We live in an age that venerates youth, and in many respects the churches of America have followed the trend.

They cater to their young people in manifold ways, not least in their methodologies of youth ministry: generous helpings of recreational candy with a paltry side of discipleship vegetables.

The RPCNA has also placed a high premium on youth ministry, formally establishing a Covenanter Young People’s Union in 1917 (the conceptual forerunner of today’s Youth Ministries Committee of Synod), which promoted the formation of a Covenanter Young People’s Society in each congregation. Its priorities have, however, been decidedly different from today’s trend.

Historically, RPCNA Directories for Worship always contained a rationale and instruction for youth groups. For example, as recently as 2009, the Constitution contained the assertion, “The purpose of the Young People’s Society is fellowship in worship, growth, service, and recreation, which will inspire them to a deeper loyalty to Christ and the Church” (Directory for the Worship of God 2009, V, 13). Such statements were omitted from the directory with its revised focus as a Directory for Public Worship (addition of “public”) in 2010. But while that focus is welcome, we mustn’t forget the rich legacy of youth work bequeathed to us by former generations.

This article recalls the aspirations of the generation that initiated denomination-wide youth ministry, as a challenge to keep our hands at the plow, whether we are covenant youth, their parents, or the adults called to come alongside both, to see our young people become spiritually “sturdy in their youth” (Ps. 144:12). These aspirations are found in a long-lost statement of purpose for Young People’s Societies written in 1911 to guide Synod as it worked toward a denominational structure for its youth ministry.

A Statement of Purpose for Young People’s Societies (1911)

“To lead the youth of the Church to become intelligent and loyal disciples of Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior; to help them in the battle with the many temptations of life; to build up strong Christian faith and symmetrical Christian character; to train young people in individual and associated Christian work in order that they may be most useful to the Church; to place upon them a burden of responsibility for the extension and building up of the Kingdom of Christ throughout the world, and to influence them to place their lives where they can best serve their generation (RP Minutes of Synod 1911, 124).”

This sixfold goal for youth ministry in the RPCNA is as relevant today as when it was first penned by Synod’s Committee on Young People’s Societies in 1911.

Goal 1: To Become Intelligent and Loyal Disciples

Our first goal is to lead the youth of the church to become “intelligent and loyal disciples of Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.” There are covenant youth in our congregations who have yet to profess their personal faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord. In the context of youth activities, we routinely ought to confront them with the claims of Christ and His covenant of grace upon them. And upon professing their faith, the activities we plan for these young disciples should be primarily designed to help them “grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 3:18), under the oversight of parents and Christian adults who model this “intelligent and loyal discipleship” for them.

Goal 2: To Equip for Spiritual Warfare

Our second goal is “to help them in the battle with the many temptations of life.” Does your church’s youth ministry create a subculture that is sheltered from the world like a monastery, or does it equip your youth to be “arrows in the hand of a warrior” (Ps. 127:4) and stand firm in a hostile culture? Jesus instructed His disciples they were to be “in the world, but not of the world” (John 17:14–16). How many youth groups in America’s churches are not “in the world” (in the sense that they are secluding themselves from it in purpose-built youth wings) and yet are very much “of” it (imbibing its methods, entertainments, and assumptions in their huddles)? May we equip our youth to “keep themselves unstained from the world” (Jas. 1:27), while still being conversant with its lies: training them to be vigilant in prayer and competent to wield the sword of the Spirit.

Goal 3: To Strengthen Christian Faith and Character

Our third goal is “to build up strong Christian faith and symmetrical Christian character.” When the Covenanter Young People’s Union was established in 1917, it adopted an official pledge drawn from the Covenant of 1871 that remained in our Directory until its most recent revision:

“Aiming to live for the glory of God as my chief end, I will, in reliance upon God’s grace, and feeling my inability to perform any spiritual duty in my own strength, diligently attend to searching the Scriptures, religious conversation, private prayer, family worship, the prayer meeting and the sanctuary, and will seek in them to worship God in spirit and in truth. I do solemnly promise to depart from all iniquity, and to live soberly, righteously, and godly in this world, commending and encouraging by my example, temperance, love, and godliness” (DWG 2009, V, 14).

While today we may not be prepared to administer such a pledge to our youth groups, it presents them with a compelling challenge to aspire to holy lives in a modern Babylon. Do we make the means of grace attractive or tedious to them? Are we promoting a tangible holiness among our young people? Is their humor, conversation, and choice of entertainments imbued with the “language of Zion” (Neh. 13:24) or of Babylon? Do they prefer the company of their Christian peers to that of their YouTube influencers?

Goal 4: To Train for Usefulness in the Church

The fourth goal is “to train young people in individual and associated Christian work in order that they may be most useful to the Church.” For Reformed Presbyterians, youth ministries are not parachurch, but intrachurch. They are intentionally under the umbrella, support, and remit of the church and her courts because one of the great goals is to train up the next generation of pastors, elders, deacons, Sabbath school teachers, and youth group leaders.

One of the key goals of our youth work should be to instill in them a sense of belonging and ownership in the RPCNA. We have many young people in our churches who have little idea that the church is bigger than their own congregation, or that they are part of a much bigger denominational family. This is why it is so important to encourage and enable our youth to get involved in presbytery-wide and synod-level activities. On this subject, Professor R. J. George of the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary (RPTS) commented in 1914:

“Denominational Attachment…does not mean an empty pride in an ancestral name. It means devotion to divine institutions, to a system of God-given and blood-bought truth, and to the accomplishment of a heaven-appointed mission. Such an attachment must be founded upon intellectual knowledge, conscientious convictions, and deep religious experience: and these the young people’s society should supply” (Lectures in Pastoral Theology, 2:140–1).

Goal 5: To Cast a Missionary Vision

The fifth goal is “to place upon them a burden of responsibility for the extension and building up of the Kingdom of Christ throughout the world.” Four years after Synod published this statement of purpose for its Young People’s Societies, in 1915, its Young People’s secretary reported that 19 young men and women had purposed to go on the mission field. With the advent of Young People’s Conventions in the late 1910s and 1920s, more and more volunteered themselves for missionary work, including Sam Boyle in 1921. There were 75 more pledges to serve the church in 1924.

We might be tempted to think revival had broken out if we saw such figures emerging from Theological Foundations for Youth (TFY) or the RP International Conference today! Certainly, the RPCNA has undergone dramatic changes since those early decades of the 20th Century. The church saw a steep decline in membership in the subsequent decades, and, while we have begun to see encouraging signs of numeric recovery in recent years, there is still a much smaller pool of young servants from which to repopulate our mission fields today. Nevertheless, might we not ask ourselves why, proportionately speaking, we aren’t seeing more young people on fire for the cause of Christ’s Crown and Covenant?

Goal 6: To Cast a Vocational Vision

The sixth goal is “to influence them to place their lives where they can best serve their generation.” Not all of our youth will be called to “full-time Christian ministry,” and our youth programs should also find ways to equip and prepare them to go into the world in a variety of vocational roles, investing their Lord’s talents and shining “as lights in the world” (Phil. 2:15).

In this statement of purpose, our predecessors in the RPCNA’s youth ministry set an immensely high goal. Although they also acknowledged the need for recreational and social activities at youth events from summer camps to campfire singalongs to team sports, the emphasis was clearly on Christian discipleship. Surely this is an emphasis that we would do well to emulate.

Solomon says, “Do not say, ‘Why were the old days better than these?’ for it is not wise to ask such questions” (Eccl. 7:10). If we find ourselves discouraged in youth ministry, it might be unhealthy to dwell on the past with a nostalgic sigh. But as inheritors of “a good heritage” (Ps. 16:6) with this statement of purpose, we may learn something from the priorities of those who have gone before us in this vital work, and recalibrate our own priorities accordingly.