Navigating Discipline in Youth Ministry

In some ways, youth ministry is the best job or role anyone can have. There’s nothing more rewarding, and quite frankly, nothing more fun than discipling the next generation. When you’re leading in youth ministry, you play games on a regular basis. You order and eat pizza all the time. Watching funny videos, laughing with teenagers, and having ridiculous conversations can become part of your regular rhythm.

It’s the best.

But sometimes, it’s not all fun and games. Sometimes, we have to be “the bad guy” (or girl, of course). Navigating discipline in youth ministry is one of the hardest parts about leading youth ministry. And if you’re anything like me, it’s something you don’t look forward to, don’t enjoy while it’s happening, and constantly question yourself about after the fact. But discipline is an important part of youth ministry. Establishing boundaries for behavior issues is part of discipleship.

So let’s talk about four ways to respond when navigating discipline in youth ministry.

1. Respond to Patterns

When you’re leading lesson time or discussions in a youth group environment, the thing you want most is for every student to be completely on board with everything you’re doing and saying. You’re not just there to play games, after all. You’re there to talk about Jesus. You want to help students grow spiritually. You’re there to give students an environment where they can do the same. So it can be incredibly frustrating when one particular student decides to be disruptive in the middle of what you designed to be a very spiritually helpful lesson time.

But one of the common mistakes made by youth pastors and youth leaders is reacting to instances of disruption. The truth is, every single student is going to have a bad night here and there. They’re teenagers. They’re going to have nights where they’re disruptive, where they’re not locked in, where they just want to goof off, where they’re not being everything you want them to be. And when we react to instances, what we often end up doing is destabilizing our ministry rather than stabilizing it, because we’re not allowing students to ever have a bad night.

A far better way to handle this is to respond to patterns. That means you’re going to have to be long-suffering with students. You may have to allow students a little bit of rope. You may have to endure two or three nights in a one-month period where a student is being disruptive before you address it with them. And that’s difficult to do. We want to handle it right there in the moment. We want to cut it off before it becomes something worse. I totally understand all of that.

A Gospel Lens for Discipline

But my gospel lens for this is that God is long-suffering toward us in Christ.

God, in His kindness toward us and out of a place of grace, typically doesn’t react to every instance where we fall short. He responds to our patterns of behavior with patience, kindness, conviction, and love.

And so, as we love our students as God has loved us in Christ, my encouragement would be to let the small stuff go. Let the instances of disruption go. But if one instance becomes many instances (a pattern), that’s where we step in and begin to address the behavioral issues that are happening.

2. Lead With Curiosity

Before we get to curiosity, firstly let me just say please avoid calling students out in front of their peers. And I understand the thought process behind calling a student out publicly. By making an example out of one student, you preemptively correct all of the others. But since our role in students’ lives is to become influential to them so that we can be of social and spiritual significance, a.k.a. discipling them, we can’t sacrifice one student in order to be more efficient in correcting all of the others. That doesn’t instill trust. And ultimately, it caps your ability to be influential in the lives of your students. So, if at all possible, address your students one-on-one about their behavioral issues.

But when you do address them, lead with curiosity. It’s natural to lead with frustration. But a more effective way of handling that conversation is to ask a question with genuine curiosity. Something like:

“Hey, tonight you seemed a little distracted during the lesson time. Why do you think that is?”

“Hey, I know when I have a hard day or when I have a lot going on in my life, it can be difficult to lock in during times where people want me to lock in. I felt like you weren’t quite locked in tonight. Is there anything going on in your life that I can pray for?”

When you lead with that kind of curiosity, you’re inviting the student into a conversation where it’s okay for them not to be perfect. And that kind of conversation can make a student want to give you the best they have moving forward.

How This Has Looked In My Youth Group

Let me give you a personal example.

Several years ago, in my Wednesday night youth group environment, we had a nice little small group of students who were coming consistently. We’d have maybe eight to ten students who showed up on a regular basis.

Four of those students were absolute best friends. In fact, two of them were dating, one of them was a sibling, and the sibling was the best friend. It was just one of those groups where four of them were incredibly tight. They hung out all the time outside of youth group. So when they came into youth group, to them, it kind of felt like a continuation of their unstructured hangout time. And they treated it as such.

In particular, there was one student who was younger than the others who was incredibly disruptive a couple of youth group nights in a row. So after a particularly disruptive youth group night, I pulled him aside and asked him, “Hey, I feel like you’ve been having a hard time locking in. What’s been going on with that?”

Out of the overflow of that conversation, I was able to let him know, “Hey, the way you’ve been distracting lately has actually been making it really hard for other students to get what they came to youth group to get.”

And he apologized. Moving forward, he was significantly more locked in during our youth group time. That was years ago now, and that student and I have continued to have an incredibly close relationship. First and foremost, that’s because I showed up for that student in so many ways beyond that one moment. But additionally, it’s because when I had to confront him about his behavior, I led with curiosity rather than anger.

3. Make More Deposits Than Withdrawals

You’ve probably heard the concept of relational deposits versus relational withdrawals. It often comes up when a couple is in a serious dating relationship. It may also come up in Christian circles from time to time. The concept is that when you’re in a relationship with somebody, you’re going to make some relational withdrawals. There’ll be times where you do something or say something that acts as a withdrawal from the bank account of that relationship. It’s something the other person isn’t going to like.

But what’s helpful in relationships is making sure you’re making more deposits into that relational bank account than withdrawals—doing things that make them feel seen, loved, cared for, and valued.

It’s no different in the world of youth ministry. When navigating discipline in youth ministry, one of the best things you can do is make sure the only time you talk to a kid isn’t when you’re disciplining them. Make lots and lots of deposits. If a student feels like you care about them, it’ll make all the difference when you need to correct them for their behavior.

When you show up at their soccer game, when you ask them about TV shows they care about, when you laugh at jokes they make, when you build positive memories together as often as possible, those deposits will yield great dividends down the road on the occasions when you have to correct them.

So if you want to navigate discipline conversations well in youth ministry, make sure you’re navigating non-discipline conversations well in youth ministry, and make sure you’re doing that more frequently.

4. Reorient Their Who More Than Their Do

One of the most important things we can remember in youth ministry leadership is that, ultimately, our goal isn’t to modify our students’ behavior. Ultimately, what we’re after is seeing their hearts change and orient more and more toward Jesus.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have conversations about discipline. It doesn’t mean we don’t address behavioral issues. But it does mean that when students have behavioral issues, we try to get at the heart of those behavioral issues rather than only trying to resolve the behavioral issues themselves.

Because sometimes when a student is being disruptive in youth group, they’re really acting out because something is going on at home.

When a student seems lethargic or like they don’t care about anything you’re trying to do at youth group, it may not be that they don’t care about youth group or Jesus. It may be that all of their relational, mental, and emotional energy is being taken up by a breakup they just went through.

So when we address behavioral issues with students, what we really want to do is address heart issues with students. Those heart issues are often playing themselves out in the form of behaviors. When we approach these conversations with that as our lens and backdrop, we’re probably going to have a more productive conversation. It may not change their behavior quite as quickly. But in the long run, it’ll probably change their behavior more deeply because rather than chopping off a leaf, we’re slowly attacking the root of the issue, which is the heart.

Keep Shepherding the Students God Has Given You

This certainly isn’t the end-all be-all of addressing behavior issues and navigating discipline conversations in youth group. When you have students who are challenging, it’s always going to be a challenge to figure out how to love them well while also maintaining a sense of health in the youth ministry.

There may be times when, ultimately, you have to tell a student they’re not allowed to come back for a season. But I think the goal for all of us is to make that few and far between because we want to care for the sheep God has put in our flock.

So, as you navigate behavioral issues at youth group, remember these four things:

Respond to patterns, not isolated instances.

Lead with curiosity, not anger.

Make more deposits than withdrawals.

Reorient their who more than their do.

Discipline in youth ministry is hard. But it’s also an important part of discipleship, and God has modeled what it looks like in the context of the gospel. So wear the gospel as your lens, show grace, and play the long game!