Growing Teenage Disciples
This article is an excerpt from Kyle Hoffsmith’s new book, Youth Ministry and the Vine: A Ministry Mind-Shift for Discipling the Next Generation, by Matthias Media (2026) and is republished without modification with permission. This article includes Amazon Affiliate links.
“How big is your youth group?” If you haven’t been asked this question yet as a youth pastor, then know that it will be asked of you soon. (And you may feel judged accordingly.) Youth pastors often fall into a trap where the success rate of a group, program, or ministry is based on external qualities, such as the number of bodies in the room. Recently I was at a lunch meeting with nine other youth pastors who serve churches in our area. During the conversation, one of them remarked that he had “only 20 or so students” in his ministry. I stopped the conversation to remind him that 20 students may make him feel like his youth group is small, but I emphasized that 20 students is certainly a notable number to teach. If you are reading this and you ‘only’ have a few students regularly attending your group, that is still a number worthy of care and attention. Culture, even church culture, has reinforced the theory that if attendance is high, it must be a successful ministry. Of course, this implies that if only a few are attending, you must be struggling or even failing as a youth pastor.
This way of measuring success causes panic and pressure; it makes you weary as a youth pastor, because numerical success seems to depend on you—even though you are fully aware that many of the factors affecting student attendance are outside your control. You might be asking yourself, “What if no students show up tonight?” or while planning for 50 students you worry “What if only five come?” Particularly in youth ministry, this is increasingly out of your control due to the busyness of students. Yet the pressure to measure success based on attendance still feels heavy. Leaders of large youth groups can feel pressure because they adopt the mentality “bigger is always better”, and a sense of low-grade anxiety is always on their shoulders because they need to add more students and programs and events. Leaders of smaller groups feel the same kind of anxiety as they worry about being on the brink of failure.
But there’s great news that relieves this pressure: attendance is not the only way God calculates success, in youth ministry or otherwise. Although many measure the success of the church based solely on size, God measures growth and success based on faithful ness and maturity, increasing the number of people being transferred into the kingdom of his Son and growing in their likeness of Christ.(1) Youth workers can take courage and have reassurance in knowing that our ministry’s success cannot be measured by only looking at attendance, but should be measured by the spiritual growth of the members.(2)
This does not suggest that attendance is meaningless. We want to see more and more students come to hear the gospel, an increasing number of students becoming disciples, and those students going and making more disciples. But ‘successful’ ministry growth is when our numbers are increasing because of gospel growth—the spiritual growth of students who are becoming disciple-making disciples.
If growth in godliness, rather than growth in numbers, is the primary focus, then this must be the focus of every aspect of your student ministry. Spiritual growth is much harder to measure than numerical growth because often spiritual growth happens slowly, and it cannot be tracked neatly by attendance graphs. Growth in godliness is long-lasting, person-shaping change that not only benefits students now, but lays a foundation for them for the rest of their lives. This shift in our ministry goal addresses the heartbreak of students leaving church as young adults that we mentioned at the beginning of the book. If we’re shaping our ministry around the goal of growing our students in godliness and maturity, rather than just trying to make sure they show up each week, then Lord willing our students will become adults who continue to follow Christ as faithful disciples and not walk away.(3)
So, now that we rightly understand that growth is not measured only numerically but also by spiritual growth, or what we’re calling ‘vine growth’, what does a growing student look like?
To answer this, let’s look at what we’re aiming for—our finish line. An unidentified destination is as useless as a vehicle without any fuel. Youth pastors and workers must know the anticipated destination for the students who sign up for summer camp: is the goal for students to have fun? Youth workers must know the goals for those who show up for Sunday school lessons week after week: is it for them to have a greater intellectual understanding of the Bible? Parents need to know the goal of driving their student to a youth-group meeting every single week: is it for their kid to spend time with other Christian friends? These questions and assumed answers for each scenario are partly correct, but they miss the well-rounded view and the ultimate goal.
The apostle Paul made his goal very clear in the letter of Colossians, when he wrote: “Him [Christ] we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ” (Col 1:28). Given the authority of Scripture, wouldn’t it be wise to apply Paul’s goal to our ministry? Just from this one verse, we can find the message, the method, and the goal by which we can get our student ministry set up for biblical success.
(1) The question of how we should assess growth in maturity is addressed in more depth in appendix C.
(2) C Marshall and T Payne, The Trellis and the Vine, 3rd edn, Matthias Media, 2024, p 38.
(3) There is much more that could be said about how to think biblically about numbers. For more, see Andrew Heard’s Growth and Change: The danger and necessity of a passion for church growth (Matthias Media, 2023), chapter 4 (‘The importance of numbers’).