I spend lots of time thinking, theorizing, and analyzing about youth ministry. Looking at trends and how we got to where we are today and dreaming about the future are invigorating exercises for me. But ultimately, we need some concrete ways to move from where we are to where we want to be. Most of the time I’m not so good about this. We say over and over again that we want to move away from programs and towards relationships, but have a hard time letting go because we have nothing to move towards. What might it look like if our youth ministries put as much time, effort, and money into people as we did into programs? What might be a simple first step towards such an approach? We have to start somewhere.

Recently, I came across a highly practical resource that could begin to shift the way our congregations think about nurturing faith in the lives of our children and youth: Full Circle Triple-A Training by Tom Schwolert and Lyle Griner. This is a downloadable, four-session training curriculum for adults. The approach of this material is to gather a group of adults (parents, grandparents, godparents, coaches, neighbors–they don’t even have to go to your church!) that are dedicated to nurturing faith in a young person together around a table to talk about how they can work together to encourage faith as this child grows up.

One way to get this started is to have incoming confirmands and their parents pick out 6-10 adults in their lives and invite them to come together on a Saturday to talk about how they can work together to help encourage the faith of these new confirmands. With only a class of five confirmands it would be possible to equip almost fifty adults to work together to nurture faith in the life of their confirmand. Or, you could do this with families of children who have been baptized recently, or just open it up to anyone. You could do it all in one day, once a week for a month, or once a quarter over a yearlong period. What is important is not the format, but gathering a group of adults willing and able to dedicate themselves to the young people in our churches.

The only programmatic part of this approach is the initial four-session training to help get the adults thinking together about being authentic, available, and affirming people in the lives of their particular young person. After that initial training, the idea is that these adults have been given a set of common tools that they can use collaboratively to build up a young person’s faith. The church might help them with periodic reminders about things that they committed to and talked about, but the bulk of the ministry happens when the adults minister to the young person as they go about their lives over an extended period of time. Such an approach truly places the emphasis on the person and not upon a program.

I have not yet held my first session using this material, but plan to do so in the fall. I have read through it and have talked about it with some of the parents at our church, and they are excited about implementing it. If you are looking for a concrete way to make a shift in your youth ministry, this could be it. Maybe this will be the first domino to fall that will get adults in the congregation to realize that youth ministry is not the job of a program, but of intentional, committed, caring relationships that seek to nurture faith in a young person. This curriculum could literally shift the whole mindset of a congregation if implemented across multiple families and adults in a congregation. Out of that shift other new, concrete ideas might form.

This material could very well be one of the initial tipping points for you and your church’s ministry. If you are tired of the theorizing and want something you can take and implement right away, this could be the resource for you.

[Full disclosure: One of the authors, Tom Schwolert is a friend of mine. But if I didn’t like the material I would not blog about it, and I sure wouldn’t use it in my own ministry. Hopefully I can post some thoughts this fall after going through the training with our first group of adults and then later on after it has been in place for a while.]