How Youth Pastors Respond When Students Leave the Faith – Mike McGarry

You never know whose faith will endure and whose will be fade. In my 15 years of youth ministry I’ve seen student leaders completely forsake Christ by their sophomore year of college, while others are currently serving in pastoral ministry despite their spiritual fence-sitting in high school.

Salvation is a gift of God, and youth pastors learn pretty quickly how unreliably teenagers’ spiritual passions predict their long-term trajectory. This doesn’t undermine the validity or significance of our ministry, but it’s a reminder to play the long game while refusing to keep score based on short-term fruitfulness.

Parents grieve when their children walk away from Jesus. Youth pastors do too.

We’ve invested years of our lives into preaching the gospel to them. We’ve sat through their basketball games, endured painfully awkward conversations at the coffee shop, and counseled them through adolescent identity crises and heartbreaks. We also baptized many of them. We saw them on spiritual mountaintops when something they’ve heard a thousand times in Sunday school finally clicks, when God’s goodness is undeniable in their life, and when God used them to minister to a friend. 

Parents grieve when their children walk away from Jesus. Youth pastors do too.

When students leave the faith, it strikes our hearts in ways that few understand. I’ve recently shared what I’ve learned about how youth pastors can prepare students for lasting faith. This is my best attempt to help shed light, and I hope some encouragement, about how youth pastors respond when students leave the faith. 

Stop to Grieve

It can be tempting to overlook the sadness and grief. Don’t. 

No one serves in youth ministry for the paycheck or because it’s a good way to gain respect. They pastor teenagers because the Lord has called them to lead students to Jesus. Youth workers invest themselves into students in significant ways. Even now, I still consider myself a pastor to the students who graduated from my ministry 15 years ago. If they needed me, I’d be there in a heartbeat. 

So when one of them turns away from Jesus, the sorrow is real. 

Jesus understands what it’s like to have dearly loved disciples lose faith. Some of those disciples return (Peter) and others don’t (Judas). In both scenarios, youth workers can find sympathy in Christ. Grieve a young adult’s lost faith, but not in a way that prompts self-pity or bitterness. Let your grief fuel your prayer for these students, pleading with the Lord to revive their faith. 

Trust the Lord

It’s only natural to wonder what you could’ve done differently. 

Should I have followed up more during their freshman year of college? Should I have worked harder to connect them with a healthy college ministry or church once they left home? Could I have preemptively addressed some of the difficult questions that now undermine their faith?

But because of God’s grace, there’s no need to live with guilt or self-pity about what could’ve been done differently. Salvation is the gracious work of God. Rather than focusing on what you wish you’d done, trust the Lord with these students’ futures. 

Rather than focusing on what you wish you’d done, trust the Lord with these students’ futures.

The youth pastor in me wants to hug my students who have lost their faith and listen to them over a good cup of coffee. I want to really hear them—both what’s being said and what’s left unsaid. And I want to remind them that the gospel is a message of good news of great joy. I want to warn them about what they are risking by turning away from the salvation of God. 

Don’t Give Up on Them

Many who have formally deconstructed their faith will now consider you their spiritual enemy. I have heard from students who’ve said they needed counseling to undo the harmful and destructive things they learned in church. The reality of 1 Corinthians 1:23 and Jesus’s message to his disciples in Luke 10:16 is a hard reality check: “The one who hears you hears me, and the one who rejects you rejects me, and the one who rejects me rejects him who sent me.”

There isn’t much a pastor can do about someone’s flat-out rejection of the gospel.

At the same time, good shepherds chase down lost sheep. Be faithful and keep checking in on young adults who are questioning or deconstructing their faith. Follow up on opportunities to make yourself available to listen to their questions and walk with them. Intercede for them by name before the throne of grace, while remembering you are not their savior, and their salvation is not yours to determine. Praying for wisdom may seem like such an obvious response, but it’s easily overlooked. 

Keep Playing the Long Game

I’ve seen a lot of students walk away from faith after high school. There have been seasons of significant agony over the questions, “What am I doing? Is this worth it?” But I’ve stuck with it because the Lord has placed a continuing burden on my life to reach the next generation with the gospel, and because I’m committed to playing the long game. 

As I’ve written in my book A Biblical Theology of Youth Ministry, “The goal of youth ministry is not to produce teenage Christians. Instead, the purpose of youth ministry is to produce adult disciples whose faith took root and was nourished throughout their teen years.”

The goal of youth ministry is not to produce teenage Christians.

It’s easy to grow discouraged by students who walk away from the faith. But there are others whose faith begins to take shape after they graduate. Often they return and tell you about all the things they’re learning that they have “never heard before,” even though they heard it every week in youth group. But their hearts were hardened at the time. Instead of being resentful, celebrate that you played a role in the kindling that God eventually ignited and fanned into flame.

God is at work in a thousand ways you cannot see. Sometimes students lose their faith, and sometimes their faith comes to life. Either way, do not lose heart. Endure in your pastoral calling to feed God’s sheep. Rest in the truth that Jesus is still building his church. 

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