How Do I Get Students Off Their Phones During Youth Group?

Every single youth leader has felt this tension before: students on their phones during youth group. You work hard to put together an amazing lesson plan including an absolutely fire interactive game element and maybe even an object lesson, and still you’ve got at least a few students with a physical Bible held up and open in front of them—the blue light glow of their hidden phone radiating off of their face (who do they think they’re fooling, anyway?).

But before we jump in here, can I just say something I think all of us know deep down, but might be a little bit ashamed to admit? The phone addiction struggle is not a teenage struggle. It’s a human struggle. Studies (and real life) show that adults often multitask during sermons, text during social events, or scroll during (potential) quality time at home with the family.

So because this is a shared cultural issue, our response to students should be full of grace—not judgment or shame. There might be a lot of teenage struggles we no longer understand as adults, but we get this one. And what’s worse? Teenagers are still developing neurologically and have never known life without devices—so they don’t always have the tools to self-regulate. At least they have an excuse, kind of!

So our posture matters, here. Being honest with ourselves allows us to approach this from a gospel-centered, empathetic place.

The Movie Theater vs. Watching a Movie at Home

You’ve noticed this before, but I don’t know if you’ve thought about it intentionally. Most people check their phones or even persistently use them while watching a movie at home, but not in a movie theater. Why?

In our attempt to come up with some solutions for getting students off their phones at youth group, I want to explore three key elements that distinguish the human experience at a theater versus at home.

1) Create a Shared Communal Experience

At the movie theater, the experience feels collective—you’re part of something with others. Some of the folks in the theater, you know well. Others are complete strangers. But you’ve all gathered into this space together to experience something that, hopefully, adds value to your day and enjoyment to your life. And the communal nature of that shared experience is in part what keeps us off of our phones during the movie.

We should aim to create environments that feel shared, meaningful, and communal in our youth groups. I know we already do—or at least we try our best to—but let’s refocus and reevaluate in that area.

• Does your youth ministry environment feel missional?
• Is there a common feeling that you’ve gathered for a purpose beyond each person’s individual learning?
• Is there a sense in which the whole of your youth group is greater than the sum of its parts?

I know these are big questions, but they’re important ones for us to ask every once in a while. Nobody needs more pressure or temptation to feel shame when it comes to leading a youth group. It’s hard, and sometimes it doesn’t go the way we dream. But if you have students on their phones, creating a shared communal experience is one element that’s seemed to work well for movie theaters.

When students feel they’re part of something bigger than themselves, they’re more likely to be present and less likely to reach for their phone.

2) Invite Students to Invest

People pay attention more when they’ve invested in something. At a movie theater, you’ve spent money and carved out time—so you’re more locked in. Not only have you invested in the actual movie viewing, but you’ve typically even invested in snacks and drinks to consume during the movie viewing. So you’ve invested in a common experience (the movie), but you’ve also invested in personalizing that common experience (your snacks of choice).

In youth ministry, we’d be wise to prioritize giving our students places to invest. In our case, they’re probably not financially invested. We want to give them investment opportunities (ownership) in areas of programming, leadership, and culture development.

And, I know, sometimes you’ve got a youth group with a lot of kids you would be unwise to give a platform to. Sometimes their spiritual maturity hasn’t caught up with their exuberance. But investment doesn’t have to mean leading the lesson time. It can mean choosing the game, planning the next event, or drawing the youth group mascot (no, seriously, try it. It’s hilarious). Let kids run tech. Give them the space to run with the inside jokes that form during youth group.

The more each of your students feels like they get to have a personalized investment in the shared common experience of youth group, the less likely they are to let their phone divide their attention.

3) Lore Over Law

The third reason people don’t use phones in a theater: it’s against the rules. We’ve all seen the employees with the glowy stick walk through the theater. Most of us know that employee is just a 17-year-old kid daydreaming about seeing his girlfriend after his shift is over, but it’s fun to straighten up in your seat a little bit as if the glowing flashlight is a lightsaber of justice.

Imagination. Youth pastor. You get it.

In youth ministry, we probably would be wise to, at least during strategic times of youth group, have a no phones rule. That could look like phone baskets, screen-free zones, or a top-down, every week reminder like: “You have all week to be on your phone—just give us 90 minutes.”

But, if I can offer a suggestion, this should feel more like lore than law. It should feel like a fun, unique subculture thing. Your goal is for it to feel like a “we get to do this” thing when putting your phones away. And that’s why numbers 1 and 2 of this post are so important and so primary.

Movie theaters have learned how to do this well, by the way. AMC is my theater of choice where I live, and they’ve got Nicole Kidman on the screen before every movie setting the lore of going to the movies. It’s funny, really, because she doesn’t have to convince you to go to the movies. You’re already there! But AMC decided that even though you’re already there physically, they want to set the lore of romance, action, and distraction from the mundanity of everyday life so you’ll want to put your phone away and just lock into what’s going on on the screen.

We can do that too, you know. Maybe it isn’t a well-produced 90 second short film. But we can lead with lore and help students feel a sense of expectation and excitement that. For 90 minutes, they get to be divorced from their phone and lock into something that truly matters.

Students Want Something More

You know this already, too, but I want to offer it as a final thought: Most students don’t want to be glued to their phones during youth group. They want something better. Something richer. Something real.

If we build experiences that feel meaningful, shared, and immersive, students will happily step away from distraction—even if it takes some prompting. Remember, they’ve never experienced life without these little devices. We’re introducing them to something better, but it is something foreign. So create a shared communal experience, invite students to invest, and lead with lore over law. When you do, you’ll be on your way to a more phone-free youth group environment.

By the way, looking for a way to teach your students to put their phones down and embrace real, authentic community? Check out the 2D Series — a 3-week teaching series designed to help students reimagine the value of their real-life community over the noise of the digital world.