Every ministry here exists for kids and teenagers. Very few of them invite kids and teenagers into the decisions.
Two questions in this survey are almost identical in structure. One asks who is in the room when the ministry year gets planned. The other asks who has input on what gets taught. Both offer the same range of options: staff, leadership, volunteers, parents, kids, or nobody but you.
Put the answers side by side and a hierarchy appears — one that almost nobody designed on purpose.
Select all that apply, so answers total more than 100%.
Paid staff, senior leadership, volunteers — then a steep drop. The two groups the ministry actually serves, students and their parents, sit at the bottom of the list.
Teaching decisions follow nearly the same order.
of ministries include kids or teenagers in neither room — not in planning, not in teaching decisions.
of respondents
of ministries — of — bring students into both conversations.
We build ministries for young people, and then decide what those ministries will be without asking a single one of them. The pattern in two questions
Planning meetings happen on weekday mornings, when students are at school. They involve budgets, staffing, and calendars — grown-up logistics. Nobody excludes a fifteen-year-old on purpose; the meeting simply wasn't built with one in mind.
There's also a fair objection. Teenagers don't know the budget, can't see the whole year, and would happily vote for a lock-in every weekend. Handing them the calendar isn't the idea.
But the survey suggests something narrower and more interesting: the ministries that do make room for student voice look measurably different elsewhere.
describe their environment as fun and welcoming for everyone — even brand-new kids
n=
say the same about their environment
n=
The gap widens on parents. Where students have a voice, of leaders describe parents as highly or somewhat engaged. Where students have no voice, that falls to .
Which points at something worth sitting with: including young people doesn't appear to trade off against including their families. The ministries that opened one door tend to have opened the other.
Participation seems to be a posture, not a policy. Churches that ask, ask everybody.
Only ministries include students in both rooms. That is a small group — small enough that these percentages could shift meaningfully with a few dozen more responses. Treat the direction as interesting and the precise figures as provisional.
Causation is genuinely unclear here, and probably runs both ways. Inviting students in might create a warmer ministry. Or a ministry that is already warm, already healthy, already staffed well enough to breathe, is simply more likely to invite students in. This data cannot separate the two.
What makes it worth publishing anyway is the cost of the experiment. Asking three students what they think about next fall requires no budget, no board approval, and no new program. It is among the cheapest things a ministry could try.
Not should students run the ministry — no one is proposing that. The question is smaller and harder to dismiss:
When you plan next year, is there a chair for the people it's for?
Based on responses to the Stuff You Can Use State of Ministry survey. “Both rooms” means selecting Students/kids for who's in the planning room and Kids or teenagers for who has input on teaching topics ( ministries). “Neither” means selecting neither ( ministries).
Parent engagement combines “highly engaged” and “somewhat engaged.” Comparisons are unadjusted cross-tabulations with no controls for church size or staffing, and the “both rooms” group is small — see the caveat above. Every figure is computed from the response data at build time.