Closing the Gap: Robbie and Lydia Sweet Equip Scottish Churches to Reach the Next Generation

About six months ago, a girl named Jane* approached Locksley Sweet at their high school in Glasgow, Scotland, and said, “I hear your family are Christians.”

“Yes,” said Locksley.

“Do you go to church?” asked Jane.

“Yes,” said Locksley.

“Oh, I’d quite like to go to church. Can I come with you?” asked Jane.

To those of us in the United States, this conversation does not seem unusual. We can imagine a similar exchange happening in our high schools. With both church and parachurch ministries present on school campuses, it is likely most high schoolers in the U.S. have met a Christian.  

The opposite is true in Scotland.

Over the past 70 years the Scottish Church has dramatically declined. Scotland’s census in 2022 showed 51% of respondents claimed “no religion”—a sharp increase from the 36% of people who responded that way in 2011. The census also indicated the national church, The Church of Scotland, has lost over 50% of its members in a decade. Any cultural ties to Christian values and beliefs have disappeared. Locksley is likely the only Christian Jane knows. In their school of 1,500 students, the Sweets have only met three believing families and they are the only Christian presence on campus.

MTW missionaries Robbie and Lydia Sweet (Locksley’s parents) are working to change that. The Sweets are part of MTW’s Next team, which equips the global Church to reach the next generation for Christ. Since 2015, they have helped Scottish church leaders reach out to the youth in their country. They are currently working with The Free Church of Scotland, providing discipleship training as the denomination plants and revitalizes churches around the country.

Building a Ministry From the Ground Up

Robbie and Lydia met as students at Covenant College while volunteering in the youth ministry at Lookout Mountain Presbyterian Church. After graduating and getting married, they served on the youth staff at Lookout Mountain until God called them to global missions around 2012. During that time, Robbie remembered a dissertation his boss asked him to read a couple years before by Eric Larsen, founder of MTW Next. Knowing they wanted to continue working with youth and figuring MTW, their denomination’s missions agency, was the best place to start, Robbie emailed Eric.

“When we started praying about cross-cultural youth work, the only thing I knew was that I had read this guy’s paper three years ago and I tracked with his philosophy of ministry. So I was like, ‘I’m just going to get in touch with him. I don’t know who he is but I know he works for MTW,’” says Robbie. 

Within 10 minutes of sending the email, Eric called Robbie. Three years later, at the invitation of a Scottish pastor who is a friend of Eric’s, Robbie, Lydia, and their four kids moved to St. Andrews, Scotland, where they quickly learned they were starting their ministry from scratch.

Organized youth programs rarely exist in Scottish churches. Many congregations have as few as six members and don’t have the funds to even call a senior pastor. For the churches that can, the pastor is responsible for preaching three times a week, visiting his congregants, and leading a mid-week prayer meeting. No one has the time or resources to run a youth ministry.

This was the context the Sweets stepped into, and though there wasn’t much of a plan when they arrived, their church in St. Andrews welcomed them. Shortly after their arrival, a Baptist church with several youth in the congregation asked Robbie and Lydia for help. They joined forces and launched a city-wide monthly youth meeting where the Sweets provided the oversight but asked all participating churches to send volunteers to do the outreach and discipleship. Robbie regularly spoke at pastors’ conferences and provided training for Christian summer camp directors. Much of the Sweets early work also involved caring for MTW missionary families around Europe.

The Sweets spent six years in St. Andrews, which they describe as a wonderful time of building relationships, learning the culture, and participating in a supportive church community. In 2021, the family moved to Glasgow to focus their ministry efforts with MTW’s partner denomination, The Free Church of Scotland. They joined one of the denomination’s church plants and Robbie serves on The Free Church’s youth committee where he continues to train leaders for next-generation ministry.

Extending Care Opens the Door for Discipleship

In early 2025, Robbie and Lydia’s eldest daughter, Reagan, had a similar experience as her sister Locksley. During the church plant’s core group phase, a year before their Glasgow church plant began worship services, the pastor led training for the group in evangelism. At one of these meetings, everyone wrote down the name of a person they wanted to see come to know Jesus. Robbie noticed Reagan wrote down the name of one of her classmates named Mary.*

Mary had never shown interest in going to church but attended the city-wide monthly youth meetings the Sweets organized for the denomination (similar to the one they did in St. Andrews). At the February meeting, a visiting friend told Reagan she was going to the Sweet’s church that weekend. Mary, who was also part of the conversation, turned to Reagan and said, “I’d like to go to church with you. Can I come and can I bring my mom?”

Since their first Sunday as visitors, neither Jane (Lockely’s friend at the beginning of the story) nor Mary have missed a church service. At first, the Sweets texted each girl every Saturday asking if they wanted a ride. Now they assume both are coming.

Robbie says, “When I ask my kids, ‘Why do you think your friends want to come to church with you and then keep coming back?’ They’re like ‘Oh, because all the adults seem to like that we and our friends are there.’”

Their simple answer highlights a complex problem. A trend MTW Next seeks to address is systematic parental abandonment. All over the world, parents and adults have in some way neglected the emerging generation. In Scotland, the abandonment has been relational. Adults are more concerned with a teenager’s performance than they are about getting to know and love them. 

The gulf between the generations is just as pervasive inside the Scottish Church as it is in the culture and is one of the reasons the country is in its dark spiritual state. This relational gap has left a discipleship vacuum in which the older generations have failed to pass down their faith to the younger.

 “This is what happens when discipleship to the next generation stops … Our main heart is to rebuild discipleship, which means you are with them and you know them and you care about them. This has been lost,” says Robbie.

After years of churning the rock-hard spiritual soil, The Free Church of Scotland has recently gained momentum. In 2017, they launched the 30 by 30 Project in which they seek to plant 30 new churches by 2030. By God’s grace, they are on track to reach that goal and have already planted 17 churches. They are also committed to strengthening the 100  existing churches and have invited MTW to join their church planting and revitalization movement. But Robbie tells the denomination’s ministers that if they don’t have a plan to reach the next generation, they are wasting their time. To avoid the fate of the dying congregations around them, they must disciple young people.

The good news for overworked and under-resourced Scottish pastors is that reaching youth doesn’t mean building a full-fledged program. Local churches just need to demonstrate Christ’s care for the teenagers in their midst. More than anything, Robbie wants ministers to realize the difference extending love, compassion, and attention to youth can make in both the life of a teen and the life of a church. The Sweets have seen the impact of this in their church through the way the core group treats their kids and teenagers like Jane and Mary.

“It’s not like we’re running a robust youth program. It’s that the people in the church are committed to valuing the young people who come along, and speaking to them and including them.” says Robbie. This has created an attractive environment for people like Jane and Mary. They want to be at church and they want their families to come.

Building relationships. Valuing teenagers. Making sure they know they are loved and significant. This is the avenue to addressing the adult abandonment and the first step in creating a culture of discipleship in the Scottish church. 

“I think everywhere you’re trying to reach young people, you have to close the relational gap first … It is not good to be the cleverest person in the room and tell youth a bunch of good things if they don’t know that you care about them,” says Robbie. “If our contribution to the Free Church’s church-planting movement is to just try to help push back against that, then I think it’s worth it.”

The Largest Unreached People Group in the World

Robbie and Lydia’s work in Scotland is a snapshot of the Next team’s bigger vision to equip the global Church to reach the next generation with the gospel. There are three trends that compel their mission.

1. Fifty-one percent of the world’s population is under age 30.
2. Globally, adolescence begins at 10 and doesn’t end until 30.
3. Youth from different cultures have more in common with each other than they do with the adults in their home culture because of globalization and parental abandonment.

The intersection of these trends means the “10/30 Window” (the world’s population of people between the ages of 10 and 30) is the largest unreached people group in the world. The strength and longevity of Scotland’s churches depends on discipling their youth. The same is true of the global Church and, as Robbie has said, churches will only be effective in this mission if they close the gulf between the generations.

“No matter how many kids are at your church, pursue them with compassion because that is how God pursued us. Even if you don’t have any yet, have a plan for how to pursue them with compassion,” says Robbie.

Remember that God closed the relational gap between Himself and us. He has pursued us with compassion, forgiven us, and gifted us eternal significance. As His agents in the world, we are called to extend that same treatment to the confused, lonely, and lost youth of the world. He cares for Jane. He cares for Mary. He cares for Reagan and for Locksley and has called His people to do the same.  

*Names have been changed for privacy reasons.