How to Reclaim Youth from the World

Reclaiming youth is an activity targeted to bring back the youth to the church.

Why reclaim them?

There has been a research that most of the churches today have no more youth inside it. And the reason is that most of them are enjoying their life outside church activities. But there are also reasons that involved within the church members. Some of these are

1. Adult members live phony lives
2. Church places emphasis on non essentials, older members are critical and uncaring
3. Church leaders are preoccupied with organization not with people
4. Worships are dull and meaningless
5. church too restrictive
6. Attracted to different lifestyle
7. Do not have real friends inside the church
8. Church does not allow me to think for myself

In order to bring back the youth to the church and other church members a reclaiming seminar is one activity to strategize the elements of successfully bringing them back to church.

To do this, as a youth leader, your challenge is to facilitate a seminar about reclaiming. And this requires a little skill especially facilitating a group of young and adult people. You must have a little background on the tools that are in needed in the seminar.

The tool involved is a problem tree analysis, this may be new to your or not. But it will help to facilitate your reclaiming process to a successful one. It may take you whole day or week to plan, depending on the number of people attending the seminar.

In this seminar, it is important the segregate the participants by group (does not matter if the group is a combination of male and female).

The first activity in reclaiming seminar is to analyze what are the problems in the church.

Problem identification

At this stage you just ask the group to list all the problems in the church. All of the problems that they encounter and then try to rank them from their point of view which is worse or not.

To give you an example I will just use my experience with the youth in reclaiming which they have pointed out one problem which is Low Youth Church attendance.

Program identification

After identifying the problems, you can ask the groups what programs that can be applied to solve the problem. Any program must be at least attainable from their standpoint.

Then, asked the group to rank the best identified programs by group and present their reasons why. As a whole group, you can have a voting on which program should be carried on and implemented first.

In this example I will use again the result of our reclaiming seminar. We have identified a program which is to visit and serenade the long lost church youth members.

If the group has already identified the best programs for them, it is time now to list all the possible problems concerning the program.

Problem identification of the program

One of the problems that our youth group had listed is refusal from the targeted household, boredom, conflict of both parties (the one serenading and the person to be visited), food preparation (some church members don’t have food to offer, that is why they refused). These are some of the problems.

Cause and Effect identification

Before we go down to the bottom, let us have a recap, first you have identified the problem which is Low Church attendance of youth. And you have already a solution to the problem that is to visit and do serenading.

Then you have already the problems concerning serenading. Now is the time to reorganize those problems which are cause and effects.

You can rearrange the list in your meta cards in the board to follow the sequence. See the picture below. Rearrange it to the closest possible cause and effect category.  

Means to an End

If you have done the steps above, you are almost done with the process and the next method is very simple. You just re categorize the cause and effect as a means to an end.

To simplify, if you have identified food preparation as an the effect or cause why your prospect do not want to be visited, you try to be proactive now by telling the prospect that you will visit them or you can prepare your own food if this is allowable in their culture.

It is just listing the negative results and turning them to a positive one. 

By this time you already identified the persons that will go with you on to serenade, the things to bring during serenade and the outcome.

The important here is to focus on what is the easiest thing to do. And that could be elicit through the process you are reading now which is called the problem tree analysis.

I have used it in reclaiming the youth and it is not very difficult, though it requires a little bit of knowledge to facilitate but if you can just do the things above like, problem identification, program identification, cause and effect relationship and means to an end relationship.

Having been successfully done these things you are not far to your success in reclaiming the youth back to church.