Aaron Routledge
Head of Youth Ministry at The Message Trust
The United Kingdom
A Results-Focused Culture
I unintentionally created a culture where we celebrated the result rather than the risk. If a young person shared the Gospel and someone responded, we celebrated. But if they stepped out courageously and nothing seemed to happen, it felt like failure.
The teens were significantly impacted. Some young people became discouraged. Others disqualified themselves, believing they weren’t good enough because they weren’t seeing immediate results. The pressure to produce outcomes only God can produce became a burden they weren’t meant to carry.
Everything changed when I realized we needed to celebrate risk over result.
Measuring in Faith
The Bible never calls us to save people; it calls us to share Jesus. Salvation belongs to the Lord! Our role is faithfulness; God’s role is transformation. We are called to go, to proclaim the Good News, and to trust the Holy Spirit with what happens next.
When we began celebrating Gospel risk instead of Gospel results, the pressure lifted. Evangelism became a joy rather than a performance. Young people no longer carried the weight of conversion on their shoulders. Instead, they were freed to focus on what God had asked them to do: take a risk and share Christ with others.
They became bolder. Every conversation, every invitation, every act of obedience became a win, regardless of the outcome. They stopped measuring success by responses and started measuring it by faithfulness.
Today, through The Charge (a ministry of The Message Trust), we train around 40 youth groups each year across the UK, raising Gospel Advancing leaders and mobilizing teenagers to share the Gospel with confidence. At the heart of everything we do is a simple conviction: We take the risk, and God produces the result.
