Let me paint a picture for you. It’s an overwhelming picture that points to a dream we’d all like to achieve. Let’s take an average small city school: McDowell High School, comprising grades 9-12, enrolls approximately 2,400 students annually. I am going to use two assumed averages about the church. First, that an average church spends a minimum of $50,000 to run the student ministry department including salary. Second, that on average, the student ministry has about 50 students in it’s mid circle of influence. Now, some churches will be higher and lower in either or both of those assumptions, but look at your situation and do your own math. Youth Ministry Architecs agree with me that an average church will spend $1,000 per student per year. Based on this, a single church would need to have the following in place if it hoped to have a student ministry that involved half of these students:
– A budget of roughly $1,200,000
– 24 full-time staff
– 240 volunteers
Keep in mind this is effectively reaching half of ONE high school in our area. How many schools does your student ministry draw from?
The dream I mentioned above that we’d all like to see, but are scared to begin the journey to, points to this… churches must work together as the church. We don’t have a choice. No church in our area that hopes to reach every teenager in the community with the Good News can afford the money, staff, and volunteer power it would take.
What if we worked together for the Kingdom and combined our resources, not to form one congregation, but to provide extensions of every local Church to the school in the form of an evangelistic club? First Priority is a non-territorial place for the churches to come and unite with the sole intent of sharing with students the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Students do reach students. There are more students who call themselves ‘Christian’ than any other group at the school, including the band and the football team. Let’s give that group a strategy to influence their peers and support them as they do it. The potential of seeing thousands of students come to know Jesus as their Lord and Savior is there, ONLY if we, the local church leaders will work together to reach our schools with the gospel.
Keep Hope!
Brad
