Youth Ministry, Media, and Go Karts

Here’s a sample, representative event that your standard issue Associate Pastor for Youth needs to plan and promote: Youth Night at Boomers. It’s a fundraiser, held at a local mini-golf/go Kart/ arcade joint, to benefit a local nonprofit.

Our AP begins, about six weeks out from the event date, to publicize and recruit.

• She writes about it in the monthly church newsletter for two consecutive months
• She sends a postcard in the mail to every middle and high school student on the church’s rolls (about 30)
• She sends an email to all of those students, as well as to their parents, about it
• She puts it on the monthly calendar that gets mailed to every student, as well as emailed and posted on the church’s website
• She talks about it at youth group gatherings for two weeks before the event date, asking for a show of hands: who’s coming?
• The week of the event, she posts the event on Facebook and sends it to the youth group’s facebook group
• The day of the event she sends text messages to students reminding them of the time, location, and cost of the event.

Five students come.

Five.

This is not a lament about a lack of student commitment. Maybe the event was garbage. I mean, you can publicize the death out of a belly-button-lint-collecting party, and nobody’s going to come. No, this is an open inquiry about the sheer number of media our Associate Pastor is employing to promote the youth ministry to her students.

New communication technologies don’t replace old ones. Our AP is not texting students instead of sending a monthly calendar in the mail. The Facebook group has not supplanted the weekly email. Instead, basic competence now requires that our AP employ the newest media to connect with teens on top of the face-to-face, telephone, and mail media she’s been using for years.

And with no apparent change in participation.

What to do?