5 Ways to Make Your Student Indifferent to God

5 Ways to Make Your Student Indifferent to God by Mark Cox

In youth ministry, one of the hardest things I’ve had to experience is leading students into a growing relationship with Jesus, while their parents are doing the opposite. In a lot of cases, the parent wants the best for his/her teenager. It’s just that their definition of “best” might not match up with mine. There are some hard-and-fast rules to engage if you don’t want your teenager to care about God. The following are just a few.

1. Make sure their extra-curricular activities are priority over church. You should always make sure that their scholarships are intact, and that they don’t get kicked off the team. That’s definitely more important than their relationship with Christ and eternity, for that matter.

2. When your teenager screws up, ground them from church. Of course! If they don’t care that you take away their TV, cell phone, or friend time, hit them where it hurts. Take away church. Yeah – that oughta do it.

3. Don’t call them out when they need guidance. Always let them make their own mistakes. And if they’re about to do something super-destructive, it’s probably best that they learn on their own. Because learning it the hard way is always the necessary path, right?

4. Talk negatively about your church staff around your teenager. If your pastor messes up, make sure that you call a family meeting to roast him. You should definitely let your teenager know that people can’t be trusted, especially incompetent church leaders. Your teenager needs to know that trusting church leaders isn’t smart! If they don’t trust church leaders, there’s a small chance they’ll ever accept God’s direction in their life. And that’s the safer way to live.

5. Don’t model real faith. At the end of the day, the last thing you want to do, if you want your teenager to ignore God’s voice, is to follow it yourself.

Please know my heart on this issue. We parents need to be leading our families to Jesus every chance we get. Maybe it’s time to take inventory of who or what we’re actually leading our families to.

After all, actions speak louder than words.

Mark Cox is the Student Pastor at Indian Springs Baptist Church. Stalk him at his blog www.thinknextnow.com or on Twitter @markhcox.

Post & Article Worth Reading-Second Part

Here is the second part of the article by Tommy Hilliker wrote a great article called God’s P.A.T.H. for parenting: part two. You can access it through our student ministry blog. It's worth the read. Have a great week!

Post & Article Worth Reading

If you are a parent or hope to be a parent someday, Tommy Hilliker wrote a great article called God’s P.A.T.H. for parenting: part one. Part two will be posted later this week. You can access it through our student ministry blog. It's worth the ready. Have a great weekend!

Today there was a great blog by a guy named Tim Stevens. He is the executive pastor at Granger community church. I believe he had some great insight for parents raising teens. He has a few of his own so think speaks from some experience.

Here is just a highlight:

• The environments parents place their students in just before the teen years will often dictate the student's environments they pick.
  

• As they start middle school, don't give them the option to stay home from the youth program.

• Get them in situations where they are hanging with young adults who are following God.

• Let them participate in events where there is a good chance they might take a step spiritually, like summer camp, missions trips, or weekend retreats.

You can click here to read the blog in its entirety.