How do you motivate a Teenager?

I love working with teenagers, and have loved it ever since I started doing so during College. Last week I spent an afternoon playing ultimate Frisbee with thirteen missionaries kids and having the time of my life. There are quite a few different reasons why I enjoy ministering to teens.

For one thing they are full of energy and excitement which can be contagious. I honestly act differently around teenagers than I do with adults. This is in no way disrespecting adults, instead being around loud outgoing youth seems to make me the same way. Spending time with them is also an amazing way to learn more about the way teens think and live. Most of what I know about youth culture comes from just listening to what they say.

I could go on listing reasons why I love working with young people but this isn’t about that. Today my mind is focused on what I dread about youth ministry. That is motivating those energetic outgoing kids to grow in Christ. Now first of all let me say that a huge number of teenagers who I work with are living for the Lord. But a lot of times this only comes after trying very hard to motivate them.

For some reason it is very hard to get teens interested in spiritual things. Some believe that this is because the younger generation holds to what is called the “buy in principle”. In other words they will not become actively involved in anything until it has been proven to work. So maybe these youth are just thinking about or testing what it means to live for God. But that still doesn’t make it any easier to motivate them.

Adding to this problem is the fact that there doesn’t seem to be many proven methods to motivate them. Basically there are two options. One is to tell challenge them strongly from Scripture, the other is to earn their respect through love. Given the choice of these two philosophies I will choose the strong challenge but even that doesn’t seem to work all of the time.

My issue with the challenge method is that many times it becomes unloving and lacks patience. Lets say for instance that you wanted to develop the habit of having daily devotions in a Church youth group. Some taking the challenge method would demand that the teenagers start having devotions every day. Can you see where there is no love seen in discussion, explanation of why it is important to have devotions, or encouragement here? Now for some youth groups that refuse to do anything over time you would need to be faced with this strong confrontational style. But part of me wonders if this is what we should use at the very beginning.

The second method in my mind is worse than the first because it uses little Scripture. The foundational point of this philosophy is getting the teens to like you so that they will obey whatever is said in the lesson. Now I by no means have a problem with earning the respect of young people. As a matter of fact I believe that this is absolutely essential if you are going to have a strong ministry.

My problem is the fact that love isn’t as good of a motivator as Scripture. And from experience I can testify to the fact that just because youth like you, doesn’t mean they will obey the truths of Scripture. I guess there has to be a balanced method of motivation which combines the truth of a challenging philosophy with the love and grace of a respect philosophy. The problem is very few of us know what that looks like.