Two-part series: The worship explosion

Group, Mar/Apr 2000 by Kurth, Tim

In the first of two feature articles on the meteoric growth of youth-led worship in the church, we follow one youth leader's journey from a traditional youth ministry structure to a revolutionized ministry fueled by worship

Editor's Note: What do Britain's royal teenagers William and Harry have in common with your kids? No, it's not those spiffy private-school uniforms. The sons of Charles have jumped on the biggest bandwagon in youth ministry-high-octane worship. In January the royal family joined 60,000 people at an outdoor stadium in Wales for a worship event called Millennium Songs of Praise, broadcast live to 10 million people.

In the last two years, worship music and youth-led worship services have quickly steamrolled into the hottest trend in worldwide youth ministry@ That's not just me talking-we asked youth leaders visiting our Web site to vote on, well, "the hottest trend in youth ministry We offered 13 choices, and "worship" was by far the #1 vote-getter 1

Meanwhile, the flood of worship CDs and worship resources shows no sign of cresting.2 And the swelling number of Web sites dedicated to groups that have launched their own youth-led worship services indicates the movement has moved well past the fad stage.3 More and more youth leaders are networking with peers who've experimented with a youth-led worship format, then returning home to plant one of their own. Veteran Illinois youth minister and longtime group contributor Tim Kurth is one of those trendsetters, and this is his story...

Last year, after nearly 18 years of ministry in the church, I finally pared away my other church responsibilities to focus full time on building a ministry to teenagers. Youth work has always been a big part of my job description, but now it is my job description.

I figured I already knew the formula: fall retreat, winter retreat, and summer retreat or service project or workcamp. Sunday morning was about study and discipleship, Sunday night was about fun and games with a short devotion thrown in. Mix in the occasional lock-in, paintball or laser-tag competition, amusement park excursion, and the odd fund-raiser and you've got yourself a youth ministry.

Armed with that wealth of conventional blindness, I announced to everyone what we'd be doing. The youth program's comerstone would be our Sunday night meetings. The first and third Sundays of each month we'd focus our time on smallgroup discussions (because some kids like that). The second Sunday would be recreation-oriented (friends won't come if it's not fun). And every fourth Sunday we'd do some kind of worship thing (because I'd heard some youth ministry peers talking about worship@s power to attract new kids).

My theory was simple: To appeal to the broadest number of young people you have to offer all the options. And when church leaders pressured me about big numbers I could always rent the local health club and invite 80 or 90 kids to swim, play basketball, and run around the building.

I know you've already seen it coming... the whole ball of yarn was one big operatic disaster. My "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" model was colossally ineffective. With no clear focus to the ministry, our kids grew confused. They could never quite keep track of what happened on what Sunday, and over time they gave up trying.

Disinterested kids lead to dissatisfied parents, and dissatisfied parents make for disappointed church leaders. My tried-and-true strategies just weren't reaching kids the way I'd hoped. We did fun-and-games with some success, but we weren't feeding kids' hunger for deep spiritual growth. We didn't do much of anything to disciple them, and we weren't challenging them to be Christian leaders.

As I muddled through the year it finally hit me: we weren't really doing ministry we were maintaining aprogram. We called it a youth group and we had a cute pig mascot that reflected our acronym-PYG. But I'd failed to mature my approach as this new generation of teenagers was entering my ministry. I desperately needed to discover what they were searching for...

1 The first thing I did was to listen to my young people. Even before the program went sour, a group of eager kids asked me if they could start a band. I gave them permission to use the church's sound equipment on one condition: They'd have to play for our once-amonth worship night. They agreed, and I told them I'd help with their rehearsals. It wasn't long before I realized their talent was raw, and I couldn't give them the help they needed. So I recruited a musically savvy twentysomething guy to take these teenagers under his wing and train them to be a worship band.

I also invited a diverse group of young people to paint a picture for me of what our youth ministry would look like ff they were in charge. I'd done something like this years before when I rebuilt a youth program, and I had a hunch it would work again.

Meanwhile, by God's grace, people started dropping news articles on my desk about kids around the country who were hungry for intimate worship experiences and surprisingly curious about the church's supposedly stuffy traditions.