Pastor Blogs - Youth Parents, Students, and Volunteers

May We Live For Christ

Titus 2:14, “Christ Jesus gave Himself up for us…to purify a people for Him…to live for good.”

Parents, Students, and Volunteers

What could God do with you today?

I love being a Student Ministries pastor because I know God is capable of doing great things in the lives of students. We can know that because Ephesians 3:20-21 says, “Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever! Amen.”

We have numerous biblical example of how God used young people in the past to do great things: young David battling Goliath, Daniel standing his ground in the face of a lion, and God choosing a godly teenage girl named Mary to give birth to our Lord. Clearly, God chooses young people to accomplish great things for him. I believe that the expectations we place on young people in the local church today are far too low.

A story came out about a school in Oregon that decided to test the theory of if expectations we place on young people actually have consequences.

Teachers were given two classes of randomly divided students. Without knowing it, the teachers were told that one class was made up of the best and brightest students and the other class was made up of the slower to average students. With that, the teachers began to teach and guess what happened? All of the teachers’ interactions with the students were tainted by their expectations. When the teachers worked with the students in the “bright” class, they persisted with the students until they got the answer. But when the students in the “slow” class didn’t find the answer right away, the teachers moved on to another student. Don’t miss this: statistically the classes were exactly the same. The only difference was in what their teachers expected of them.

Soon, the students began to meet those expectations. The “best and brightest” class began to excel, and the “slower to average” class began to lag behind. The point of the study is that expectations we place on youth has consequences.

Student ministries today are primarily built on entertainment and not on the foundation of God’s Word. I want to say there is nothing wrong with having fun. I believe God’s people have a lot of fun together, yet the primary purpose of OUR ministry is to place on ourselves, the expectations God places on us from His word, trusting His Spirit to enable us to accomplish those expectations.