In this sermon, Voddie Baucham discusses the institutionalization of youth and the church, arguing that it has proven unsuccessful in evangelizing and retaining teenagers. He traces the origins of the Sunday School Movement to 18th century England and highlights the negative consequences of creating a church within a church. Baucham emphasizes the importance of family discipleship and criticizes youth ministries for undermining the role of parents in their children's spiritual lives. He calls for a return to biblical patterns of including young people in the worship of the community of faith and questions the validity of age-graded ministries.

Basically, we've come to a place where we've seen the institutionalization of youth and of the church, where people cannot comprehend a church without these age-graded ministries. We understand it as the norm. We can think of no other way of doing church. Unfortunately, we've also done that in the midst of a model that has proven over the years to be unsuccessful. So we note that the more money we spend on youth ministers, the more people we train and employ in these ministries, the worse off we are at evangelizing and retaining teenagers.

And these are not my words. Alvin Reed, my mentor, notes this in his book, Raising the Bar, and he is by no means against youth ministry. He's arguing that it needs to be done better, but even he recognizes that this institution that's been created has been grossly unsuccessful. We don't abandon things in this culture. Institutions suffer from what a friend of mine calls institutional inertia.

Once you get something going and once it becomes institutionalized, it almost never changes. It exists almost by divine right in people's minds, and it becomes what we often refer to as a sacred cow. And youth ministry is incredibly sentimental. Don't you love young people? Don't you want to see them come to the Lord?

We have all these stories of people who walked forward during youth camp or whose favorite person in the world was their Sunday school teacher. There are people who came to the Lord because they walked down to the church that had the youth ministry. So as long as you have people who can connect their spiritual lives to this institution, it's not going to change. A lot of people don't realize the cottage industries that have sort of arisen around youth ministry. For example, you have the youth minister himself.

This is a position that is a lucrative position. You can make a good living being a youth pastor. And there are churches with 200 members who have full-time youth pastors. So that's one cottage industry. Connected to the youth ministry position is the youth ministry degree.

For example, if you and I were to start a seminary and we wanted to train pastors. We had a hundred students and we can train this hundred students and we can give them the traditional Master of Divinity degree. It's about a hundred hour degree. Well, you don't really need that for these youth ministry positions that are quite lucrative. So you've got young kids who are going into these youth ministry positions who don't have any training.

Well, what if you and I developed a youth ministry degree and instead of 100 hours, it was only 60 hours. Now we get these individuals into our schools, they're paying a lower amount, but instead of 100 guys paying us the full amount, now we have 150 or 200 guys in our seminary. So what has happened in the seminaries is the youth minister's degree has become another revenue stream as they train people in that particular field. Well, beyond the youth ministry position and the youth ministry degree, you also have youth ministry professors. And in addition to that, summer camps, these have popped up all over the place.

So Now there are people in camp ministry, camp pastors, worship leaders for camp ministry. There's events within youth ministry, the Disciple Now weekend and all these other things. There's t-shirt companies. There's millions to be made selling t-shirts for youth events. Now churches are building youth facilities.

So now you've got million dollar buildings going up for young people to have their meeting in each week. So now not only are you an architect who can build a church, but just building youth facilities has become another industry that's attached itself to this whole concept, not to mention the numerous pieces of material. For example, let's go back to the seminary piece. Not only are we going to get these individuals to come to our seminaries to be trained for the youth ministry degree. But we're going to have, let's say within our denomination, one of our arms, so to speak, will be creating Sunday school material.

So now I have the youth minister and the Christian education Sunday school person coming to do my youth or children's degree, they're going to learn how to use the materials that I sell through my denomination so that when they go to work in these churches, every quarter they're coming back buying those materials that they've learned how to use in the church for their youth ministry and children's ministry through my seminary. You just follow the money and you realize this is not going anywhere. Well, the Sunday School Movement came to us from across the waters in England and interestingly enough, originally the Sunday School Movement was designed for children. Again, remember, you don't have the child labor laws at that time. This is the 1700s.

You got kids who were working in factories because they got little hands and can do things that big hands can't do. You have kids who are not being educated. The Sunday School movement was originally targeted toward those children in order to teach them generally. It was never designed in order to be the discipling arm of the church, but it was an outreach from the church for kids who weren't able to have an education. And there were two major arguments against the youth ministry movement as it began to grow.

And the two major arguments were, if we keep this up, two things are going to happen. Number one, we're going to begin to apply this model to Christian children, or to the children of Christians. And number two, if we apply this model in the church, parents are going to stop catechizing their own children. And both of those things have occurred. By the way, the Sunday School movement in the United States doesn't really catch on until the middle to the latter part of the 1800s.

So it literally has not been around that long. It is very new and very recent, even though people treat it like it's something that Jesus did. You know, what happens is it becomes institutionalized. And once it becomes institutionalized, we go right back to that idea of institutional inertia. It gets started.

It's a good idea. Why don't we grow it? Why don't we expand it? Then you come to the United States and you have you know, what's called flakes formula Which was a big Baptist push for Sunday school and there were five major tenants of flakes formula basically designed to perpetuate the institution and to use it as a method of growth. So it's always been seen, or was originally seen, as this outreach arm, as this growth arm.

It's not seen as that as much anymore. It's become viewed as the discipleship arm of the church, and it has completely transformed. The idea that youth ministry is our outreach arm is an absolute farce. Here's the way the argument goes. Youth ministry is the way that we reach out to people who either don't have parents, don't have Christian parents, or whose Christian parents are not doing what they're supposed to do.

If that were true, then what you would not see is this phenomenon. The kid whose parents are doing what they're supposed to do... Let's take the person who's on church staff. You get a church staffer who's not sending their kid to the youth group. Well, what happens to that church staffer?

Well, they're brought before the powers that be, and they're asked, why aren't you sending your kid to the youth group? Why aren't you participating in our youth ministry? Well, our youth ministry is for kids who don't have Christian parents. My child does have a Christian parent. I'm discipling my child.

I really don't need that ministry. Well, what's that person told? Are they given a pat on the back? And say, hey, great job. By the way, would you help all the rest of the parents who are doing what they're supposed to do to get their kids out of youth ministry too?

No, they're not, because that is a lie. The youth ministry is for every kid. It is the program that we use, not just as the evangelism arm, but the discipleship arm as well. And non-compliance is not accepted. You must be assimilated.

Where do you go in the Scriptures to justify this ministry? The answer is you don't. What's interesting, as a doctoral student at Southeastern Seminary, A lot of this research was coming out about retention rates and how kids are no longer staying in the church and so on and so forth. And doctoral students say crazy things all the time. And there were several guys there at the time who were looking at this research.

Dr. Reed was working on his book, Raising the Bar at the time, and it was then that I sort of floated this trial balloon, just thinking, hey, I'm a doctoral student, you can say crazy stuff, you know? And the trial balloon I floated was this, we're talking about reforming youth ministry, right? Well, to reform something as a Christian means to take it back to its original biblically intended purpose. Well, youth ministry doesn't have one.

Therefore, we don't need to reform it. We need to abolish it. Now, I said that, and talking to people, again, these are doctoral students, these are professors, you would think that you just sort of interact over thought like this, it was considered completely crazy. But here's what I discovered, from then until Now, what I discovered was every time I had a conversation with someone about this idea of abolishing youth ministry, I got responses that ranged from the practical to the philosophical, but never the theological or the biblical. In other words, you get things like, well, what about kids who?

Or you get questions like, well, what would we do with? Or you get questions like, well, why would we throw out the baby with the bathwater? You get those kind of questions. What you never get is, well what about this text? Well what about this theological principle?

Well what about, you never, ever, ever, when you talk about abolishing youth ministry, does someone come back to you with, forget book, chapter, and verse, just theological principle that says that this is something that we ought to be doing as a church. At best you get, well There's nothing that says we can't. That's unacceptable. That's a great question. You get rid of one, how do you justify the rest?

My answer, you don't. There is no justification for the rest. See, here's what we have to recognize. We've built this entire structure, not from the Bible up, but from the culture up. We've built this entire structure, not because you go to the Bible and you see young marriage between 32 and 37 and a half, you know, as a group.

You don't see that in the Bible. Where do we get those categories from? You know where most of those categories come from? They come from space requirements. So what happens is you look at the number of people that you have in a particular age group, young marriage for example.

If we have enough young marriage to fill up two rooms, then we take the young marriage between age A and age B, and we break that in half so that we put them in two separate rooms, it's completely arbitrary. It has no more biblical merit than just saying, you're couple one, you're couple two, all the ones go over here, all the twos go over there. But why don't we do that? Because we've bought into this age-graded mentality. That's why.

So philosophically, there's no argument. Theologically, biblically, there's no argument for any of it. But we do it religiously because we're absolutely convinced of it and committed to it simply because it's what we know, not because it's what the scriptures teach. You know, it's interesting. I use that terminology, actually, back in those days.

I said, you know, I'm not for amelioration, I'm for emancipation. You know, in other words, it's not just about making things better for these individuals who are in the youth ministry. It is about abolishing this ministry that, number one, had no scriptural basis whatsoever when we started it, and number two, has had a detrimental impact on these young people, on their families, and on the church as a whole as we've completely lost our way as it relates to bringing up, evangelizing, and discipling the next generation. Yeah, that is an argument that people make, and it's a dangerous argument. The argument that basically says, I got saved through this ministry or in this circumstance, therefore that circumstance is normative or should be normative for other people.

Think about that from a principled perspective. I got saved in a youth ministry, therefore we shouldn't get rid of youth ministry. How about the person who says, I got saved in a crack house, therefore we shouldn't get rid of crack houses. People get saved in all sorts of environments. That has to do with the sovereignty of God.

So there's two problems with that. Number one, if you follow it to its logical conclusion, it doesn't work. But here's the second problem. We are not arguing for the sovereignty of God in saving people regardless of where he finds them, we find ourselves arguing for the sovereignty of systems because we're arguing that it was the system that saved me, not God. No, God saved you in spite of the system, not because of the system.

So argue for the sovereignty of God, and if we believe in the sovereignty of God, then let's do church the way God tells us to do it, and trust Him, not the cultural norms. Essentially what we've done is we've created a church within a church. We no longer have one body, but we have multiple bodies. As a result of that, we don't belong to one another. For example, How are we going to engage in Titus 2 ministry if the younger and the older don't go to the same service?

How are we going to engage in sharing life together if we're not part of the same congregation? And essentially that's what's happening. Listen, I went and did an event out on the West Coast, I won't say where, but I did an event on a college campus and the campus minister picked me up for the event. We had lunch together, we sat down at lunch and he said to me, my daughter, pray for my daughter because we just found out that she hadn't been going to church for a while. I said, really, what's a while?

A couple of months. I said, wow, your daughter wasn't going to church for a couple of months. How old's your daughter? I'm thinking he's going to say, you know, my daughter's 20-something, she's away at college. That's not what he said.

He said my daughter is 16. So, wait a minute, how does your 16-year-old daughter not come to church for months and you, her father, a minister, a pastor, who's a member of the same church, not know it. Well, we go to the early Sunday school and then the late service. She goes to the opposite. So they were getting in cars, leaving, assuming that their daughter was getting in another car and leaving, going to a separate worship service, in a separate building by the way, and a separate Sunday school in a separate building.

And it was only when her Sunday school teacher asked how she was doing that this father realized that his daughter hadn't been in church. Now the church did that. And that is considered completely acceptable because we are ministering to and catering to this group of people that we desperately need to reach. That's a failure, not a success. We talk about these numbers between 70 and 88 percent of young people leaving the church by the end of their first post-high school year.

And a lot of people were upset about those numbers, and we've seen them again and again and again. Sometimes you see the numbers go as low as 60%. But again, there are large numbers of young people, swaths of them who are no longer involved in the church. I talked to youth pastors, and I talked to youth pastors who've been doing this 15, 20 years, And I asked them two questions. Question number one, do these numbers ring true?

Do these numbers ring true? That 65, 75, do those numbers ring true? Yes, inevitably, to a man. They say yes, those numbers are ringing true. But here's the second question, and I believe this is a more important question.

Who's the 30%? Who are those kids who are remaining? And generally, here's the response that I get from them. There's two types of kids. Again, anecdotal information, evidence all over the place, but there's two basic types of kids who are remaining.

Number one, the kid that doesn't need me. That's the kid who has a family that's discipling them and youth ministry is gravy. They come sometime, most of the time they don't, whatever, but youth ministry is gravy. Kid number two is the kid whose family is so messed up that they basically live with me. So in both instances, these youth ministers are saying the answer is family discipleship.

Either in their home or in our home through spiritual adoption, the answer is family discipleship. The youth ministry doesn't provide that. The youth minister trying to think about what's wrong with youth ministry is a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse. The fox is not going to say, I need to not be here. The fox is going to try to figure out how he can devour fewer hens so that you'll be happy with him for a while.

Youth ministers are not going to say, parents need to be doing what we're doing. We need to not have this job. They're going to try to preserve the institution. Now does that mean that they're evil and that they're scheming and conniving? No, but they wouldn't be there if they didn't believe, fundamentally, that it was their job to do what they're doing and that it was essential and that they were the answer.

They wouldn't be there if they didn't believe that. So they're going to give you those answers. But it's ironic that what the youth minister says is, if we're gonna reach these kids, number one, we need to know them better. Well, guess what? Parents know them better.

Number two, we need to have relational ministry where we're involved in their lives. Guess what? God's designed a relational ministry to be involved in their lives. It's called their parents. Number three, we need to be more consistent in our teaching.

Guess what? God's given them a place where they wake up every morning where they can have consistent teaching. Everything that youth ministers say is the answer already exists in the home. But what they will not say is the home is where the answer lies. They can't because the moment they say that, they admit that they shouldn't be in their position.

Same way we did before youth ministry. Think about it. It's question begging logic, okay? And it's question begging on a number of levels. First, they're begging the question by arguing that we're going to stop reaching the loss.

Well, what question are they begging? That they've actually reached the loss. Well, we know statistically that's not the case. These young people are leaving. They went out from among us because they were not all of us, as John says in 1 John 2.19.

So, they're not reaching a loss. Here's the second thing. Less than 10% of professing Christians in America have a biblical world view. Less than 5%, according to Barnard research, less than 5% of teenagers who profess Christianity are theologically literate enough to be called Christians. So they're begging the question, we're not reaching the loss.

The other question they're begging is this, if we don't do youth ministry, we're not going to reach the loss. It would have to follow then that we weren't reaching the loss before youth ministry. But we know that that's simply not the case. We had the first great awakening, we had the second great awakening, we had every awakening the church has ever experienced before the advent of youth ministry. So it is sheer folly to argue that removing this very recent invention is somehow going to plunge the church into peril.

Because the only way that could be true is if we weren't doing it right before they got here. And that's simply not the case. It's interesting, and that's an argument that people raise frequently. Why can't we have both? Well, number one, why should we have both?

That's my argument. Make a biblical argument for age-graded ministries. Here's my second argument. One of the reasons parents aren't involved is because we have youth ministry. For 30 years, youth ministry has screamed to parents, we're trained professionals, don't try this at home.

Having the trained professional communicates to the parents that it is the church's job. So what you do is you create this division. I call it the varsity versus JV parents. So the varsity parent in the church is the one that's doing the work of discipleship in their home with their child. The JV parent is the one who's relying on the church to do it.

That creates a sense of division that is completely and utterly unnecessary. The other thing is, where does it end? Where do we stop having ministries designed for people who aren't doing things well? Do we have the lovemaking ministry for the couple that's not handling that as well as they ought to? Do we have the baby naming ministry for people who just give their children horrid names?

Do we just say, you know what, you're not doing a good job at this. We're going to put a minister on that to do that for you. It's ridiculous when you think that the argument is, parents aren't doing something that they're supposed to be doing, therefore we're gonna create a ministry to do it for them. How about the tithing ministry? Most churches that I know, they've got families that just aren't tithing the way they're supposed to.

Should we then start an outside tithing ministry to raise the tithe for them because they don't do it? Why is it that in every other area we say, if it's not happening, call it sin and call people to obedience. But when it comes to discipling the next generation, we say, we'll take care of that for you. That doesn't work. They don't know anything else.

That's called being institutionalized. You don't know anything else. You think that it's right because it's all that you know, and that's a problem. And again, people mean well. These people are passionate about the lost, passionate about young people.

But here's the question. This is not about statistics. This is not about, well, this many kids are coming back and this many kids are going away, so on and so forth. That's merely a symptom. This is about whether or not we trust God.

Do we trust the sovereign Lord of the universe to communicate to us in His Word what the most effective way is to disciple and evangelize the next generation? Or do we trust in something else? Are we looking to the culture or are we looking to the word? That's the question. Well, the Bible has a very clear pattern in the Old Testament and the New of young people being number one in the worship of the community of faith with their parents.

We see that in Ezra 10 and see it in Deuteronomy 32. We see it, for example, implicitly in Ephesians chapter six, in Colossians chapter three, places where children are addressed directly in a document that is to be read in the worship of the church as a whole. We see it in the ministry of Jesus. He's teaching and he points to a child. He doesn't say go over to the nursery and bring me a child.

There are children there as Jesus is teaching. So throughout the scriptures we see this example. But there's the other example where we go to Deuteronomy 6, where we go to Psalm 78, where we go to the book of Proverbs, where we go to Ephesians chapter 6, where explicitly we see the Scriptures teaching parents to communicate the truth to their children, to do it on an ongoing basis. When you rise up, when you lie down, when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, one generation teaching another generation. We see this over and over and over again.

Children obey your parents and the Lord for this is right. Honor your father and your mother, which is a first commandment with a promise, that it may be well with you, and you may live long in the land. Fathers do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. It is absolutely clear that parents have that responsibility. Here's the other thing.

Parents are the only ones who have the proper tools. For example, children need nurture, but they also need correction. That kind of biblical correction falls within the purview and the responsibility of the parent. The church does not have that tool. The church does not wield the rod in the child's life.

Only the parent does. And the Bible says that that is a primary tool in the correction and shaping of children. So if we're going to sort of turn over this discipleship without one of the primary tools that God gives for correcting children, then we're only looking at a portion of the picture. So the Bible makes it very clear that that is a parental responsibility. Now does that mean that the church has no role to play?

No, remember what I said. The children are in the worshiping community. So as a pastor, When I'm preaching and teaching, there's children there. I'm preaching and teaching to them, just like I am to their parents. So far from me saying that as a pastor, I have no role, I'm saying as a pastor, I do have a role.

And because of that, I believe the children are supposed to be there, listening to the word of God as it is preached, and as it is taught, and as it is read, as we worship together as a community. No, Jesus didn't go to the temple to be trained. Jesus went to the temple to announce his presence with authority. That's what he did when he was 12 years old. He didn't go to be trained.

He was not sent away to be trained. Here's the other thing. Jesus had disciples, they were grown men. That was not a Sunday school class. And the discipleship happened life on life.

They lived together for over three years. That is not the model for a Sunday school class. Now, this is a model of discipleship that we see for the church, But it is not a model of children's ministry that we see for the church. The other thing that we have to realize is that there's a hermeneutical principle here, and that is that narrative is not normative. What God in the flesh did with the individuals who would be his apostles was not normative for the way we do church.

If it were, then what we would have in the epistles, again, the apostles didn't come back and they didn't write in 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians, what you do is you get 12 people and you do what Jesus did with the 12 of us so that you can have apostles like Jesus had apostles. No, they give us explicitly what the church is supposed to do in making disciples. And we do not have the apostles going back to their own experience with Jesus for three years, saying that that's normative in the life of believers thereafter. So we gotta be real careful in our exegesis there. When I'm looking at how my children are to be raised and discipled, I'm going to go to the explicit teaching in, for example, Ephesians chapter 6, and not to the example of Jesus establishing apostles who would be the foundation upon which the church is built as the normative example for the way that we go about raising our children.

One, they weren't children, and two, they did not in turn communicate to us in the epistles that that was the normative way that we're to make disciples. Here's what's wrong with that. You take the youth ministry and you turn it into what the church is supposed to look like. The question is, why do you need the youth ministry? You are communicating something about culture.

You're also communicating something about maturity. You're basically saying that these are children and not adults. See, one of the overarching issues here is when do we begin to treat young people like they're adults? We have 16, 17, 18 year olds that we're still treating like children, And they're not children. We need to expect more from them.

And if we're going to expect more from them, the question then comes, why do we do it in an environment where they are not around peers, other adults who happen to be older, Titus 2, and put them in a situation where they are amongst themselves. It's unnecessary. So that's what sort of baffles me about this movement, especially in reform circles where they say, we get it, We understand what's wrong with youth ministry. We're not going to do that. We're going to be all about teaching, all about doctrine, all about so on and so...

Well, isn't that what the church is about? Why do you have them in another room to do the same thing that they would get if they were in there being part of the community, which goes back to the issue of young people not being part of the community. That's the problem. The issue is we started That's the wrong starting point. The starting point is we have to preach the gospel and we have to be clear.

We have to know what God has said and we have to communicate what God has said and God will build his church. If that's our starting point, then we do not fear man. If that's our starting point, we do not worship at the altar of man. If that's our starting point, we do not compromise because we know what man's greatest need is. But Because we've chosen another starting point, which is man, this man-centeredness, because we've chosen that starting point, we are seeing fruit.

That is one of those evidences out there of how far we've gone and how wrong we are. But the real problem is that we don't believe that the gospel is sufficient. It depends on what you mean by innovate. The church not only has the freedom to innovate, but is commanded to innovate in certain things. Sing to the Lord a new song.

Praise God that we've had songwriters over the years and that Isaac Newton had that freedom to innovate and to write some of those great hymns that we sing. But we innovate in ways that scripture tells us to innovate. When it comes to being innovative and trying to reach the culture and doing things that are not found in the scripture, trying to worship God in ways that God has not told us to worship him, then our innovation becomes dangerous. For example, the great example of this in the Bible is Uzzah. The Philistines have captured the ark and they've taken it away and you know and of course things go badly for them.

They send the ark back. Now the ark is coming back and it's being carried in and it's falling down. Uzzah sees the ark falling down and he wants to do something good. He loves the ark. He loves Israel.

He wants to rescue the ark from falling onto the dirt. And he reaches out and grabs the ark in a way that God has not expressly told Israel to touch the ark and God kills him. And I love the way R.C. Sproul puts a fine point on this. He says Uzzah somehow thought that his hands were somehow cleaner than the dirt.

And the fact of the matter is, they weren't. We are but decorated dust. We worship God the way God tells us to worship him. That's our limitations. And trust me, we have not exhausted everything that the scriptures have taught us about how it is that we worship God.

And everything that he has given us is more than enough. The gospel's more than enough. I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ, because it is the power of God unto salvation to all those who believe, the Jew first and also the Greek. I believe that. And it's when we stop believing that, that we begin to innovate.

I do not believe that the gospel is enough. We need the gospel and this new thing that we've innovated. Even when it comes to the innovation of singing to the Lord a new song, which songs are the ones that remain with us? The ones that are faithful to the revelation that God has given His people. That's what stays with us.

When we try to find new ways to become more like the culture, because we believe that's going to help God out, that's when we're in trouble. My message to fathers is a simple one, and that is that God has given you an unbelievable gift. The gift of investing into the life of your children and your children's children. And somehow, somebody has convinced us that the best thing that we can do with that gift is to pass it on to someone else. My plea would be that fathers not abdicate here, that they not miss this great blessing.

Men come to the end of their life and regret a great many things, but few men come to the end of their life and regret time invested and well spent with their children, teaching them the Word of God, teaching them how to love God, how to know God, and how to serve God. Don't miss that opportunity. My plea to pastors is quite simple. Trust God's Word. Teach God's Word.

Root and ground your ministry in the Word of God. When you look throughout history, there are certain men whose names are remembered. Those are men who were faithful stewards of the Word of God, who handled it well. There are a few who are remembered who didn't do so, but they're remembered because of the folly that resulted from their ministry. My plea to pastors is trust the word.

It is sufficient. We will stand before God, and when we stand before God, We don't want to answer with, do you see how well I helped you out by grabbing a hold to the things that fallen men had placed in the culture? But instead, you gave me the gospel and I gave it to your people the best way I knew how. That's our goal. That's what we're called to.

Let them lay us in the ground, having stood firm and stood fast and proclaimed the gospel until our dying breath. We need no other.