Roughly half of youth group kids are walking away from faith in college. This map shows where the 50 graduates who were under my care this past year are headed in the fall. If you’re wondering, I stole the idea for the map from HSM at Saddleback Community Church. You can see their version here.
All I know is that I refuse to accept that 50% of my students will walk away from faith. I’ve made it my mission to reduce that percentage among LifeLine students. Over the last 3 years, we have revamped our approach to the senior year experience. Here’s a glimpse of our strategy.
1. CELEBRATE SENIORS
We love to make a big deal about our seniors. We give them a lot of stage time, put on a retreat just for them and give them their own house group–no underclassmen allowed! In our ministry, being a senior is special and you get access to opportunities that are only for seniors. We do this to help retain our seniors. We want our students to have something to look forward to. Typically, seniors seem to disappear from youth group but by offering them unique experiences and the spotlight we are able to keep them involved. And, this is very important to us because we have a lot we want to teach them.
2. TRAIN SENIORS
In our ministry context, half of our programming nights take place in homes. For seniors, their home is only for seniors and the curriculum is designed for them. We talk about how to choose the right college (or not), what college will actually be like, debt, politics, partying, dating, apologetics, calling, mission, and a bunch of other stuff that we feel will help them navigate the challenges of life beyond high school. Again, by offering them a curriculum that hits them where they are at, we are able to retain our seniors through the year.
3. HAND OFF SENIORS
Rather than a book and a handshake, we attempt to hand our students off to both a mentor and a new ministry or church. The mentor is actually from our ministry–the same mentor they’ve had for the last four years. We just encourage the relationship to continue through the first year of college. I stole this idea from the Sticky Faith book. They call it 4+1. If you haven’t read it, you really should.
We also want to hand our students off to a new church or campus ministry. During their senior year we constantly talk about how important it is to find a church or campus ministry with the first two weeks of college. Most students who don’t connect within the first two weeks never will.
We identify churches and ministries for our students and then contact the ministry leaders and ask them to connect with our graduate before college begins. We also send our graduates a care package in early September to encourage them and remind them to plug into a church or ministry.
So that’s a brief explanation of how we highlight the senior year and attempt to equip our students for the next phase of their lives. How do you do it?
