I love rewards! If you know me, you know that I also love Chick-fil-A, but one of the reasons I love it, aside from the obvious, is that they have an excellent rewards program. I’m pretty sure I could eat something free at CFA for the next year and still have rewards left over (that may say more about my dietary habits than their system, but it is what it is)!
I hate running! Why would anyone want to subject themselves to hours of pounding their feet to the ground just to go in a circle?! At the same time, I love running when there’s a direct reward. Ultimate Frisbee is one of my favorite sports. I will sprint up and down the field for hours at a time, chasing a little flying piece of plastic because the reward is immediately in front of me. While neither of these are worse for you than the other, if you take away the reward that Ultimate Frisbee offers me, you won’t see me running again any time soon! Even though I know there are rewards and benefits to distance running, I feed off the rush of the reward!
The key here is the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation (more on this later).
We’ve all done it; we’ve dangled the carrot in front of our students, trying to motivate them to higher levels of spirituality. We’ve promised food, gift cards, money off trips, and shaved heads (or beards) with the hope that they would read their Bible, invite a friend, pray more, or fast. I’m a fan of incentives; I think they definitely have a place in Youth Ministry, but I would ask, “Have we thought about the long game?”
Incentives often breed extrinsic motivation. Which is basically motivation that comes from the outside. We do this to encourage them and push them to a deeper relationship with Jesus or to reach out to others that they just need a little push to talk to. While these extrinsic motivations aren’t inherently bad, they must lead to something deeper.
All of our goals for our students are that they become intrinsically motivated, that their walk with Jesus, their relationship with the Lord, will become their motivation. We want our students to love spending time with Jesus, reading their Bibles, spending time in prayer, going deeper by fasting, or spreading the Gospel to their friends. And we want them to do these things because of a rich, deep connection with God. I want to know and love God the way that David did and I want the students I work with to have this as well:
1 You, God, are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
I thirst for you,
my whole being longs for you,
in a dry and parched land
where there is no water.
2 I have seen you in the sanctuary
and beheld your power and your glory.
3 Because your love is better than life,
my lips will glorify you.
4 I will praise you as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands.
Psalm 63:1-4 NIV
But how do we get students to move from chasing rewards to chasing after God?
Just like running, spiritual growth is a process. Most runners don’t start by loving the early mornings and long miles—they start with small steps, and over time, they develop a love for the rhythm, the challenge, and the results. In the same way, students may begin with extrinsic motivation—reading their Bibles for a prize or inviting a friend to earn a discount—but our goal is to help them discover the intrinsic joy of knowing God.
The challenge for us as leaders is to bridge that gap. Yes, incentives can spark engagement, but they should always point toward something deeper. We want students to go beyond doing spiritual things because they’re rewarded for it—to doing them because they’ve encountered the living God and can’t imagine life without Him.
Our job is to create spaces where students experience God’s love in a way that makes them thirsty for more. Because once they do, the reward isn’t a gift card or a free meal—it’s a transformed life.
Kyle Wood
Director of Operations and Communication
Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash