YOUTH PASTORS, MUSIC LEADERS, AND OTHER UNSCRIPTURAL POSITIONS

By: Guillermo Santamaria

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

From an Old School Baptist (Absoluter) perspective, everything in your document is one diagnosis with several symptoms: modern evangelicalism keeps inventing parallel religious machinery—voluntary societies in the 19th century, then the “benevolent empire,” and now parachurch pipelines—and those machines inevitably develop their own authority (boards, payroll, metrics, brand logic) while remaining outside the accountability of a local congregation. The deepest objection is not “doing good” or “reaching youth,” but rival governance: a second center of gravity forms beside the church, and once it exists it begins to steer churches by what funds, scales, and produces measurable outputs. That pressure operationalizes the gospel (methods, techniques, decision-moments), flattens ecclesiology into lowest-common-denominator interdenominationalism, and turns the church into a vendor and staging area rather than the living body where Christ rules through his appointed means—preaching, ordinances, discipline, pastoral care, and mutual edification. In short, the machinery doesn’t merely “assist” the church; it subtly redefines what the church is for, what success looks like, and who gets to set the agenda.

In that light, the “youth pastor” isn’t merely a job title; it becomes a new office by function, because it divides the flock into demographic slices and normalizes a mini-church inside the church, often governed by conference-curriculum ecosystems rather than congregational oversight. This demographic logic also trains families to outsource discipleship to specialists and programs, so the ordinary life of the saints—public preaching, prayer, reverent worship, the Lord’s table, and the steady example of mature believers—gets displaced by “age-appropriate” content and constant stimulation. Likewise, “music leaders” and the modern “worship leader” role are traced (rightly, in Old School terms) from simple coordination to professionalized revival technology (Sankey/Barrows logic) to a full industry—tech stacks, performance expectations, licensing, branding—so the congregation is tempted to shift from singing to watching, and worship drifts from participatory praise into curated experience. Hymnbooks themselves aren’t the enemy in this frame; the danger is when worship vocabulary becomes an imported pipeline controlled from outside the church, so “theology with a melody” turns into a distribution system that trains tastes and doctrines without local shepherding. The Old School constructive alternative is the same steady centerthe bookr keeps implying: one undivided church life, elders accountable for the whole flock, family discipleship without engineering, congregational singing as congregational (not concert), and no extra-church machinery claiming to be “help” while quietly functioning as governor—because when the church accepts that governor, it eventually inherits the governor’s theology. And once “results” become the proof of faithfulness, the church is already halfway to treating grace like a technique.