Lets Play Church!
Two years ago, immediately after my senior pastor returned from a England and Wales missionary trip, he founded the youth church. He apparently got some vision there and wanted to bring this vision to fruition in Malaysia - amongst the original vision was a vision for a Malay language-centric multi-ethnic, multi-cultural church (my church has four sections - English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil).
For the first few meetings, things started out with a bang - there was high attendance, for one, though that’s probably because of a long schedule of special speakers. Eventually, though, things starts getting smaller and smaller. It started out with an attendance of 100, and it dropped and dropped and by time it celebrated its first birthday, it’s average weekly attendance was ~50 people. Because of poor management, the Tamils started leaving slowly until they became non-existant by the end of the year.
Around this time, the senior pastor’s daughter got married with a foreigner from Bible School. The senior pastor decided to make his new son-in-law the youth pastor. This, however, poses a slight problem: he can’t speak Malay. So the more-or-less bilingual congregation turned English-speaking. Half a year later, i.e. now, with attendance in its teens at best, the church decided to make the youth church a once-in-a-month feature.
Meanwhile, the student cell/care group I’m attending started out very small (well, the first meeting was big, but shrunk greatly the next and slowly built up). Soon after, the cell leader had to leave to study in Scotland. Few weeks later, the assistant cell leader got a schedule with classes on Friday nights. So essentially - no leadership in the initial period. Everything was spontaneous, with the former cell leader’s sister just deciding the duty rosters and facilitate discussions. But we grew. Unlike the youth church, the cell group with no evangelizing intention brought in 2-3 people to the Lord. Attendance is regular, and for the past few months, outstripped the youth church. It’s already at a point where it needs to split.
What’s this all about? The youth church started in a bang and ended in a whimper. It follows a pattern for every other youth program in church for the past 1-2 decades. They try to emulate the successes of surrounding churches’ youth church without realizing all these youth churches started out small and grew. One youth church my classmate attends had many years where it was small before suddenly expanding rapidly. My church attempts to skip a few steps. The pattern this time is slightly different - first, there’s a non-local pastor and second it skipped the weekly-to-fortnightly step.
Soon, if the pattern holds, once a month cell group would be forced to cancel to everyone would go to Youth Church. And slowly the cell group would be disbanded by a failing youth church infrastructure. Rinse, wash, repeat.
The thing is most of the youth church leaders never even been in a youth cell - there are three successful ones. Two working youth adults that recently split and one student cell that would split soon. The church doesn’t pay attention to its cell group, using the institution as a very successful manner of reaching out and evangelizing. The world can have concerts, talent nights, sports competitions, marathons - but they, so far, can’t emulate the fellowship found in the cell group.
That classmate I was talking earlier have a brother who started attending this youth church cell groups. The brother accepted Christ and soon brought along his younger sister - my classmate - who soon accepted Christ. The process is currently being repeated with her oldest brother and have already been successful in bring their mother back to Christ. They all didn’t start off by attending a youth church concert, rather informal cell groups held non-threateningly in homes rather than in churches.
In Malaysia, many parents have objections to their children going to church - it is more foolhardy bringing them to homes rather than churches. But chances of my church learning this lesson is slim, the pattern is bound to end and be repeated soon. I predict, 2007 youth church would have its last meeting, 2008 there would be a spell of any major youth activity and 2009, the pattern starts all over again. My predictions have been successful before.
Even more sadly, God’s vision ended soon after it was implemented. Not the first time. Couple of years back, God sent a speaker from India telling us the Biblical manner to evangelize and what method the church should employ. Everyone was gung-ho about it. It died no less than two weeks after the vision was taken by the church. And every so often, preachers would preach that revival would come with a massive harvest soon - perhaps even this year! - and I have no choice but to snicker silently back that it would have been years ago if they kept God’s vision.
No use God speaking to them or sending visions or sending prophets - his message would only last 3 months at most.