Let Youth Be Bored, For the Gospel Sake!

I am currently reading a book entitled Family-Based Youth Ministry by Mark Devries. I want to share a quote with you:

"Jim Rayburn, the founder of Young Life, is frequently quoted as saying,
"It's a sin to bore a kid with the gospel." Being, in many ways, a product
of Young Life myself, I have a deep appreciation for waht Rayburn was getting
at; namely, that the traditional structures of the church are often obstacles
rather than windows through which we see Christ.But keeping teenagers from ever being bored in their faith deprives
them of the opportunity to develop the discipline and perseverance they need to
live the Christian life...Christian faith may begin on the mountaintop,
but Christian character is formed int he crucible of pain."

This statement has really been brewing in my mind. How many times do we
see young people who were extremely involved in youth activities fall away from
institutional church, and blame the church for being too boring! They get bored with the congregational singing, the time of communion, the message that is actually preached straight out of Scripture. They feel out of place spending time with elderly and children, and they end up leaving the church because they didn't have a place that could be called their own.'

Perhaps the job of youth ministry is not to get youth excited about playing
games, because adults do not play games at church. Perhaps the job of
youth ministry is not to take students to rock concerts and exciting conferences, for often times they make the journey with Christ seem like the life of a rock star, which it most certainly is not. Perhaps we need to spend more time sending our youth to work on the house of a shut-in within the church community. Perhaps we should spend more of our time teaching students to appreciate the words used in worship, and focus less on trying to find the newest "in" worship song. Perhaps we need to teach our kids to give to the church, to interact with adults, to get involved in church ministries, rather than having mission trips of our own, big events of our own, and special sections of the building that are our own!

Maybe the problem with youth ministry isn't that youth leave the church when they reach adulthood, but that the youth were never part of the church at all.