One day you visit a church, your teen goes off to the youth service, your little one goes off to children’s church, the baby goes to the nursery, and you and your spouse get a great seat in a plush auditorium with first-class music, professional drama, a relevant, encouraging, application-oriented, non-threatening talk, and you get it all in just under an hour. Moreover, you look at the brochures, and it’s right there in black and white: “Our youth ministry exists to do the job that you’ve neglected all these years.” What a deal! We don’t have to keep the little one quiet, we get our needs met, and to top it off, the youth guy is going to disciple my teenager (whom I don’t even like right now). Who cares if the youth guy has only been married a few months and has never even attempted to discipline a child of his own. “Count me in!” I realize that this is an exaggeration, but the fact is, it wouldn’t matter if the youth pastor were a forty-year-old Ph.D. with five children of his own whom he had raised successfully. That still would not justify the abdication of parental responsibility.

– Voddie Baucham