The TikTok video begins with a huddle of bashful teens. As the music starts, so does their dance routine of hand gestures. Many try to keep a straight face but most fail. The camera pans to another group that does the same routine. Then to another.

It is a cute item, the stuff of viral videos.

“I made them learn this dance in 10 minutes in between our dinner and the filming,” Ps Janelle Ong said about the performance by the youths in her church.

Ps Janelle is a Youth Pastor at Mount Carmel Bible-Presbyterian Church. She showed the clip during a Lab session for youth pastors and leaders called “Winning the Youths” to underscore the importance of keeping up with youth trends.

“I was the one recording the video. In these small ways, it actually helps break the ice. It helps you to keep being relevant to them. And then they open up to you a lot more about their life, about their journey,” she explained.

“Youth ministry really is about journeying with your youths.”

The session was part of the recent LoveSingapore Summit 2025 in Kuala Lumpur (January 13-16). To win the youths is one of the three strategic thrusts of LoveSingapore.

Ps Janelle heads a youth ministry of over 100 youths in her church, a mid-sized church. Below is an edited excerpt of the three tips she shared on how to bring and keep youths in churches.

Whatever the size of your church, you will face different challenges because youth work really is not easy. We talk about going “all in” for our youths. The reality is that in a church space, you have two different pillars that you are fighting.

On the first pillar, you have the front-facing youths who are second-generation Christians and who are found already in a church.

But we do not assume that they are already settled. We do not assume that they already know the Bible. So we have to, in a way, convert them within our own church ministry

Then you also have the question of how we reach out and win over the youths who are not in a church, the youths in the neighbourhood.

So I will share a little bit today from my own experience of my time in the ministry.

1. Stay current

Be current in their social spaces

Do you know what games they are playing? You need to know what they are engaging with. Then you also want to know what they are doing in the social space.

I really believe it is very important if you are working with young people, you must have an Instagram account, minimally. If you have TikTok, that is great.

You really want to be in their space. Being in the youth ministry, you are in the mission field because you are crossing a culture. So in order to contextualise (your ministry) and also to be in their culture, you need to know what is happening in their world.

Be current with their conversations

What are the youths talking about, even in your own chat groups? Do you really know what is happening in their school? What are their stress points? What are they struggling with?

They have all these questions that are very real. How do you find answers in the Bible to anchor them in the faith?

Be current with Christian youth movements

It is important to stay current because when you know what is going on in these spheres, you get a sense of where God is moving your ministry towards because you are not just your own church – you are one Church, you are a united Body of Christ.

One of the greatest pains for me is: How do I bring the youths to really worship God?  You can talk until the day goes to night but they will not get it because they are not exposed.

So along the way, I began to bring them with me to youth events. In 2023, I brought just five to 10 youths for a few of the FOPx events just see if it did speak to them. It turned out that they really encountered God. They were so alive and awakened in the Spirit. Then they brought it back to the ministry.

And then a new struggle happened. They began to say: “Hey, now how come we are doing so much, we are praying but the rest are still not singing, they are not expressing themselves in their worship?”

So last year, we brought the whole ministry. It was so amazing. They were just so passionately worshipping God, genuinely catching the fire for God’s Spirit to worship Him. That was so beautiful to me.

When we came back, just in our first services we got the youth ministry to come to the front and just worship. They were no longer that stoic bunch of youths just singing without any passion. They had moved to a place and understanding of what it means to worship. Being worshipful can be taught and it has to be caught.

Be current with other youth ministries

This is really important for your own friendship development, and because you get to see and learn from how each other is doing church.

For example, in the first service of this year, we did this vision board of what are you expecting. But this idea was not new. It came because I saw it on a pastor’s Instagram.

The vision board that was an idea that was passed from pastor to pastor.

Lo and behold, on a coach on the way up to the Summit this year, someone told me: “Hey, I saw your Instagram about this and I copied the same idea.”

But you know who started this? The pastor copied this from another pastor.

All that is to say if you are not connected to your peers in the ministry, you will not be able to know what we are doing. This is not to compete but to complement so the ideas can be bounced off each other.

2. Stay clear

Be clear about your calling. As youth pastors, you are not just a youth pastor, you are also a leader. We need to be clear of the role that we play.

Have a strategy

We need to be clear of our strategy. Where are you leading your youth ministry towards? Do you have a direction of what you are doing? It may not be a five-year plan but have you asked God for a Word for your youths for this season?

Because where you are bringing the youths affects the pulpit ministry, affects your key events in the whole year, affects the way you are discipling your leaders to drive to a certain point.

But you must be clear. If you are not clear, your ministry will just go on as status quo but nothing great will be achieved. You are just going aimlessly.

Be strategic in your connections

Who you connect with has to be strategic. It is not possible to text all the youths in your church.

The influencers in the group, if you connect to them, will give you all the friendship information, all the conflicts that are going on and then you can problem-solve from there.

Be strategic in the Instagram game. I specifically chose Instagram because I find that youths today chat a lot more on their Instagram DM. It is their space and when you are in their space, they chat a lot more rather than in person.

Be strategic with your hangouts

For youth camp or any camp, stay over with them, sleep on the floor with them because all the things come out at 2am. If you do not stay over, you do not know what is going on. A lot of ministry happens over the late night.

Ps Janelle believes that hanging out with the youths is very important because it establishes relationships that make ministering to them easier.

You want to preach to a group of people who know you because if they know you, the odds are, when you preach, the Word goes deeper into their hearts.

Be strategic with your shepherding

We started this thing called Mundane Mondays. We have this Google doc that we use. Every Monday, the leaders have to update the attendance. The second thing is to update any pastoral concerns. After updating, we then take the next 10 to 20 minutes to pray for every single person. The heart of it is to pray. After you pray for them, pray for yourself.

So this is being faithful to the mandate, faithful to the small things that we often overlook because prayer is really so important.

On my end, it is good because now I get to pray alongside them. So that is something for being strategic in my shepherding, not to control but to really know my people: What (do) they need help in? How can I celebrate with them?

3. Stay connected

Connect to church vision

We want to lead our sheep with a vision but we want to also stay connected to the church. We do not want to create our own subculture. As we try to be leaders to lead our youths, we have to submit to our senior pastor, to the church’s plan.

Based on what the plan is, we then consider how can we contextualise it to the youths so that when they go to the main service in church they can talk to the uncles and aunties about the same thing.

So we do not say: “Oh, welcome back to the Youth Ministry.” We say: “Welcome back to church.” We need to start changing our communication because communication affects the way we think.

Going towards our 60th anniversary, we had this Bible reading plan. So I made sure the youths were doing the same thing – same message, same call, same value. Do not reinvent your own core values. Use the same thing that the church is doing.

Connect to church service

We try to get them to go for the main services. In my church, every communion weekend, there is no youth service. But the youths do not go to the main service. They take it as a week off.

So I started to get them involved in the main service, something that does not take too much time. I got them involved in congregational prayer. I rostered them.

The parents are happy and the youths began to see the needs of the church. They would get the prayer pointers from the church office and they begin to realise that the church is doing so many things. They begin to have a burden for the church. So they grow in spiritual maturity and in small things like stage confidence.

And when our youths are rostered, the rest will come for service because they want to support their friends.

Connect to parents

The longer I serve in Youth Ministry, the more I find it important to connect to the parents. Throughout the last two years, I realised there were so many times I needed to rally all the parents to support and pray for the youths and there was no platform.

So I created a Telegram chat. It is a chat group where they can ask, they can share. It is a partnership.

Connect to Christ

No matter what we do, it will not work unless we have Christ because the only thing we can really offer to our youths is Christ. Only Christ can change their lives. Only God’s Word has the power to transform them.

We want to just be with Christ, walk with Him and let God lead us and guide us. And from that place, the outflow comes because Christ is with us, working in us and through us for our ministries, for the non-Christians around them and just to bless the whole church.

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