Building A Healthy Student Worship Team
A healthy student worship team gives teenagers meaningful opportunities to use their gifts, grow as disciples and serve the church.
This is probably one of the most unhinged titles of any blog post I’ve ever written. But I believe in this deeply, and the concept has gone viral recently on socials. Atheism is not a threat to Christianity. It’s an opportunity to experience Christianity from a fresh perspective. And when we incorporate this paradigm into our youth ministry philosophy, it can be deeply transformative for our students—even the ones far from God.
I don’t spend a ton of time on Instagram reels, but I doomscroll enough to catch a trend every once in a while. And a few weeks ago, my algorithm suggested the reel of a user named Brian Guan (@bdguan) who was in day 3 or 4 of a faith journey experiment.
Guan, an atheist, wanted to go 30 days fully pretending God was real in order to see if it improved his quality of life. He boiled Christianity down to four daily practices—prayer, reading the Bible, going to church (regularly, not daily), and applying Jesus’ teachings—and intentionally did them.
By day 5, Guan noticed his nicotine addiction beginning to fade.
By day 14, he noticed himself being a much kinder version of himself.
And by day 20, Guan stopped labeling his videos “pretending God is real” and started labeling them “believing God is real.”
I’m speaking for him a bit here, and he shares his own story on his page (it’s worth checking out), but while he probably doesn’t have all of the answers to his doubts yet, and he may not have an MDiv-level mastery of theology, Brian tried following Jesus without faith, and it was so transformative it led him to faith.
Your youth group has atheists in it. If it doesn’t now, it has in the past. And if it hasn’t in the past, it will in the future. Sometimes it’ll be a friend that one of your core students brings. And, to be honest, sometimes it’s going to be one of your core students themselves who decides they don’t believe anymore.
That’s more than a hypothetical. Pew Research Center found that 32% of American teenagers identify as religiously unaffiliated, including 6% as atheists and 4% as agnostics.
Teenagers are social creatures. They’re pretty good at blending in when they need to. It’s normal to have a teenager or two (or more) in your ministry who belongs but doesn’t believe.
But when we do find out as leaders that one of our students is an atheist, it’s easy to freak out internally and feel like we have to fix it. If you’re anything like me, you probably start immediately reevaluating your teaching scope and cycle to see if you’ve got an apologetics series coming up. Or maybe you think back on what you’ve been teaching the past few months wondering if something you said enabled this unbelief.
Our gut instinct, in some cases, is probably to try to have a really direct conversation with the kid about their atheism in the hopes that we can convince them in one conversation that God is real, Jesus died for them, and He’s worth surrendering their life to. And maybe in some cases, that’s what the Holy Spirit is calling you to do.
But in light of Brian Guan’s journey (which, as of August 2026 is most certainly far from over), I want to propose another way of engaging the atheist students in your ministry.
What Brian Guan has done is actually really, really biblical in a way. Don’t burn me at the stake, though, yet. Hear me out.
When Jesus appeared onto the scene, His disciples immediately knew He was different. But, and hear me clearly, they were deep into their three-year ministry before they believed Jesus was the Messiah or, even more so, the Son of God.
The disciples knew Jesus was a rabbi.
They could see that He wasn’t normal.
Several probably believed He was the Messiah earlier on than others.
But the majority of these twelve men followed Jesus for a long time without being totally certain what…it was…that they were following.
I mean even for the ones that decided early on that Jesus was the Messiah, they certainly had a gross misunderstanding of what the Messiah was coming to do. They wanted and expected a conquering military and political leader. That’s what they believed in. That version of Peter, James, or John would’ve scoffed at the picture most of us have of the Messiah today—in new covenant Christianity.
Anyway, my point is, the very first believers and most famous believers followed the way of Jesus way before they believed in Jesus. Christian living vastly preceded Christian belief. But the lifestyle was so undeniably magnetic that, when the time came, the belief part came really, really easily—except for Judas I guess.
So that then leaves us with a ministry paradigm to try out. What if, instead of meeting your atheist students up in the philosophical and scientific rafters, you just invited them to follow the way of Jesus for a while and see what happens?
No, I know. “Without faith it is impossible to please God.” I’m familiar with that verse. I hear you. But sometimes faith follows following.
No, I know. We don’t want students thinking their salvation is secure when they’ve never made a decision. I hear you. But sometimes faith follows following.
No, I know. If they genuinely try to follow Jesus’ way for a while, and don’t find it remotely magnetic, that might be a bad influence on other students. I hear you. But sometimes faith follows following.
Like a gospel-centered lifestyle is the way we humans were designed to live. It just makes sense that, for some teenagers, parroting the lifestyle might lead them toward trust and belief faster than intellectual arguments ever could.
I know this is a weird way to approach this. In some ways, it probably feels backwards. But whether this ministry approach to engaging atheist kids in your youth group “works” or not, rest assured that God’s got this. He’s never surprised when a student in your care professes they don’t believe in Him. Life is long, and your ministry is just one of many vehicles God can use to bring souls unto Himself.
So take some of the pressure off of yourself. And invite students to follow Jesus—sometimes even before they believe in Him.
A healthy student worship team gives teenagers meaningful opportunities to use their gifts, grow as disciples and serve the church.
Every student who walks into your youth group is carrying something you may never see. They might walk in laughing,
In some ways, youth ministry is the best job or role anyone can have. There’s nothing more rewarding, and quite