If you can think of any churches in hard (by which I mean, deprived) places – and there are less of us than perhaps there ought to be – and you think about what workers they have, I suspect you would find two predominate. First, you will likely find a pastor, or a pastor who goes by the term ‘planter’ but is still actually a pastor. Most recognise the importance of having one so we all pretty much make sure we get someone full-time to work for the church as an elder.

Second, you’re quite likely to find a woman’s worker. They’re not inevitable. Not everybody has the means for one and some contexts find other priorities. But, whether you’re in a Muslim-majority area or a white working class one, you tend to find women either rule the roost, are the doorway to family life or both. If you want to make any headway in your community, male pastors aren’t going to be much cop reaching them, so you find women’s workers tend to be a priority.

The other common type of worker you might find is an evangelist or gospel worker. Depending on the priorities of your area, your church context, who else you have volunteering among the membership and the crossover of various roles, some of these things might roll together. For example, we appointed a Gospel Worker who is some combination of our church women’s worker, community engagement and evangelist rolled into one. This was due to a coming together of the needs locally and the most appropriate person we found for our context. It is often the case that pastors in deprived communities are also evangelists and involved in community engagement too. As we tend to be small, we don’t always so neatly delineate our tasks and job specs. There is a sense in which whatever is there to be done, and we are in a position to do, that falls under our broad remit.

What you are less likely to find is a youth worker. I’m not saying they don’t exist. You can find some if you hunt for them. I’m also not suggesting here it would be wrong or is a problem to have one. As with almost any role you might conjure up, there will be benefits to the church. But the majority of churches in deprived communities don’t find this their priority. It seemed worth asking, why is that?

Before I go on, let me be clear what I am NOT saying. I know what this internet is like. The tiny gap between what I actually say and what I might mean is assumed to be a huge chasm and also what is not said deemed the main point of what I was writing despite not saying it at all! So for clarity: I AM NOT saying youth workers are a waste of time. I AM NOT saying growing young people in the faith is not worthwhile. I AM NOT suggesting youth don’t matter. I AM NOT arguing that we don’t want young people, or the children of believing parents, to become Christians. We want them to be well taught, to hear the gospel, to grow to love Jesus and to become faithful disciples as much as we might want anybody else to be. Whatever else you hear, just take note of this paragraph. It’s quite important.

So, if all those negative affirmations are true, why do we not prioritise youth workers on that basis? There are several reasons. The simplest of which – as I alluded to above – is limited resources and a matter of priorities. Given unlimited resources, we might well decide to employ a youth worker. But no church has unlimited resources and so we have to think carefully about how to deploy them. If we are in a position to appoint a second worker at all – or particularly blessed to have the opportunity for a third worker – we have to think carefully about what we most need and what would be most effective in our context. As I noted above, the top three candidates for appointment are a pastor, women’s worker or evangelist/gospel worker. Depending on the specifics of our context, our volunteer base, size of our church and nature of our area any one of those might be deemed a higher priority than another. But a youth worker – nice as it might be – simply isn’t likely to be the highest priority in an area like ours.

However, there are some other inter-related reasons too. Pragmatically, as noted above, the way in to most families in communities like mine are through mothers. Muslim women aren’t going to engage with Christian men, even if those Christian men are coming round to offer youth services for their kids. There are multiple layers of suspicion here that are gendered, racial and religious all making it virtually impossible for a white Christian man to meaningfully make first contact with many in our area. Even if we had a female youth worker, the religious suspicions would make it such that it is unlikely for them to send their children to us just because we have sent someone of the right gender. The way in is not through the children; it is through the mothers. Making and establishing meaningful relationships with mothers in our community, given the suspicions that naturally exist, is the long and slow building of relationships with mothers. We need to know them before we would have any shot at doing anything with their kids.

The same is broadly true with the white working classes as well. Even if you are able to establish some sort of work with the children, unless you have meaningful ongoing relationships with the parents – and most likely the mothers – that kids work will largely come to naught. The best you can hope for is that parents drop their kids and return later to pick them up and for all this to happen in parallel with anything to do with the church. By which I mean, running in parallel the twain shall never meet. Even when you try prize evenings or things that might necessarily involve the parents with their children through the work you run, without ongoing contact and a built relationship, they simply will not turn up.

On top of all this, a lot of the evidence we have points to one clear fact. The primary evangelistic and discipleship tool we have is the parents of children. You can read some more about that here. That being the case, our best evangelistic and discipleship strategy for building up the young people in our churches is NOT necessarily to employ a youth worker and have amazing youth programmes. These are not bad or wrong things to have and do. But all the evidence we have says that will do very little if we haven’t properly equipped the parents. Equipping parents and having no youth works of any kind will have a bigger impact on our children than the best youth work under the sun whilst doing little to build the parents. If you are lucky enough to be able to do all these things well, praise God. But for those of us with limited resource and who feel lucky to have a second worker, or even a full-time pastor, our priority will be to build and reach parents who can equip their children rather than appoint a youth worker. The evidence and the stats simply tell us that is a better use of our resources. What is more, if we do that work well, we may just find our equipping of the parents leads to volunteers who are equipped well enough to do these things without the need for us to employ a youth worker.

As I have argued here (and elsewhere a number of times), we tend to overstate the importance of youth workers for the faith and development of our children. We are far better off pouring all our time and energy into building and equipping godly parents than we are focusing primarily on building up their children. Again, remember my earlier caveats: we want faithful, well-discipled children and young people. I am not saying otherwise. However, the evidence all tells us that our children are best evangelised, discipled and grown in the homes of well-equipped, godly, faithful parents. Which tells me the best way to get faithful, well-discipled children and young people is to pour into their parents as a matter of priority, even if that comes at the expense of youth programmes and youth workers.

Let me give a case in point. As regular readers will know, we run a weekly theology breakfast. Over two years, if you stick all the way through, you will get a solid grounding in systematic, biblical and historical theology as well as becoming equipped in hermeneutics and understanding ecclesiology. Having been through the entire course, one of our parents asked if they could run a youth bible study. They essentially wanted to take the stuff they had been learning in the theology breakfast and distil into a monthly youth bible study. This is one small example of how equipping parents, who also have a heart to see their children well discipled, can lead to those same people actively taking a lead in the discipleship of youth in the church. It was a great encouragement to me.

Now, even if this youth bible study hadn’t spun out of the theology breakfast, and there was plan or reason to assume that it would have done, equipping the parents would still have had the benefit of building up the families in the church. What I teach the parents in the theology breakfast, I teach my children at home myself. What other parents learn in the theology breakfast, they can teach at home to their children too. It may not lead to a formal youth bible study or anything similar, but it probably will lead to some parents knowing a bit more about the Bible and being able to talk more helpfully with their children at home, answer their questions and point them to appropriate bits of scripture to help them grow in their faith. Teaching the parents is what leads to growth in children.

Even when we run certain things for the children – like Sunday School – whilst we hope the children engage it helps them grow, we aren’t primarily running it for the children. We have single mothers who are dealing with children on their own all week. The least we can do for them is give them 40 minutes a week to listen to the Bible read, explained and applied to them without distraction. Even if your Sunday School is glorified babysitting (though you may be missing an opportunity with the children if that’s all it is), you are doing it for the sake of the parents who can then apply at home what they have heard undistracted on Sunday morning. Even better, when your Sunday School teaches the same thing that happens in the main meeting on a Sunday morning, you give parents fodder and you equip them to have helpful discussions with their children throughout the week about what they have both heard. But the focus here isn’t on the children directly, it is on equipping the parents. The children will grow best over the course of the week with parents equipped to speak to their children throughout it more than hoping 3-hours a week in church through youth works and whatnot might be better.

So, the lack of youth workers in deprived communities is not necessarily something to mourn. The priority of our areas is not youth works. In fact, these can be a distraction to the real needs. Our areas are replete with people who do not go to church and do not know the gospel or anything meaningful about the Lord Jesus. Our primary concern is connecting with such people. It is apparent to us that trying to do it through the children is generally speaking, and based on all the evidence we have, simply not the way in nor especially effective. We further see that the Evangelical obsession with youth works has not been a roaring success. Rather, the primary cause of most young people coming to know Jesus and going on in their faith is strong parental involvement in their life. Discipleship from parents is key. So, on that basis, we see it as far more important to equip the parents to teach and disciple their children rather than spend vast resources on the marginal value of a youth worker. This is not where the priority lies in our community nor in our churches. We don’t need to bemoan a lack of youth workers; we bemoan the lack of people able to come and equip godly parents to disciple their own kids.