Entertainment Threatens Stewardship

                                                                                                                                                                                                   Vol. III, No. 2, February 1990

Southern Baptists stand to lose an entire generation of potential ministers and need to prepare for leaner days if the trend is not reversed, a denominational social worker warned.

Anne Davis, dean of the school of social work at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, said the downturn can be traced to recent years when church youth directors have become more concerned with entertaining young people than with challenging them to make a sacrificial commitment to Christian ministry.

"When we shifted our youth programs from Bible study to entertainment and pizza parties, we lost an entire generation who no longer has the commitment to ministry," she told a group of Baptist center workers.

The conference, which focussed on starting churches through ministry, was sponsored by the Church and Community Ministries Department of the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board. "Too many young people today want a youth minister who will take them on more trips and plan more activities," she told them.

The downtrend will not be reversed until youth directors begin to instill a higher level of commitment and dedication to Christian ministry in the lives of young people, Davis said.

The problem does not stop with a lack of future ministers and lay volunteers but will also show up in lower levels of giving to fund budgets for churches and the denomination, Davis said. " Whatever happened to tithing? We have so many alternate ways of raising funds for mission trips that when these young people get to be adults, they're going to think the way you support your church or home missionaries is through bake sales and car washes."

(The above was taken from a Baptist Press article as printed in SPICE, the quarterly publication of the Stewardship Commission, winter 1990. The following additional thoughts are from The Banner).

Anne Davis has identified a very real and serious problem, but there are other aspects not brought out in the above. Youth directors are subject to the same human pressures that all of us are: specifically the impetus to focus on numbers and the short term rather than on quality and the long term. God looks at the heart, man on the outside. And often when we look at a church program (not just youth programs) we are tempted to judge it by the numbers of participants and the degree of activity instead of by spiritual growth and commitment to service.

What a joy it would be to learn of church youth programs characterized primarily by serious Bible study and sacrificial service to others and where entertainment played a strictly minor role. We underrate our youth if we treat them as if they are not capable of serious learning, as if they have nothing to offer of value in service. How can we expect them to grow if they are never challenged but only and always entertained?

It is true that youth directors should teach and lead, not just entertain. But it is also true that many parents are relieved simply to turn their youth over to the youth minister and never make any positive input, never offer any suggestions, never discuss their expectations with the pastor and youth minister, never object if they believe the youth program is going astray, never study what responsibility God's word places on them, the parents, for the godly nurturing of their children.

In part this tendency is symptomatic of our times. In many fields we have let specialization go so far that we almost automatically turn over everything, including our children, to the "professionals." Yet the Bible never mentions "youth minister" or "youth director," but it certainly has a great deal to say about the responsibilities of parents. Each parent will answer to God regarding his stewardship of these precious young lives our heavenly Father has entrusted to us.

Parents, youth themselves, pastors, and youth ministers should all be alert to the fact that our joy should be in the Lord, not in the frothy frivolity of so much that currently is included in so many youth programs.