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Hello, I have been having a lot of problems with out youth groups, specifically the youth pastor, and I am looking for advice on how to deal with the situation. We got a new youth pastor a couple years ago. He and his wife are really young, both of the, are only in their mid-late 20s. It started out okay for the first few months, but slowly I started seeing some problems with our youth pastor. First, he tries to be a friend. In my opinion, I don’t think a youth pastor is supposed to be a friend; he is supposed to be a mentor. Instead of being a mentor, he will try to act like a friend, which sometimes leads to him acting a little immature, especially during our bible lesson. For example, once a group of the seniors (the teens who should be setting an example for the tweens) were at the front of the classroom poking the youth pastor every time he walked near them, and his only response was laughter instead of asking them to stop disrupting the class. Second, he shows favoritism. Now, of course I understand he will be closer to some students, that’s normal. However, he and his wife (who is his assistant) blatantly show a lot of favoritism in youth. For example, once I arrived early to youth, I was in the room for about 10 minutes with the youth pastor’s wife before another female student arrived. When she arrived, the youth pastor’s wife excitedly said “Finally! A girl I can talk to!” right next to me. I half-jokingly asked why she couldn’t talk to me, to which she got tongue-tied. Part of the reason for this is because I don’t really fit in with a lot of the kids in youth. They enjoy stuff that I’m not into, such as dating, whereas I enjoy reading books and history (which I have been told is “gross”). The youth pastor will regularly invite students out to lunch and over to their house to play games; he has never invited me to spend time with him and his wife. Once, my parents asked him why he does stuff with other students and not me and his response was: “I don’t know how to talk to her”. Third, he has lied to me and my parents more than once and has also allowed the students to gossip about me. That one really hurt. Once, some of the students were spreading rumors about me and a friend (which was false), and they were coming to the youth pastor to tell him about them. He told them that he would handle it. How did he handle it? He told me and my friend when we were allowed to talk both in church and outside of church. And what if we didn’t listen? He told us we wouldn’t be allowed to volunteer in church anymore (something we love). We didn’t find out that the students were gossiping until a year later when my friend confronted the youth pastor and when my youth pastor admitted what he did to my parents (they were mad). Fourth, he prevents growth in the youth group. We have a lot of rules that are really just bad for the youth group. Our hour-long lesson consists of approximately 40 minutes of game time, leaving hardly any room for an actual lesson. Normally he cuts his sermon short or rushes through it. I have tried to suggest things to him, but he disregards my suggestions. For example, one time I tried to suggest that he lets the students find verses in the Bible on their own without assistance. In our youth group, we all use the same bible, and when we use them in class, the youth pastor will tell us that whoever finds the verses we will be studying first has to give the page number to everyone else. I once suggested that instead of using the page number he lets the students find the verses themselves; that way they know where books of the Bible are and how to find verses. He told me that he got it. During the lesson, he once again just asked the first student to find the verse to shout the page number. I must’ve made a face or somethings, and the wife asked if I had a problem with that, and the pastor just said sarcastically “she thinks it’s good for students to look for verses on their own”. And that was the end of that suggestion. The final issue I’m sharing about why we can’t grow is that we aren’t allowed to have discussions of any kind. Literally ANY kind of negativity is not allowed. By negativity, I mean that if two students don’t agree on the same thing, they cannot talk through their differences. This has kept us from having lots of good discussions in class that would allow us to grow. There are a lot of other issue I could mention, but I think this is enough to give ya’ll an idea of what I’m dealing with. It’s difficult because I’m still a student, and he’s still an adult. I don’t want to be disrespectful, but this really is a problem. In the two years he’s been here, we gained four new members, but lost three (who outgrew the group) as well as one who just stopped coming. Next year, we will have one kid who will be moving up into the youth group, and we will be losing four members who are going to be too old for the group. I’m worried that our youth group is eventually just fall apart. One part that really concerns me is that I feel like I’m the only one who is worried about our group and the leadership. All the other kids LOVE our youth pastor. I don’t really blame them either; he talks to them, hangs out with them, jokes around, isn’t strict, and he spends more times on games than lessons. What kid wouldn’t love that? Additionally, the adults like him because all the kids like him. Does anyone have any advice on how to handle the situation?