“Start a youth out on his way; even when he grows old he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs‬ ‭22‬:‭6‬ ‭CSB‬‬ – Read the chapter)

Sometimes a thing isn’t obvious even when it feels like it should be. Or maybe I should put that like this: Sometimes a thing that should be obvious is, but we don’t do it anyway. For the last month we have been talking about how to grow a church. Well, that’s not entirely true. We have talking about things that have all contributed in some way to the growth gay my church is currently experiencing. Yes, there are things like preaching that have hopefully played some small role, but the list we have been working through have all played a bigger one. Today, let’s talk about item number four on the list: ministry focus.

I think I’ve noted this before, but we’ve got kids and youth coming out our ears right now. It’s like we’ve struck ministry gold. Every church wants to experience what we are experiencing, and here we are with it just falling into our laps. We had three total kids and youth small groups last year. We’re planning to at least double that in the fall assuming no growth which, honestly, doesn’t seem like all that great of an assumption these days.

I don’t say any of that to boast, but rather just to explain where we are right now. Part of the reason we are experiencing all of this right now has everything to do with two of the first three things that have been on our list. We eat dinner together regularly, and we have a vested relationship with our local school.

With so many kids around here these days, we have had to make our kids and youth ministries a priority. If you want your church to grow, you need to do the same.

Now, before we dive into that, let’s deal with the objections that may already be blowing up in your mind. It’s true that not every single church has to prioritize kids and youth ministries. maybe your church is located near several different retirement communities in Florida, and you have a vibrant and constantly growing ministry to senior adults. That’s fine. They need the Gospel too, and as long as there is a steady stream of new old people moving into the community who you can reach with the Gospel, that can be a very sustainable model. Just be sure you keep the focus on being the church together rather than giving in to being little more than a Christian tourism outfit.

Maybe you’re not in a place like that, but you just don’t have any kids or youth. You can’t just materialize them out of thin air. You’re right. You can’t. But you can start being very intentional about doing the things we have talked about over the last three weeks, cover your efforts in prayer for God to provide you with some young people you can raise up, and you just may find yourself with some new kids and youth coming.

Perhaps you don’t have any volunteers to run that ministry. Well, cover that in prayer too and start looking to raise up some new leaders. You can start small. That’s perfectly acceptable. Remind people that unless they want the church to die, they’ll step up help. A little bit of guilt and holy coercion won’t hurt much.

So, there are several reasons you might not be currently prioritizing youth and kids ministries, some more legitimate than others. Here’s my challenge: fix that. If you want your church to grow, you need to fix that. Okay, but how?

Well, there are people a whole lot smarter than me who have thought long and hard about that question. They’ve written multiple books about it. I don’t propose that I’m going to tell you something more significant than what they have to say. Here, though, are some things that have worked for us.

First and foremost, you need volunteers who love kids. It seems like I shouldn’t even have to say that, but I’ll go ahead and put it out there. You need a solid core of leaders and volunteers who have a passion for kids and youth ministry. If you don’t have that much, you need to start praying for it. Hard. My church had that long before we got here. We’ve got some amazing individuals who are just gifted at working with youth or with kids, and we have been able to build a solid and growing cadre of volunteers around that core who are doing great and important work week after week.

Speaking of that solid core, you need a lot of volunteers to do the job well. My approach is to have enough volunteers that no one is having to serve every single week. There are some exceptions to that. Sunday school teachers sign up to be there every Sunday. That’s part of that position. But for Wednesday nights and children’s church, I want for volunteers to feel like they are able to participate in worship, hear the sermon, and participate in Bible study more often than they can’t because of volunteer commitments.

Because of this, I make not having to serve every single week part of my sell approach when recruiting new volunteers. As a result, we have a huge group of volunteers. There is somewhere close to 40 different adults who serve with our youth and kids. There are also youth who help with the kids ministry. It makes working out a volunteer schedule a rather arduous task, but it’s worth it. My volunteers keep coming back, and we continue to be able to recruit new ones.

Now, perhaps you are in a place that you simply don’t have enough people to take this approach. That’s okay. Start with what you have. If you are the pastor of the church, it is going to be incumbent upon you to cast a vision for why kids and youth ministries need to be the focus of your overall ministry approach. You’ll need to do this from the pulpit. You’ll need to do it in living rooms and coffee shops. You’ll need to look for opportunities to remind your people and urge your people on to stepping up to be a part of the kingdom work God plans to unleash through you if you will all step up to the great task before you.

Be intentional about inviting people to serve. Remind them that it doesn’t have to be every week. Build a small group of teachers and a large group of helpers. Once you have a solid group of teachers, building a bench of helpers is easier. And, once someone is a dedicated helper, you or a veteran teacher can start to train them to transition over to teaching. And offer training for your volunteers. There are lots of solid sources for this. Make sure you celebrate them as well. Publicly.

There are several other things that have played into what is happening right now with kids and youth at my church, but let me mention one in particular. Our program is growing because the kids are inviting their friends to come with them. We have built and invitational culture. This wasn’t necessarily intentional on our part but we are being more intentional about it. Rather, we have focused on creating a great experience for our kids and youth and they are naturally wanting their friends to experience it with them.

Now, when I say we have focused on creating a great experience, that doesn’t mean it is a fancy experience with lots of bells and whistles. We aren’t doing anything fancy, especially on Wednesday nights. We don’t have much tech involved. There’s not much of a show to the whole effort. I would argue that the invitational culture there is a symptom of our eating together on Wednesday nights and the warm and familial culture that has created at the church more generally. They are showing up and being loved well in a fun environment. Kids are drawn to that and want to have their friends there with them. You can’t cover for an environment that is poor in love with bells and whistles for very long. Aiming for an invitational culture is the way to go.

And when this starts to take root, especially in your kids ministry, your church is going to grow. While youth can get to church on their own, kids can’t. Especially little kids. Little kids get brought to church by their parents. If you are loving on someone’s kids really well, eventually they are going to be interested to check out what is going on at your church that their kids are loving so much. When you make sure that invitational, loving culture extends to adults, that you are creating a welcoming culture (something we’ll talk more about next time), they’ll start to stick. That’s when the real growth magic starts to happen.

Here at the end, let’s talk for just a minute about why all of this matters. In Proverbs 22:6, Solomon tells us that if we will “start a youth out on his way; even when he grows old he will not depart from it.” Now, as we have been talking about a lot lately on our journey through Proverbs, statements like this are not airtight promises. Many parents know the pain of having raised a kid in the church only to lose that kid to the culture when they grow up. But there is now actual data to back up what Solomon says here.

I read an article just yesterday in fact presenting it. Children who are raised in the church today are as likely to be involved in the church when they are an adult as the average adult was in 1940. That sounds like a pretty innocuous statement, so let me explain a bit further. More people went to church in the 1940s than go to church today. The data on that is abundantly clear. As the years wore on, though, fewer kids were raised in church the way they were in the 1920s and 30s. When those kids grew up, then, they weren’t as likely to be involved in church as their parents were. This was then passed on to their own kids. And the downward trend of church attendance continued.

But for parents who buck the trend and raise their kids in church, the likelihood that they will be involved in church as adults goes up. In other words, the trend gets reversed. Let’s be clear, though. Raising your kids in church doesn’t mean taking them and dropping them off. It means being involved with them, and not just on Sundays either. It means actually being actively involved in the church with your kids. Attending with them. Serving where they can see you. Inviting them to serve when they are old enough (and old enough is a lot younger than you might imagine). Creating an environment at home that encourages and supports their faith growth and development. In other words, if you live like an actively engaged follower of Jesus and invite them on that journey with you, the odds are better than not that they will be actively engaged followers of Jesus when they grow up.

Or, to put it like Solomon did, “Start a youth out on his way; even when he grows up he will not depart from it.” Now there is data (from the Pew Research Group) to back that up. It’s nice when social science finally catches up to Scripture.

As true as this may be, though, if your church isn’t actively and intentionally creating an environment that is the kind of place parents want to see their growing in their faith, those same parents will find a church that is and take their kids there. I can speak to that rather personally because I see it week after week. My goal is never for people to come to this church from another church. There are far too many people who don’t have a church they are going to at all for that to be the source I look to for growth. But parents who care about their kids learning to love Jesus and His church are not going to stay forever in a church that isn’t doing anything meaningful to help them in that effort. They will go to the one that is pouring everything it has into it. So, make sure that church is your church. The future and present growth of God’s kingdom depends on it.