What the Future Holds for Youth Ministry
Cultural and church trends will impact the future of this line of work
Sometimes I come across experts in various fields talking about what the future holds. So I’ve been trying to make sense of what they all mean for the future of youth ministry as a profession.
Within the broader sphere of Christianity and culture, a few trends indicate some changes that are already happening and will likely continue. There are the trends in dechurching and faith deconstruction, for example, which are making religion and church attendance decreasingly common. Decreasing attendance and giving go hand in hand, and so this trend will lead to budget cuts, which can obviously affect how many churches will hire youth staff, and how many youth staff they will hire (and specifically for women — when there are less youth ministry jobs overall, there will be a lot less for women specifically).
On the other hand, there’s a trend in church consolidation; in other words, a disproportionate amount of churchgoers are increasingly attending larger churches, even megachurches, as smaller churches die off.1 This could mean that, while less churches overall have a budget for youth ministry staff, more of the churches that do will be large churches with multiple youth staff. And depending on how you feel about large churches and large youth ministries, this may or may not sound like a good thing to you.
If shifts in cultural Christianity and economics for churches leads to less money for churches to hire youth staff, another trend we could see is an increase in bivocational youth workers. This would not be a surprise to me, as bivocational or covocational ministry seems to be on the rise overall. Moreover, we are living in a time of the growing gig economy, where people are looking for more flexibility in their work, and looking to have more say in when they work and how much they make. As this becomes more common, less people may want to take on full-time ministry jobs that offer lower pay and flexibility. What might be more attractive to younger workers, and therefore easier for churches to hire for, is a part-time youth ministry role that also allows the worker to do gig work part-time and therefore have more control over their schedule and overall income.
I imagine some will buck up against this idea. Ministry is a calling, one could argue, which requires sacrifice. Our time is not our own, and we can trust God to be in control of our provision. Consider this scenario, though: a small but growing church has gotten to the point where it could use some more consistent help in the youth ministry. There are several adults who have been faithfully volunteering in the youth ministry, but none of them want to quit their full-time job to work at the church. There is, however, a 28-year-old female who is also a [graphic designer, freelancer, counselor, or insert another job that allows for self-employment]. She doesn’t want to completely give up her day job, because she enjoys using her God-given gifts there, and it allows her to not live in a Christian bubble. She also can’t take the pay cut that would come if she worked full-time for the church. She is willing, however, to decrease the hours she does her self-employment work in order to take on the youth ministry job part-time. She feels called to serve the youth and would be able to make it work practically and financially, if the church is willing to make the job part-time and respect the boundaries she needs to balance it with her other job and her personal life. Couldn’t this be a win for everyone?
I don’t think a move toward more bivocational youth workers would necessarily be a bad move. I do wonder, though, what it will mean for the way that many churches have typically conceived of youth ministry. If taking a job in youth ministry has typically meant that you’re signing up for multiple 3- to 7-day trips throughout the year and multiple nights out per week, we may need to adjust how we think about how and perhaps whether we still need to pull off all these evening and overnight activities. I’d hate for an increase in part-time workers to also mean that churches are increasingly expecting full-time work for part-time pay.
Of course, there’s also the massive revolution in AI that we’re only beginning to live through. How will AI affect youth ministry and the future of these jobs? I don’t think it will replace youth leaders or even decrease the need for them. We won’t be able to all of a sudden scale our youth discipleship just because we have a new technology, just as we weren’t able to do it with advancements in video, computers, or the internet. No doubt, though, it will shape the future landscape of youth ministry, both in ways we can and don’t yet know to anticipate.
For women in youth ministry, I and many others have noted that there has been an increase in support for women through the years. More women are making it longer in youth ministry, and in ministry in general. More churches are willing to hire females into roles that they previously had only given to males (and, lest you fear this is because churches are becoming too liberal, they’re doing it without changing their overall theology). Whatever else happens, this is a good trend for women who feel called to youth ministry or ministry in general.
I would love to continue to see more women thrive in youth ministry for longer. And that’s why I think about topics like this. I wonder, what does the future of youth ministry as a line of work actually look like? Is it a field that will continue to support full-time workers, or will it increasingly mean signing up for part-time work and fighting for the few full-time jobs at megachurches? Is it a field that would become obsolete if Christianity continued to decline in our culture and churches continued to shrink? It’d be nice to know what the outlook is, but ultimately we can’t know the future. Only God does.
In the current moment, the job market for church jobs, including youth ministry jobs, seems to be a candidate’s market. This means that high-quality, qualified candidates have the upper hand in negotiating, because there are more jobs than quality candidates. A recent Chemistry Staffing online workshop shared that more candidates also want to stay local and that there is an increased emphasis on employee wellbeing and desire for continued development. In other words, the churches that will most be able to attract those quality candidates are the churches that can offer benefits in the spheres of wellbeing and development — and they might do best to look in their own backyard. (Which means that the 28-year-old part-timer makes even more sense!)
If you’re in youth ministry, focus on being a quality candidate and on being faithful to God’s call. God can be the one to work out the future.
I originally came across this fact from Ryan Burge, but I cannot find the source, probably because it’s now behind a paywall.