Yup, you read right. It’s time to admit that sharing the Good News about Jesus should be left to the professionals.
Let’s be honest: Students don’t always do everything right. They mess up. They get it wrong. They don’t do things exactly how we would want them to.
Sharing the Gospel is just too precious a task to trust to just anybody.
Haven’t you seen a student trying to share the Gospel with a friend and forget what the letter in your favorite acronym stood for? How embarrassing!
I’ve seen students who were sharing the Gospel and they forgot where the scripture they were talking about was in the Bible! Unacceptable!
I’ve even heard tale of students who shared their faith with their friends and didn’t offer a prayer at the end for their friends to repeat. They didn’t have them walk an aisle or even sign a card. Now that’s just terrible.
Come on youth pastors. It’s time to reign in these irresponsible students.
We really need to communicate to them that it’s OUR job to the talk about Jesus with lost students. That way the message always gets clearly and effectively communicated. That way our students will begin to understand that we only talk about Jesus at church, we only offer an invitation at the end of a service, and the only ones who are “qualified” to share the Gospel are the ones who went to seminary.
We wouldn’t want all of our students out there sharing their faith with their lost friends because they know them best. We wouldn’t want them to live out their Christian lives with the Gospel always on their mind. We certainly don’t want them to have conversations that lead to Jesus even though they started by talking about Twitter, or their weekend, or their parents, or school.
That’d put hundreds of missionaries out in the schools and homes and workplaces of students where we aren’t always welcome. That’d mean Gospel sharing going on all over the place without us watching every word they say. It may even mean hundreds of lost students coming to know Christ because their friends boldly shared the Gospel with them (butchering the ABC’s along the way I’m sure). We can’t have that.
That’d just be…irresponsible of us. Get ahold of your students before it’s too late!
And go practice your acronyms.