8 Good Tips For Preaching To Youth In Your Small Church

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I just want to start out by being honest with you. If you find the idea of preaching God’s Word to young people terrifying, that makes sense. Adolescents are told every which way every day that adults–especially teachers–are supposed to know everything. So if you feel weighed down by the responsibility of preaching to youth, engaging students with the Word of God, leading the Sunday school lesson, or however you want to say it–in a way they find meaningful, impactful, and maybe even fun, that’s fair.

Don’t worry. This blog post is designed to help you get off to a confident start.

The Simple Truth About Who You’re Preaching To

As intimidating as it can feel preaching to teenagers, there’s actually one very simple truth about teenagers that, once you believe it in your core, will guide you as you craft and deliver sermons to them:

When students like you, not much else really matters at the end of the day.

This should put a lot of us at ease because we’re really likable people. The kinds of people who become youth ministers are typically the kinds of people middle and high schoolers like. You’re patient. You’re easygoing. You have a sense of humor. You see beyond yourself. And that matters, almost above all else in youth ministry, because teenagers place an extraordinarily high emphasis on likeability when it comes to who they’re influenced by.

You don’t have to be the best public speaker in the world. If you and 6th grader David can spend 15 minutes talking about Minecraft, he’ll forgive every stumble, hesitation, or even occasionally boring monologue. In one sense, preaching is one of the most important and spiritually weighty things we get to do as youth pastors. But in another sense, preaching doesn’t matter nearly as much as we think it does because students are far more likely to remember the way we relationally discipled them than anything we say from the front of the room. 

But good preaching is important. So let’s talk through 8 tips for preaching to youth. The first 6 are going to help us structure our sermon, and the last 2 are some overarching tips to remember.

8 Tips For Preaching To Youth In Your Small Church

1. Meet them in their world first.

As adults, we feel like it’s our job to make the most out of our time at youth group by rushing straight to the Jesusy stuff as quickly as possible for as long as possible. That compulsion makes sense, and there’s an argument to be made for it. But what I’ve found to be true, and maybe you have too, is that middle and high school students often walk into youth group or Sunday school pretty distracted. Whether right or wrong, teenagers have many compartments to their life, and they walk into church mentally invested in the school compartment or the drama compartment or the sports compartment. 

One of the wisest things we can do in opening up a sermon is to meet them out in a different compartment than the Jesus compartment. Right or wrong, students often have a hard time transitioning cold turkey from whatever compartment their brain is in directly to wherever you are in the Jesus compartment for that night’s sermon. It’s easier for them to transition mentally if we say “Hey join me over here in the TV show compartment, or the childhood memories compartment, or the pop culture compartment”, and then once they’re with us, we transition them into something spiritually significant.

This can look a thousand different ways, and how you do it depends on what you’re preaching about that night. But an example of a bare-bones outline could be:

• Fun Compartment: Who here likes Fortnite? Fortnite is fun because _____. It’s also fun because it involves hiding.
• Spiritually Significant Compartment: Most of us are pretty familiar with hiding, aren’t we? When we feel threatened by things like peer pressure, we hide away pieces of ourselves all the time.

Now we’ve successfully moved students mentally from wherever they began the night to something relatable like Fortnite, and then on to how we hide pieces of our identity when life gets hard. They’re with us, and we’re ready to talk about Jesus stuff. But before we do, there’s one more thing we need to do, and that’s where Tip #2 comes in.

2. Don’t feed their TikTok compulsion.

Again, what I’m about to say may require you to fight against your nature as a caring adult. We want so badly to spend as much time as possible talking about the Jesusy stuff, so it’s at this point in the sermon that we’re tempted to tell students why, biblically, hiding parts of ourselves isn’t what God wants for us. Don’t do that yet. Hold off. Let me tell you why.

Teenagers are hardwired to look for the shortcut. Thanks to TikTok and other short-form content that has taken over social media, your middle and high school students are looking for the 90-second version of everything they consume.

If you talk about Fortnite for a minute or two, then only briefly mention that we hide parts of ourselves in the midst of peer pressure before rushing in to tell students that God wants our identity to be placed in Him, you have unintentionally disincentivized them from listening to the rest of your talk–and you’re only on minute four of a twenty-minute sermon. They haven’t even heard the Scripture yet, but in their minds, they don’t need to. You already gave them the TikTok version of your sermon, so why should they continue tuning in?

Instead, roll them around in how the spiritual problem you’ve identified plays itself out in a student’s everyday life. Sure, hiding parts of yourself sounds like it’s probably a bad thing on the surface. But before we talk about how the gospel solves the problem, let’s take a few minutes to actually highlight why the problem is a problem! This helps students begin learning to think critically about themselves and their habits and core beliefs. So, continuing with our brief outline example:

• Transition To Spiritually Significant Compartment: Most of us are pretty familiar with hiding, aren’t we? When we feel threatened by things like peer pressure, we hide away pieces of ourselves all the time.
• Digging Into The Problem: And that’s a problem. It means nobody really gets to see us. It means we never get to see ourselves, too. When we hide pieces of ourselves that we want others to see but choose not to let them see, either resentment builds against them because we can’t be ourselves around them, or that piece of who we are functionally fades away from lack of use.

Do you see how that draws a student deeper into the problem? Sure, hiding pieces of yourself sounds bad on the surface. But upon further exploration, no student wants to feel resentment in their relationships. No student wants to have pieces of who they are functionally fade away. Now you’ve got students leaning in, hoping you’ll say something to solve the problem you’ve highlighted for them. Just ten minutes ago they were mentally distracted about homework or their crush, but now you have them fully engaged and hungry for the Good News of Jesus Christ.

And, before we hop into Tip #3, let me just encourage you. If this second tip feels intimidating to you, please feel assured that this is why the Holy Spirit is so helpful as we prepare sermons. Illuminating the implications of human nature is the Holy Spirit’s specialty, so if you find yourself stuck as you attempt to dig deeper into the problem, lean heavily on the Holy Spirit to help.

3. Establish relevant biblical context.

Now that you have students ready and eager to explore Scripture, there’s still one more thing you need to do before you crack open a Bible. You need to give students context as to what you’re about to read. Not every student is as biblically literate as you, or even one another, so before you jump in and start reading, you’ll really help each student in the room by leveling the playing field and ensuring they understand the context.

The operative word here, though, is “relevant”. There’s a lot that any of us could say about any book of the Bible. We could talk about the literary genre, theme, when in history the book was written, background on key characters in the passage, or the authorship of the book. To expound upon every single one of those contextual components every time you preach would be overkill. You’re talking to teenagers. Most of them don’t care about all of those factors. But we do want them to learn those contextual factors slowly over time, so pick only the most relevant contextual factors to share depending on the topic you’re talking about in that sermon. Let’s continue our outline:

• Digging Into The Problem: And that’s a problem. It means nobody really gets to see us. It means we never get to see ourselves, too. When we hide pieces of ourselves that we want others to see but choose not to let them see, either resentment builds against them because we can’t be ourselves around them, or that piece of who we are functionally fades away from lack of use.
• Biblical Context: You know who understood high-pressure moments? The leaders of the Early Church. Following Jesus’ resurrection, several leaders of the Early Church emerged. One of them was a guy named Paul, and he ended up writing a bunch of letters to churches helping them understand what it means to follow Jesus. People had all kinds of opinions on who early church leaders should be, how they should act, and what it really meant to honor God. And, just like us, the leaders of the Early Church didn’t always handle that perfectly. Paul records one such instance in his letter to the Galatians. We’re in Galatians 2 starting in verse 11.

So now, in about 45 seconds, we’ve now helped students grasp where we are in history and given a brief background on the authorship all while staying super focused on the topic at hand–peer pressure. It only took 45 seconds of sermon time, and every student is on the same page about what Galatians is and why we’re about to read a piece of it.

4. Explore what the passage meant then and there.

If you’ve gone to some kind of Bible college or seminary, you’ve probably heard this before. But preaching through a text is first and foremost exploring what the passage meant then and there. We’re of course so excited to help students see what the passage we’re reading means for them. But before we do that, it’s important that we explore what the biblical passage meant then and there in the time it was written for the people it was initially written for. When we do that, we ensure students don’t miss out on the richer implications of Scripture because they try to apply it to their lives without first understanding the full picture of what’s going on.

There are entire graduate-level courses devoted solely to the art of exploring the then and there in preaching, but I think for our purposes, the clearest way to explain it is by example. So let’s continue with our outline. Before we do, here’s the Galatians 2:11-13 text we’re preaching from in our bare bones example sermon outline (actually I’d extend through verse 16 for this sermon, but for brevity, we’ll cap it at verse 13):

11 But when Peter came to Antioch, I had to oppose him to his face, for what he did was very wrong. 12 When he first arrived, he ate with the Gentile believers, who were not circumcised. But afterward, when some friends of James came, Peter wouldn’t eat with the Gentiles anymore. He was afraid of criticism from these people who insisted on the necessity of circumcision. 13 As a result, other Jewish believers followed Peter’s hypocrisy, and even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy.

Galatians 2:11-13

Then and There: 

• Peter was another early church leader
• Jews considered Gentiles outsiders
• Peter acted chill with Gentiles until Jews walked into the room
• He hid pieces of himself due to peer pressure

In a way, you’re just repeating what happened in the biblical text, but pausing here and there to clarify whenever you notice things in the text students might not understand due to cultural gaps or a lack of biblical literacy.

5. Finally you get what you want

I know it took forever, and you thought you’d never make it, but finally this is where you get what you want. You’ve met students out in their world. You’ve brought them to your world. The problem has been thoroughly explored. You set up the biblical passage. Any confusing parts about the then and there have been explained. At long last, we’ve reached the “here and now” section. Now you finally get to tell students the solution to their problem. 

This is where you drive home your application points. It’s where you tell them the Good News about what God says about their identity. It’s where you take the confrontation between Paul and Peter and use it as a springboard to confront students about why it’s wrong to hide pieces of yourself and how God’s way is better.

My encouragement to you? Be specific in this section of your sermon. When you tell students to let God define them instead of others, speak to specific life circumstances where it would be helpful to do that! You don’t even need an example from me here because this is the one part of the sermon you’ve been chomping at the bit to get to! It’s the reason you got into youth ministry in the first place! 

But once you’ve said the things you need to say, there’s one more thing to do before closing the sermon. That’s where we hit Tip #6.

6. Craft a memorable takeaway statement.

I call it The Point. Some people call it the Big Idea. Before closing the message, it’s best to leave students with one memorable statement they can walk home with. You’ve now been speaking for somewhere between 10-20 minutes straight. A lot of words have left your mouth. You may have even had a few main points as you walked through the passage. All of that is great. But so as to not overwhelm students, give them one, well-crafted statement they can walk home with in case they forget most of the other stuff.

There are several ways to attack this. Preachers have used the same techniques for decades. Alliteration is memorable. Rhyming is memorable. Wordplay of any kind is great. But being clear is probably more helpful than being cute, so just make sure The Point is short and clear above all else. I’ll give an example below:

The Point: Because Christ died, you have nothing to hide. 

It’s short. It loops in Paul’s address in verses 14-16 (which, again, I would include in this particular sermon if I were writing it). It’s on-topic and gospel-centered.

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So those are 6 tips to help you structure a sermon for middle and high school students. Before we close out, let me offer 2 broader suggestions as you prepare a sermon for students.

7. Have Your Content Internalized

“Memorized” is a very strong word. I’m not suggesting you attempt to memorize your sermon word for word. But like we said at the top of this blog post, your students like you more than they like your words. So ensure you allow your personality to shine through by having your content internalized so you’re not stuck with your head down reading your notes. You’d be surprised how much of a difference a little eye contact and confident delivery makes when speaking to students. 

8. Prepare Your Sermon In Advance

This might be a lot to ask. You’re busy. You have a lot on your plate. Odds are, either youth ministry isn’t your actual occupation or it is, but it’s just one of several aspects of your occupation. But preparing a good sermon often requires the investment of time. It requires that we sit with the text and the Holy Spirit and let it simmer for a bit. If you’re rushing and putting ideas together at the last minute, there’s a decent chance you’ll miss out on ideas, statements, or biblical insights that you would have noticed if you’d given sermon prep more time. 

But, again, you’re busy. And all of the things that you do matter. That’s why I’m a big believer in utilizing a good youth ministry curriculum. So if you’d like to simplify your week while ensuring you can deliver high-quality, low-prep sermons to your small youth group, check out the Small Church plan here! 

Be You And Be A Light!

I know. It’s a lot. But you can do this, and the more you do it, the more intuitive it will become. Meet them in their world first. Don’t feed their TikTok compulsion. Establish relevant biblical context. Explore the then and there. Say what you came to say. Craft a memorable takeaway statement. Internalize your content. And prep your sermon ahead of time. Preaching to teenagers can be scary, but it’s significantly less scary when you have a plan. 

And most of all, remember: When students like you, not much else really matters at the end of the day. So be real. Be silly. Be wise. Be intentional. Be fun. Be you.

Be a light 🙂 

Read More:

5 Helpful Ways To Start Connecting With The Youth In Church 

6 Best Youth Activities That Focus On Spiritual Growth

3 Steps To Embracing The Gaps In Youth Ministry