Youth Ministry: When the church takes down its walls
By Marcia Bosscher
Collaboration Project Story Team
How many churches would love to grow their youth group? How many pizza nights, scavenger hunts, video games, and movies does it take to draw youth in?
But what if your church hires a youth minister and in the first three years he takes the youth group from a respectable 30 to 40 kids down to 12. What do you do? What if you are that youth pastor?
Adam Clausen graduated from UW–Madison and became youth pastor at Life Center Madison on the city's southeast side. The group dwindled. There was no money for pizza or gaming and Adam truthfully had little interest in clever ice-breakers or scavenger hunts.
What he did have was a passionate heart for God and God's heart for the city.
Born in Korea, Adam was adopted into an Iowan family of modest means—his father was a custodian and his mother did in-home childcare. There were no extra funds for entertainment or his secret obsession, golf.
But as a young teen, he witnessed a powerful movement of the Holy Spirit through his small town. He saw individuals, churches—in fact the whole city—transformed. He had witnessed the power of God to change lives.
Adam Clausen, Senior Leader of Life Center Madison
This is what he took to his position at Life Center and in seven months the group that had dwindled to a dozen grew to 125. He had mentored two Black youth who happened to be influential in their respective schools, and out of that impact, their friends began inviting other friends.
There was no strategic outreach to a school or neighborhood, no budget, no bus access, and no gimmicks. The growth was all youth-initiated and peer-led.
Speaking of this experience Adam says, "I really didn't know what I was doing, and I think because I didn't know what I was doing, I was that dependent on Him. And so, then my boast in the testimony really is the Sunday School answer of 'Jesus.' I cannot take the credit and what I tell people is, 'We loved well. And then God showed up.'"
But what does it look like to love well?
According to Adam, it begins with not holding anyone to a false standard. Adam is passionate about this.
"We are holding people with different value systems, different experiences, different contexts in history, to a standard, a false standard, that they're not actually being held to by God—like don't wear your hat in church,” he said. “What people are longing for is something true, is something real, and it is always going to be messy.”
It was messy, but Adam stood up for those who came through the door. "I was very defensive and protective of our youth,” he recalled. “I knew God was bringing them. We had fights. There was cussing."
For Adam, the goal was to introduce them to the God he knew, the God he knew loved them. He knew he had to get to know them; he wanted to hear their stories.
"I want them to trust me," he said, "because I want them to trust Jesus. I'm not going to put up all these conditions for them just to be loved. For me, it's always been about removing the barriers to inclusion, to acceptance. We were a safe place, not just our church building, but me, we, were a safe place."
Reaching out to youth for Adam went well beyond those who might attend the youth group.
Adam, since becoming the Senior Leader of Life Center Madison in 2015, has continued his investment in the community through youth advocacy, young adult mentorship, and co-founding the Southeast Community Network, a grassroots community organizing effort consisting of over 40 service providers collaborating to serve southeast Madison. He is looking for the good of the community, working for the good of Madison.
Others recognized this. A few years ago, Adam was approached by Madison Metropolitan School District leaders about co-designing a pilot program to serve disengaged youth by using space available at the church. The program involved district staff, high school administrators, a dean, social workers, support staff, and students using the facility daily.
This pilot program led to the creation of MMSD’s Office of Youth Re-Engagement and West High School’s MicroSchool on the south side.
Though the pilot program is completed, relationships have continued with Adam and fellow Life Center members serving, mentoring, and supporting students and their families—personally, emotionally, and with any expressed needs they have.
Adam's goal has not been to recruit youth and their families to the church, but to offer the church, both the building and the people, to the families in the community, asking "How can we support you?"
The response was not only a thriving youth group, but a place in the community where youth outside of the church find support and healing.
“God so loved the world," Adam says, quoting from John 3, "but the Church so often just loves the Church, and even does that poorly. We must love the world as Jesus loved it. Belonging is the responsibility of family and God has called us to be his family, and we are tested by how we respond to those outside our group—do we embrace or do we exclude? Do we bring people into God's family, let them know they belong, or do we keep them out?"
"We teach people how to 'behave' when we should be teaching them how to ‘be,’ how to steward the true life that is in them. Growth happens," Adam says, "when love and life are stewarded well.”
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