Help! Our Outreach Event Only Had 5 Students!
You may think I’m being melodramatic, but I’m not. Our youth ministry had an outreach event planned last month (a fun night where students could bring their friends who needed to hear the gospel) and it totally fell apart. It was cancelled due to a lack of interest. Yikes! A Dare 2 Share-going youth group not interested in outreach!? This has really been eating at me the last few weeks. I keep asking myself, what is it that caused this to fail? Was the event not appealing? Could it have been the culture of our youth ministry? Are our students just not interested in reaching out to their friends?
All of these questions had to get answered somehow, so I decided to do a survey of the 60 middle school and high school students at youth group on Wednesday night. My intention in writing the survey was to get the pulse of our youth group when it came to their feelings towards sharing their faith, how often they do it, their ability to clearly articulate the gospel and any barriers that are holding them back. You can check out (download) the complete survey questions here. I wasn’t so sure what we were going to see but the results were pretty revealing.
Feelings towards sharing their faith:
Our students recognize the importance of sharing their faith. 70% of our students gave evangelism a 10 on the importance scale when it comes to people in general sharing their faith, and 50% rated the importance of evangelism to them personally a perfect 10. Overall there was an average answer of 9 for both questions. Through all of our teachings and events we must’ve communicated that correctly. However, it seems that finding something significant doesn’t always translate into action.
How often do they do it:
When asked how often the students shared their faith with their friends, here’s what they said:
| A lot! Whenever I get the chance. | 3 | 5% |
| Sometimes. Every once in a while. | 33 | 55% |
| Rarely. I do, but not very often. | 18 | 30% |
| Never. It’s just not a topic we bring up. | 6 | 10% |
According to the survey, there’s a lot of room for growth here. 40% of our students fall into the rarely and never categories of talking about Jesus with their friends. This could come down to a lack of student empowerment on our part as leaders, a lack of knowledge on the students’ parts, or a lack of intentionality on both parts.
Barriers to articulating the gospel:
So, what’s holding them back? When asked to fill in the blank, “I would share my faith in Jesus more if…” the answers were real and raw and fell into 5 basic categories. Do any of these sound familiar to you?
- Confidence : “If I wasn’t so quiet” … “If I was more bold”
- Fear : “If I knew I wouldn’t get rejected” … “If I wasn’t afraid, my friends would de-friend me”
- Focus : “If I wasn’t so self-centered” … “If I remembered where my focus each day is”
- Knowledge : “If I knew how to share it so people can actually relate to it” … “I could learn about how to talk about it”
- Lame excuses : “If I didn’t play sports” … “If I had time”
We also asked about the knowledge piece specifically with this question: Circle the word that best describes your feeling toward this statement: “I know how to clearly tell someone how they can start a relationship with Jesus.” Here are the results:
| Strongly Agree | 8 | 13% |
| Agree | 22 | 37% |
| Neutral | 23 | 38% |
| Disagree | 5 | 8% |
| Strongly Disagree | 2 | 3% |
Although we felt like we had taught on this topic ad nauseum, we discovered that half of our kids were not so sure or unsure that they could clearly describe the good news of Jesus to someone. That was good to know!
Drawing conclusions from this experience:
Overall, seeing these answers was extremely helpful to us as a youth ministry! Understanding students’ objections as well as their level of confidence in their ability to articulate the gospel has helped us begin to think about how to shape the content and frequency of our lessons around evangelism. Our vision as a youth group is to see students adopt evangelism as a lifestyle, not just when we offer outreach events. We want them to become the outreach event! This is going to arm us with tools to move forward towards that goal with lots of room to grow.
What about you? Do you have a good sense of the pulse of your youth ministry in this area? If you are finding yourself in the place I was, feel free to take the survey I wrote, adapt it for your own group and see what you get as results! Download the evangelism survey I used here OR Download the editable version of the survey so you can make tweaks and use it (make sure to right click and “save as”).
Have you seen an outreach event fall apart like I did? What did you learn that we could all benefit from?
I actually stopped doing outreach events because I had similar experiences. It mostly ended up being new kids from other churches than it was unsaved kids showing up. Plus, I felt like I was unintentionally teaching my kids that it’s their job to get them to church where they can outsource their evangelism efforts to someone on a stage. Couple that with the fact that conversion rates were very poor for all the effort that we were putting into them and I just decided to stop.
Instead, we started going outreach campaigns where we go through intense periods of time where we train kids to share their faith and then push them to do it for a two week period. Everything we do in youth group revolves around it. Those have been WAY more effective in so many ways. Love it!
Fantastic article and I love the idea of using the survey in our youth group. I’m definitely going to download it, adapt it, and use it. Being relatively new to my position I can’t think of a better way to get the pulse of my entire group that having them complete this survey. We’ll probably use this on our winter retreat coming up in a month.
Thanks for your generosity in sharing this survey. I look forward to using a modified version for my students. God bless you.