Wayne Rice: Youth Ministry, Parents, and the Whole Church
Youth ministry pioneer Wayne Rice reflects on the rise of Youth Specialties, the professionalization of youth ministry, and the importance of intergenerational church life. He urges churches to equip parents, connect teenagers with adults, and recover a fuller picture of the body of Christ together.
- Wayne Rice and Mike Yaconelli helped shape modern youth ministry through Youth Specialties.
- Rice says teenagers need significant adult relationships, not separation from the wider church.
- He encourages churches to support parents as the primary spiritual influence in their children’s lives.
By Joni Sullivan Baker
“I think if you are working with teenagers, you have the most important job in the church.”—Wayne Rice, in a phone interview, March 2010
In the late 1960s, churches didn’t have youth ministers. The Christian Endeavor meetings for youth that some folks remember were pretty staid affairs, possibly highlighted by a rousing rendition of “Deep and Wide,” or some other camp chorus. Meanwhile, a youth culture was starting to emerge in a changing society experiencing the generation gap.
Outside the church, organizations like Youth for Christ experimented with new ways of reaching teens through large events and after-school clubs.
And then two former Youth for Christ staffers, who had moved to church youth worker positions, changed the way churches ministered to teens. Creative, young, and probably a little wacky, in 1968 Wayne Rice and Mike Yaconelli founded Youth Specialties (YS), and have had a profound effect on the development of youth ministry as we know it today.
YS, now part of Zondervan Publishing, is the nation’s foremost organization for youth worker resources and training. Rice left YS in 1991 to form a group called Understanding Your Teenager, now part of HomeWord ministries. Mike Yaconelli continued leading YS until his death in a car accident in 2003.
Today, Rice is a 64-year-old grandfather still called to working with youth. He currently focuses his efforts on intergenerational relationships at College Avenue Baptist Church in San Diego, where he is on staff.
He has written more than 30 books for parents and youth workers, including many youth ministry best sellers. Recently, he has written two books for Standard Publishing. Engaging Parents as Allies (2009), part of the Youth Ministry in the Trenches series, helps youth ministers understand how to involve parents in the ministry to teens. In March, a second book was released called Generation to Generation, a practical guidebook to help parents be intentional about communicating faith to their teens.
CHRISTIAN STANDARD caught up with Rice recently to learn more about his life and to gain from his perspectives.
Youth Ministry Beginnings
You are one of the nation’s pioneers in the youth ministry movement. Tell us about your background and the start of Youth Specialties.
I grew up in California and was at San Diego State University in the 1960s when I very clearly felt called to work with teenagers. I still have a passion to help kids, as adolescence is when the biggest changes take place and kids start thinking for themselves.
Back then no one studied youth ministry; no one knew what to tell you to study if you were interested in ministering to youth. So I changed my major from architecture to commercial art, because in those days youth work required the ability to make really good posters . . . and I went to work for Youth for Christ, running Campus Life clubs. And that’s where I met Mike Yaconelli.
We had developed these enormous outreach events, and we were trying to finish school, so we took church jobs. We took the ideas we had developed at Youth for Christ, so our youth groups looked a lot like Campus Life clubs.
But we realized there were no resources. We had some in Youth for Christ, but there weren’t any out there for the church. So basically, in 1968, when we left Youth for Christ, we decided to start a little organization we called Youth Specialties.
We started publishing the Idea Books—they had skits, games, crowd breakers, and fun events for kids. Then, in 1970, we started our National Youth Worker Conventions. The first convention drew about 300 people, which we thought was just about every youth worker in the whole world. Now they attract thousands, plus there are a lot of other conferences.
YS rolling into the ’70s was breaking new ground. We were very passionate about reaching kids for Christ, and that’s what we felt God had called us to.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the church was neglecting its young people. There was a terrible amount of upheaval in the ’60s, and the youth revolution was going on, and the church was missing it.
We wanted to reach those kids and wanted the church to be more relevant to kids. We felt that providing the people, resources, and programming for youth would do the trick.
We made some tactical errors, but I don’t apologize for it. That’s how we learn. Our proposal to remedy the situation was for churches to hire youth workers and put on great programs and become more cool.
Intergenerational Church Life
How do you think the world has changed, and kids and the church with it?
Probably the big change is kids don’t have that many significant adults in their lives—the key word would be abandonment. It starts with the family, as families have disintegrated and the extended family has become nonexistent for a lot of kids. As a result, they have a loss of heroes, a loss of mentors; they’ve lost those kinds of connections with adults. A loss of moorings, in terms of authority; no sense of true north. As Steven Covey says, growing up in a world without a sense of right and wrong.
In a “whatever” kind of world, they have very few adults to help them figure it out. I don’t think we help that situation by setting up youth groups being led by people who are barely out of their teens. The older you get, the better you get in youth ministry; you have perspective on things, and the kids don’t care how old you are.
Where the church has made a mistake [is this]: I think the church has adopted the same model that we had in youth ministry. A lot of our churches have become like big youth groups, a big event, and we haven’t created a place where the whole church can be together as the body of Christ.
And we don’t want any crying babies or disruptive kids or annoying teenagers, and I think that’s an unfortunate development. There’s something really kind of beautiful about a church that’s really pretty chaotic at times. We miss out on the beauty of the body of Christ when we separate everybody.
You’re not really saying we should just go back to having everyone meet together, kids and adults?
That is what I’m saying. There has to be a time when the church is all together as the church. Not all the time, but sometimes.
The only place in the Bible where Jesus prays for the church is when he prays for unity, prays that we will be one, and I don’t think you can be one when you are separated all the time.
It’s ironic when you think about it: the church is the only place that is by definition an intergenerational experience, but we do our best to not be that once everybody shows up.
There’s a need for children’s ministry—in the Sunday school hour—but there needs to be a time when the whole church comes together. And families come together. Because parents are the primary spiritual influence on their kids all the way through the teen years.
Don’t ever underestimate the impact you have on your kids. The kids need to see their parents worshiping God, need to hear what their parents think about God. Need to have faith conversations.
Equipping Parents and the Whole Church
What should church leaders see as their primary goal in ministry to children and youth?
The role of the youth pastor or children’s pastor is to equip. I see youth ministers as supporting the family, doing all they can to connect young people with the rest of the church, rather than keeping them separated.
And the church needs to stop seeing it as “not my job.” I think the whole church should be doing youth ministry, not just the paid professionals.
A ministry that tries to help parents can’t be successful unless the church sees their role as helping families raise godly kids, helping parents realize their first task is what I call the First Commission—the Deuteronomy 6 passage that says to teach your children when you walk along the road, when they wake up, when they lie down . . . that has to be done by parents.
Looking Back on Youth Ministry
If you could do things differently in leading leaders of teens, what would it be?
The big mistake we made in YS, and a lot of other organizations made it too, is we professionalized it. We made youth ministry this profession, the grad schools began degrees in youth ministry, and now you can get graduate degrees in it. And there’s even an organization of professors of youth ministry and a professional research journal. A lot of parents and ordinary people in the church think they have to hire professionals.
The way faith gets passed on from one generation to the next is very natural and needs interactions between young people and old people, and we’ve isolated our kids from those people who need to be around the most.
I think it’s unfortunate our culture has isolated kids to the point that now it takes until 30 to grow up. Adolescence is the transition to adult from child. That’s why teenagers need to be around adults; they need to know how to be one.
And the numbers aren’t very good about what happens to our young people after high school.
So I don’t think we can warehouse the teens or children in their own little buildings and expect them to stick around. The church is kind of an umbilical cord, and the kids get severed from it when they leave high school unless they are part of the whole church. Unless they feel like the church is my church, there’s not a high probability they are going to stick around.
Joni Sullivan Baker, a freelance writer and managing director of Buoyancy Public Relations, lives in Loveland, Ohio.
WHAT’S A PARENT TO DO?
Someone else may know the Bible better.
Someone else may be a better mentor.
But no one knows your children better than you.
In Generation to Generation, author, parent, and youth ministry expert Wayne Rice challenges parents to enjoy their role as primary spiritual caregiver. This intensely practical book helps readers find:
- Creative ways to communicate lasting values through family traditions and everyday family routines.
- Tips for leading family devotions that won’t make kids groan.
- Ideas for encouraging children to grow in faith in their teen years.
- Useful tips to help blended and single-parent families share their faith and values.
Price: $14.99 • Item 021535410 Available at www.standardpub.com or your local Christian bookstore.
