Are We Collecting Students or Sending Missionaries? (Part 2)

In the first post in this series, I noted that if we aren't equipping students to be missionaries in their families, schools, and communities, we're simply collecting students. But what does it "look like" to collect students vs. sending missionaries? To start, here's a short list of what it looks like to simply be in the business of collecting students:

All events are planned based on what the favorite events of the students who have been around the longest are. There's not much thought about what will help get the youth ministry further toward its mission.

All evangelism efforts center around getting students to bring friends to church or youth ministry events. There's very little or no talk about helping students being missionaries wherever God has placed them, or helping students share about Jesus with their friends on their own turf.

Students in the youth ministry rarely, if ever, have meaningful conversation about church or their relationship with Jesus with their friends. Mostly because they're never taught or encouraged to.

The youth pastor is very worried about "losing" students to other nearby churches. He or she would rather worry about a few students finding a church home elsewhere than the hundreds or thousands of teenagers in his or her community that don't yet know Jesus.

Most of the new students in the youth ministry are Christians who previously attended another church in the area. If there is growth, it can be attributed to people coming from other churches, rather than students coming who don't already know Jesus.


Question: What would you add to this list?

Update: Part 3 can be read here.

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