The title of the article describes the problem of youth ministry, and not only in Salvation Church, though I would like to focus on the analysis of the situation is in our church. Salvation Church, in my opinion, is a very dynamic church; focused and proactive. With a lot of ministries. With a large percentage of people under 28 years of age among its members and involved in various ministries, including SMS-club and teams involved in floorball, Ultimate Frisbee, English club, children's ministry, camp, etc.

Sunday services are contemporary and accessible to young people. There is a well-developed system of small groups. And all of this is fine, I would even say great. But still, it is worth asking ourselves: "Do we need all the youth activity? Or maybe it's just an out-dated phenomenon, overloading the already busy schedule of young people in our church?"

 

It would be logical to pose this question directly to the youth, so I did: I conducted a survey in one of the most popular social networks on this topic (http://vk.com/wall-45591958_3). The youth were queried as the title of the article suggests. The questions were the following:
а) Tradition. Sunday services, groups, and SMS meetings are enough ...
b) There is a need for an opportunity to communicate not only with the members of your small group

Twelve people responded to the survey (about 1/5 of all young people who attend Salvation Church), and the votes were as follows: only one person voted for option "a" and the remaining eleven, of course, for "b". So, young people think these meetings are important. Why? I will try to answer exactly that question in the rest of the article ...

In the youth ministry of our church, in which I have been involved for more than 7 years, there have been different periods. There were times when the youth events were the only events. There were also times when the large number of other activities forced us to cancel the youth meetings. Analyzing the current situation on the basis of past experience, I have come to the following conclusions.

We need youth events. First, in order to build a meaningful youth ministry we need meetings for all the young people, not only small groups or SMS club teams. It's not possible to give direction to that many people without getting them all together.

Secondly, young people need to get together outside of their individual groups and ministry teams just to see how many of us there are ... I especially value the times when we worship God together in song and and raise a many-voiced, young, powerful "Hallelujah." It invigorates the spirit and provides inspiration for further work.
Third, youth meetings are an indispensable way to share prayer requests, information on events and projects, and for motivating young people to action and prayer.

Fourthly, youth meetings are the best place to give young people the opportunity to try themselves at preaching and in conducting worship, thus ensuring the development of spiritual gifts.

Fifth, they are a tool to ease age transitions. When older children graduate from Sunday School it is easier for them to feel at home in a youth service.

However, the points above do not exhaust the topic. Despite the usefulness and necessity of youth meetings, they really can become a burden. The fact is that such meetings should be organized on the basis of the understanding of the spiritual needs of the young people at the given time. And please, do not confuse the needs and whims! Youth meetings are often held, as it were, by inertia, without the proper preparation and spiritual guidance. As a result, young people are no longer interested and the authority of the youth leader is diminished, and this makes it difficult to complete a project or implement an idea. There is a saying: "better not at all than halfway." It very accurately describes those youth meetings that are only "for show", especially at Salvation Church.

So what is the point of all of this? The point is that there need to be youth meetings at Salvation Chruch - that they should be of good quality, interesting, and spiritually enriching and edifying for the youth of our wonderful church!

Vladimir Golovash