nice sunny day that our neighbors took me, Dana and Katelin, my 13-year old sister-in-law, out on the lake to have some fun. It was Katelin’s first time out on a motor boat and first time to do any type of water sports, so her eyes were either wide with terror or wide with excitement the whole time.

Every Sunday throughout the summer my youth group is doing an event called “Wake ‘n Ski” where we take kids out water skiing, tubing, knee boarding and wake boarding, stop for a cookout and an evangelistic message, and then maybe ski a little more or wrap up depending on how everyone feels. We pray many students will come to know Christ through this outreach.

Here’s a video clip of Katelin’s first time water tubing.