Over the past few months I have been wrestling with a few ideas about bridging the gap between youth and life out of high school. Our experience has not been as bleak as what many studies show about the number of students leaving the Church and their faith behind after high school but it is still a concern. Part of my wrestle is that the jump from Youth to Young adults is often pretty substantial in style and values even in the same Church. Over the past few years a trend that has begun to happen in the Vancouver area where I live is combining Youth and Young Adults into the same group encompassing grade 8 to age 23.
At first it seems crazy having that large of a spread of young people in the same room, but I have visited the groups and it is actually a really healthy environment. If you think these are small Churches with limited resources, it is just not the case. One of the Churches is around 1000 people and the other around 2500 and both are thriving with this organization. Students are making the jump more seamlessly after high school, becoming leaders and staying connected to the Church in a meaningful way. They have events outside of their weekly gather for specific age groups throughout the year and one of them breaks their summer camp up into 3 age groups as well. I am no there yet, but could be convinced to combine resources to develop one ministry of HS and College.
It seems to be working really well here, but have you tried it? Seen it done? What do you think?
If you want to check out the groups you can right here:
Relate Church www.relategeneration.ca
CLA Church www.therevolutionmovement.com
-Geoff (Twitter)
6
Josh Griffin has been in youth ministry for 16+ years in a small church and a big church. He currently serves as the High School Pastor at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, CA. [
Latest Tweet
Geoff Stewart serves the Jr / Sr High School Pastor at Peace Portal Alliance Church in Surrey B.C.
Chris Wesley serves as the Director of Student Ministry at Church of the Nativity in Timonium, Maryland.
Colton Harker serves with Josh at Saddleback Church. He is currently in his second year in youth ministry.
This is an interesting move,
We have begun to do this Bridge in some ways. A few of our grade 12 students will be joining our young adults small group starting tomorrow night. So our age range will be 17-25.
It’s a risk we are going to take, as a trial for an 8 week series. If it flops we will be going back to keeping them separate, if it works we will see where it goes.
I’ve thought about this some too as my role is Director of High School and Young Adult ministries. I think we’re going to start in some smaller ways. For example having a joint international mission opportunity. I recently had a parent express concern about having even 9th or 10th graders with the 20 year olds for it being too big of a gap, but this post thankfully reminded me of some of the reasons why our team wanted to try it in the first place. It definitely is a struggle, because even now we have a core group of young adults but they’re at a completely different life stage than the college freshmen so the freshmen don’t want to get involved with the young adult ministry which just creates awkwardness and lots of people who want to be involved somewhere but feel like they don’t belong anywhere. Open to any suggestions anyone has!
This idea intrigues me, although I may be concerned about the interactions between the opposite sex. A place where older wolves could come in to prey.
agree
I am a new youth minister who has been handed the role of creating a college ministry as well. I am not sure how I like the idea of having youth (7-12th graders) in with college students. I think that age gap is just too much. I am open to suggestions on how to bridge the gap because its an important age group that we have huge opportunities with as a church. I will check those resources out.
This year we began letting the Seniors participate in our young adult ministry to aid the transition between the two ministries. One of the real benefits is that the young adults can model to the seniors what a healthy Christian life looks like outside of highschool.