Many of us in youth ministry still don’t get the importance of parents. We think we are doing an important job of helping students grow in their faith and parents should get out of our way. This thinking will not work. We have to be serious about partnering with parents. I know many youth workers avoid parents because we want to avoid confrontation but this again is the wrong thinking. We need to get out ahead of parents and ask them for partnership. We have to solicit their input and implement their ideas. By doing so we will form a partnership with them and have the best chance of reaching students. A parent and a youth worker in partnership is a powerful tool in God’s hands. To form partnerships with parents consider the following:

1. Help Parents
Hold parent meetings with an expert in parenting. Ask a member of your congregation to give a workshop on one aspect of parenting that would add value to your parents.

2. Build Parental Networks
Put parents together for the benefit of helping each other. Many parents are facing the same issues but they aren’t connected. If you connect them, they will see that you care about them and this will be a big help to parents.

3. Customize the Youth Ministry
Ask each parent, “what do you want to see happen in your student’s spiritual life?” Then work together to see it happen. Parents will be grateful someone has the same concern they do and they will want to work with you to reach their student.

I spent this past weekend with a ton of great youth workers at the Simply Youth Ministry Conference. We took some time today in the office to reflect on what we learned. Here is a small sample of our thoughts:

1. Youth workers need community
We witnessed the power of community through connections over and over again. Youth pastors don’t feel connected to their churches or their profession, so gatherings like SYMC feel like being in a spa.

2. Youth workers want to mentor
Over and over again youth workers told me how they would want to mentor students but neither the students nor the youth workers had a ton of time. I believe youth workers see the need for mentoring like never before but don’t know how to make it happen.

3. Youth workers lack professionalism
Some youth workers dress and act like the students they work with. While some of this behavior makes you connect with students, it also hurts the church’s view of youth ministry.

4. Youth workers need training
So many youth workers don’t have any clue what they are doing. Youth ministry doesn’t have a minor leagues and churches don’t seem to help them. Many feel like they are drowning.

5. Youth workers still don’t understand parents
With all the talk about family ministry, many youth workers still don’t get how to put parents first. They don’t understand that parents are the primary faith influencers. They don’t know how to build relationships with them.

6. Youth workers are being hurt by senior pastors
There are lots of hurt feelings between youth workers and senior pastors. I can’t understand how a senior pastor can pray for the ministry of his church and then go mistreat youth workers.

7. Youth workers sacrifice
I heard many powerful stories of sacrifice on the part of youth workers. Stories that will one day be told in Heaven, and after they are told youth workers will be called heroes.

Why is student leadership always the last thing we do? Think about this, youth workers put off student leadership until the ministry is “ready” for them to lead. This is conventional wisdom but it doesn’t make any sense. Did Jesus wait until the disciples were ready before sending them out on their first mission trip? Did he make sure everything was perfect before starting a leadership team of the unprepared? Actually, to start his ministry he walked from Nazareth to the Jordan River got baptized and started building his leadership team. Notice, he picked the people lowest on the totem pole. Youth ministry needs to be about building students into owners, not participants.

It breaks my heart when youth workers tell me they would love for their students to lead but they are just not ready. When are students ready to lead? When they are responsible or when they are somewhat responsible? I tend to wonder if were looking at the wrong person. Maybe the questions should be, “when will the youth worker be ready to let students lead?” Student leadership programs are a big time commitment, there so many aspects to ministry and thinking of adding one more is hard to imagine. I know youth workers are overworked, but students having ownership in the ministry is too important to put off. If we want students to own their faith they have to own the ministry.