How to start a youth & children’s ministry

Lee Stephenson: 00:00:10

Hey, welcome everyone, to our unfiltered podcast. My name is Lee Stevenson and I get to serve as executive director of church planning with Converge. And my co host here, I'm Danny.

Danny Parmelee: 00:00:20

Parmalee with Converge Mid America.

Lee Stephenson: 00:00:22

So. And thanks for tuning in. We're having real conversations about church planting things, so whatever that means.

But today we want to talk a little bit about just the art of pulling together children's youth ministry in the life of a church plant. Because it is a different beast when maybe you don't have a facility that's homegrown, you know, like It's a home base 24. 7 space. How do you do it?

Should you do it? Let's talk a little bit about that. So interesting for you, Danny. Like, you know, we've talked before that.

What did you guys do for children's ministry when you first got started?

Danny Parmelee: 00:00:57

Yeah, nothing. So. Okay, so you're gonna have to talk for the rest of the time. No, but honestly, we.

So when we started, my wife and I, we were married, we didn't have any kids, and we were planted right next to university. So we were college students, young marrieds without kids, and young professionals that were single. And so children were not on our mind at all.

We did not even have child care in the beginning. And so our church grew again with just a bunch of people without kids.

And then once that kind of momentum kind of carried us, what happened is if there was any family that came in with kids, they kind of saw what was going on. They were really excited, like, wow, this is really cool. So many young people, you know, worshiping the Lord. This is so unique.

However, there's nothing here for me, so we're gonna leave. So that eventually grew into just childcare, which. Okay, so we figured out we need to present something.

So it was literally like just take care of the children, do some coloring books, that type of thing. But again, that was still really hard because it didn't really attract families that wanted something a little bit.

Lee Stephenson: 00:02:12

They wanted more than a coloring book for their kids.

Danny Parmelee: 00:02:14

Y.

So for us, it actually wasn't until we went multi site and opened up a new location that then through that we actually really emphasized children's ministry from the beginning, which then totally grew our number of families and children's ministry, which then backflowed in, you know, into that original campus.

Lee Stephenson: 00:02:34

But how far were you into the church when you actually really got more involved on the children's ministry side? Thanks.

Danny Parmelee: 00:02:42

Five years. So, I mean, we were. Yeah. So for a long time it was. It was A real struggle. And it was an urban setting.

So it wasn't like we were in the middle of the suburbs. It was a lot of again, college students, young professionals, young married, without kids that were around that area. So there was that match.

However it was, it was hard.

And it honestly wasn't until we had kids ourselves, you know, that we recognize because also what would happen is our young married started having children and they ended up moving out into the suburbs. And that's actually part of the reason that we launched the location that we did.

Not just to reach the people that were leaving, but because they would say, oh, we're still going to come back here. And they would come back and say we can't invite our non Christian friends too far, it's too far, there's no parking, there's nothing for kids.

And so that kind of opened that know door for us and children's ministry. We, we saw the relevance and how, how important it was and, and made that shift from child care to actual children's ministry.

Where we recognize man, some of our greatest evangelism is, is happening during the children's worship time.

And so it wasn't just a ploy to, you know, like have the kids have such a good time and give them candy so they're like, I want to come back to church type of thing.

So yeah, it was probably one of the biggest mistakes that we made in planting the church is that we were not intentional about setting up children's ministry. So I'd love to hear your story. I know yours is different than ours.

Lee Stephenson: 00:04:16

Yeah, well, we did do children's ministry from day one. We planted in more of a suburban context where there were a lot of young families moving into our area.

And so we knew from day one, like we'll be irrelevant as a church if we don't have a really good children's program. And so that was kind of priority one in starting the church.

You know, we kind of focused and said we want to do a few things well and just kill them, you know. And so we talked about the worship service needed to be done extremely well. We want to do outreach extremely well.

The guest experience in children's ministry. And so we actually started from day one.

We had a full time children's pastor on staff working to develop the idea and the context and the systems for children's ministry actually do well. So we started in a movie theater, which was an interesting context to try to pull off children's ministry.

We had one auditorium that we used for the adults. And when we first started, we had two other auditoriums that we rented for children's ministry. We eventually added another one.

And so we had three different movie theaters that were being used for that. Part of the. I mean, in part of the. It was fun, but there are challenges in the fact that, I mean they're showing movies while we have services on.

So there are people walking in and out of the facilities.

How do you secure a wing of the movie theater and make sure that people, you know, moviegoers aren't showing up to the movie early and just walking in and at the same time being cognizant of the relationship, not wanting to fend the movie theater and the management and stuff of that sort. And so that, that took some coaching. But even down when it came to like how do you create nursery space in a portable situation in a movie theater?

You know. So we ended up.

Danny Parmelee: 00:06:10

How did you.

Lee Stephenson: 00:06:11

Yeah, we. We put down a foam floor on the ground and rolled out carpets.

Danny Parmelee: 00:06:16

Those are puzzle pieces.

Lee Stephenson: 00:06:17

Puzzle pieces and carpets. So we did a combination of the two.

So we'd roll out carpets because we knew a lot of these, your toddlers and crawlers, they're going to be all over that floor. And last thing a new mom wants to do is once they're a six month old rolling around crawling on a movie theater floor.

We had to bring in our own vacuum cleaners and go back through the movie theater even though it had been cleaned, it wasn't cleaned to our standards because the last thing you want is a little kid crawling over and pulling up old piece of popcorn, stick it in their mouth. So we, our team went through and cleaned all that. We actually baby. So we used the very front of the movie theater for the majority of stuff.

So you have it's level. The rest of the theater is theater seating and it gave us an adequate amount of space to be able to use down there by the actual screen.

So we actually gated off like in the nursery, the entire area with baby gates. And we created a system to be able to do that.

There was a ton of baby gates that we needed to do that, but it kept all the kids corralled and made it feel safe and clean when parents dropped them off. We did a check in, check out system in the hallway in front of all those classes.

We found portable rocking chairs and we used playpens and different things like that to be able to set up to. To at least feel like this will work in the older elementary ages and things of that sort.

We actually tiered it so we would have space in the kind of the middle ground when you first walk up, and then you'd walk down, you know, and so we'd have maybe craft area up here, lesson time down here. But again, we'd roll out carpets and things of that sort.

Danny Parmelee: 00:07:59

Were the tables tilted? How did you.

Lee Stephenson: 00:08:02

Well, you have kind of most. In our theater, you had two levels.

So you had the level down by the screen, which was elevated, and then it flattened out where you know, people would roll in a wheelchair or something of that sort and park those. And then you had the remaining part of the theater. So we maximized both of those spaces for the. For the children's experience.

Part of the challenge, too, was creating a check in, check out system. Because we didn't have WI fi access in our building was how do we. What kind of system can we use? We preferred a web based, but we couldn't do it.

And even the walls were so thick that it was hard to get even Internet access from a hotspot or something of that sort, parts of the space. So we ended up finding. We went with a company that did kind of check in, checkout system that was computer based. And it worked.

You know, when we moved out of the movie theater, we eventually changed that. We met in the movie theater for two years and then eventually moved into a high school again, we had to rethink our entire system for that.

And the nice thing is the high school provided adequate space. Like, there was tons of space to do children's. You have classrooms.

But part of the challenge was you got to keep the teacher happy whose classroom you're meeting in. And so we. You bribe them. You know, you leave gift baskets and gift cards and different things like that.

Notes telling them thank you for their willingness to share their space. And then you got to make sure, like, everything is perfectly back into place because they'll notice the smallest thing if it's. If it's not.

We actually. We have guys create a really cool wood frame kind of archway outside of one of the classrooms.

And so we had people enter through the back door from outside into the classroom. And then we did check in there, and then they would funnel out to specific classrooms based on age.

And we wanted to keep the nursery as close to the main auditorium as we possibly could. Because knowing that the kids are small and their tendency would be the ones like if they're crying or something, you may have to page a parent.

And you don't want them walking all the way across the campus to get to their kid when they know that they're wondering what in the world's wrong with my kid, why am I being paged in this moment? And that it actually, I felt like it was easier in the school situation.

Now I know working with different school districts, their approach to rental space can be different. Like you pay a certain price per classroom per hour that you're using.

But a lot of schools, and this is a little trick for church planners, don't charge for hallway space. And a lot of schools, you can actually wall off hallways and hold the classroom and actually do it for little to no cost.

And so that's another way to consider for church planners that are in a mobile situation when it comes to setting up children's space.

Danny Parmelee: 00:11:02

Yeah, that's great. Getting to know how the cause usually a lot of times it's the district, not even the school that has a set. And it'll say $25 per room.

So we had that situation in our third location. And so we said, does the cafeteria count as a room? And they said, yes, that's one room.

So we basically made a children's vil then inside of that by using pipe and drape and bright colorful walls. Now the negative is as volume increased and distraction from one room to the next.

But from a price wise and from an easy check in and check out, they were all going into one area to be able to do it. So look at the contracts and ask because for some of them, it depends on who the decision maker is.

And the school could say, yeah, hallway space, that's all you know, that's, that's free. You're, you're already. That's kind of included in your auditorium price.

Lee Stephenson: 00:11:50

Yeah. When we made the move into the high school, we actually thought we'd be there along much longer than we were.

We only ended up being in there nine months. So we, but we were approaching it like, man, this will be 3, 5 year potential of being in this, this space.

We just tried to figure out how can we be as creative as we possibly can. And so we, we were coming up with game things. Like the room that we did trial check in was the drama room.

Well, the entire drama room is painted black. Like every wall was black. So it was a dark room. So we talked about changing our children's ministry.

Like go to the mining room and doing a mining theme. And you know, they have to walk through a cave, in other words, to get checked in. And then we thought about creating mining carts.

Like the kids actually get placed in the mining cart and a miner will push them to their classroom. Or having, you know, so there are ways to make this fun and use.

Use the opportunities that God presents you to make it fun for parents and for the children as well.

Danny Parmelee: 00:12:47

I want to go back to something that you said right away in the beginning. You said you started with a full time children's person. How did you pull that off financially? Did they raise their own support? Was this.

And did they have ministry experience in that? So tell us just a little bit about that. That's probably not the norm.

Lee Stephenson: 00:13:12

We actually started off right off the bat with three of us full time. So it was myself, it was an executive pastor and then a children's pastor. And I worked with them to raise support.

I knew that they wouldn't, they didn't have the outlets to raise the amount of money that they needed to fully cover their salary.

So I went on the war path, in other words, trying to raise as much money as I possibly could to offset whatever they couldn't raise, knowing I had the potential to raise more money. We put all that money into one fund and so we all got paid out of the same fund.

It wasn't like, well, you didn't raise enough money this month, so you're not getting paid. It was like, we're in this together, we bleed together, we win together.

And that built trust right off the bat when they realized, like, I'm getting paid out of the same fund they're getting paid out of. The person that was our children's pastor had previous children's ministry experience.

He was kind of like the number two person in a church, over a thousand that we had gotten to know over a couple years.

And when we put out the vision like we're going to be planning church, he actually came and approached us and said, I'd be really interested in being part of this. I don't know if there's any way that we can make this happen. And I'm like, yeah, let's talk. And so eventually that rolled out into him.

And it was one of those. It was a really hard decision, like, do we do children's ministry over a worship? And that was a challenge for us.

But when we looked at the community in context where we were planting and we looked at the volunteer pull that we had on our launch team, I'm like, we've got really good musicians and they're fully bought in. And I feel like they could get us probably upwards of 300 people with them just leading as volunteers.

And so I was like, I don't want to put full time assets or even A whole lot of financial means into that in a mobile situation.

At this point, if I had my choice, let's go with children's ministry because honestly, if parents and the children have a great time and they learn something, they'll come back and they'll put that as a higher priority over the worship experience that they have in those early stages of. Of the church. And so I went ahead and made that call. It worked out for us given the context in which we planted.

Danny Parmelee: 00:15:31

That's great. Is there curriculum that you used? And I remember the first time curriculum was presented to me, I was like, whoa, that is so expensive. It is so just.

And I don't know if you have any ideas for church planters who are just on the tightest budget to go, man. Well, we can't. We can't purchase a. Can't afford a full curriculum.

Lee Stephenson: 00:15:56

And it's time consuming. You don't want to have your volunteers developing that on your own. Early on, we couldn't afford it.

And there were several churches in our area that knew that. And what they did was when they were. They just saved their stuff from the previous year and then they gave us the curriculum.

So we were basically running children's curriculum that was a year old. But our people didn't know and it was fine. And that really helped offset some serious costs.

Early on, as we grew, we moved to using orange curriculum. There are a lot of good things out there, a lot of groups that you could talk to. Gospel Project's another one. That's really good.

We just aligned with the orange and just decided, let's do this. And it worked really well for us when it came to implementation.

Danny Parmelee: 00:16:47

That's great. How much is it? Do you remember? Offhand itself? I can't remember what. And I think it's per amount of people you church.

Lee Stephenson: 00:16:56

Yeah.

Danny Parmelee: 00:16:56

And that type of thing. So.

Lee Stephenson: 00:16:58

Yeah, I think it was a couple thousand dollars.

Danny Parmelee: 00:17:00

Yeah, it was more than. I just remember being more than the coloring books. Yeah, I was.

Lee Stephenson: 00:17:04

Yeah. I'm like, oh, yeah. I had no idea.

Danny Parmelee: 00:17:08

Yeah. So when we did have children's ministry, same thing. We used orange for a while.

And then in the last couple years we were using Gospel Project and that was. Was helpful for us. So talk a little bit about security. I know you mentioned it already, especially with just what's happening in our culture.

The amount of people that are scared to drop their kids off. Why is it important? How do you communicate it? How do you handle situations when people are like, well, I don't want to drop my kids Off.

I want to have them with me during the service. So.

Lee Stephenson: 00:17:46

Great, great question. Security has got to be utmost importance when it comes to developing your system. And so think through.

You've got to background check anybody that works with anybody, any minor. Like that's just a given. And so have a formalized application process for anybody and include in that a background check which costs money.

It's gonna cost money, but it's 10.

Danny Parmelee: 00:18:14

To 15 bucks is much cheaper than a lawsuit.

Lee Stephenson: 00:18:18

Yes, way cheaper. So just, just make it happen. It, you know, we had certain policies and protocols that we put in place.

Things like, you know, there's no, never an adult one on one with a child. You know, we had bathroom policies that were created, all that kind of stuff. And that really helped protect us.

You know, we wanted as secure as we possibly could. Check in, check out. Like it's the same in, same out tags had to be checked every time a child was picked up. And we would test it.

Like I'd have people actually come and say, you know, I want you to see if you can get your kid out of the classroom without getting your tag checked.

And you know, and if they did, then we had some really hard conversations like, I don't care if they're your aunt coming to pick up your nephew or whatever. Like, you know, you gotta check the tag because you just never know another situation.

And so we just had to drill that into people and eventually they got it.

We'd even sometimes have secret shoppers, like I'd ask other pastors or something of that sort, like, hey, would you come and just see if you can walk through our children's space without being asked who you are? And, and so that helped us secure some of those things.

I found, like security when it came to our children's space was easier for us in our portable situations than it was in our permanent situation. Just because of layout. It was just the way the facilities were laid out.

It made it easier for us to blockade and things lock down than it did when we were in a permanent facility.

I think one of the things too that worked really well for new people like we wanted, especially new moms dropping off their first child in a nursery like that is probably one of the most anxious moments that a parent will ever have walking into a church.

And so we made sure the first point of contact when they stopped by the nursery, somebody that was incredibly warm, very understanding of the hardness of the situation, could relax the mom as they're dropping off the kid and say, we got it. You're gonna Be well taken care of, and if there's any problem, page you. And. And that really helped alleviate fear.

We did a whole New Here kind of process. And so when people came in, we'd have a booth out front saying, new here, Start Here. And that allowed us capture.

Even on the website, we say, like, hey, your first time, stop by here and show a picture of it, and we'll cater to you. Part of that process was checking in new families for the first time, and they would then be walked to their classrooms.

But what they didn't know is the tags that were printed at the New Here, Start Here were a different color tag. And so we put that on the child. That immediately alerted the teacher, hey, this kid's here for the very first time. And so give him extra attention.

Pay attention to the parents, make sure that they're put at ease when that kid gets dropped off. That helped us tremendously just in that guest connection, too.

Danny Parmelee: 00:21:16

Right? That's great. Okay, one more question on children's stuff before we go to youth. Getting children's volunteers, I've heard, is the easiest thing.

Like, you just. They are flocking. You have to turn people away.

So how do you manage recruiting volunteers without it being the desperate plea from the front that if someone, you know, using guilt and whatever to, yeah, definitely don't do that.

Lee Stephenson: 00:21:43

I think you gotta be real. You gotta understand life happens. Just teach your people to communicate. You've got to lift up high.

Like, one of the greatest mission fields that we have is sitting right here, and that's our children. And if we miss our children, it doesn't matter what we do internationally, it doesn't matter what we do in our community. We lost.

And so tell stories where, you know, lives are being changed as children. Talk about your own life if your life was impacted from a Sunday school teacher growing up.

And thank your teachers on a regular basis from up front as a pastor. And if you have kids in the program, celebrate that. I oftentimes would talk and say, I'm talking to you as a dad, not as a pastor.

And just thank you to all of our teachers. You're pouring into my kids, and I'm very appreciative of that, and I know my kids, so thank you. You're saints.

And maybe have all the teachers stand in the service and just celebrate them like that alone. People want to be a part of a winning team when they volunteer.

And so if you make children's ministry seem like they're winning, people will want to be a part of that. And your best Recruiters are those that are already in the, in that ministry.

And so we would leverage them on a regular basis, like, do you know two or three people that, you know, you, you are aware of that would do a great job? And oh yeah, my buddy, you know, and they'd write their names down.

One of the biggest challenges is not necessarily volunteers, but it's getting men to volunteer in children's ministry. I think we need a greater man presence when it comes to that area of ministry.

And I just regularly from up front would push that and say, guys, we need you in there. And you may sit there and go, I don't know what to do. I don't know what to say. I don't know Bible stories.

I'm like, that's okay, just go and let the kids crawl on you. That alone, you just being there or being in the hallway giving a high five. It changes the dynamic of the ministry for boys.

And we need to capture the attention of our boys from an early stage. And we saw a lot of men start to sign up from that as well. Like, well, I can do that.

Danny Parmelee: 00:23:58

I think that was a big even shift for us as well too, is that people saw that not every single person is the lead teacher. And that was the most intimidating thing that they thought, like, I don't know how to go through a curriculum. I don't know.

They're going to ask me some theological question, like lots of different roles. We need people for check in. We need someone to just help with the craft, someone else will be teaching.

And what we found is that people enter in on those low levels, going, okay, I'll just kind of sit in the corner and kind of fill juice cups. I can fill juice cups. And then the next thing you know, they're like leading the drama and the, you know, the large group worship.

They're fully into it and it's an exciting thing. And God uses them in big ways.

Lee Stephenson: 00:24:39

Absolutely.

Danny Parmelee: 00:24:40

Cool. All right, let's talk about youth. That's also another challenging one.

Lee Stephenson: 00:24:43

Well, I'm assuming because you didn't do children's ministry, you didn't do youth ministry here.

Danny Parmelee: 00:24:47

Yeah, we didn't. And yes, we certainly didn't.

Lee Stephenson: 00:24:52

So we didn't do youth right off the bat. And partly we just didn't feel like we had the capacity to do it. And we lost people.

And we knew that when we did that, and people would come in and like, what do you guys have for my youth? I'm like, nothing. Like, they can serve, they can come into the service, you know, we think we have a service that would be appealing to them.

But we said, for now we don't have anything. It'll be coming. But we just didn't have the platform and the ability to pull it off at a quality level.

We were about six months in to the church plant when we finally started youth ministry. And it was just volunteer. You know, we found a couple people that were like, they're high energy.

That we just noticed, like the youth that were in the church kind of were attracted to them. And I just approached them and said, hey, would you guys mind starting a midweek youth program for us?

And we just hosted at somebody's house that was in the community right near where we launched the church. And believe it or not, I mean, they grew it to 40 kids very quickly meeting in a home. And what did they do?

Danny Parmelee: 00:25:57

Like, did they do a curriculum or was it.

Lee Stephenson: 00:25:59

No, it wasn't curriculum based. We kind of coached them on how to develop series and they do teaching, they do small groups, they do some game time. They kept it relational.

They just made it fun and made sure that they were learning, being challenged in their faith. And we encouraged them, like, hey, have me come, I'll do a Q and A or I'll teach on something.

So we tried to routinely bring in different people to give that perspective. But yeah, they grew it to 40 kids in no time.

And once they got up to that number, we went, man, what could we do if we actually got a full time person in this role? We, we ended up hiring a full time person. We're still portable, they're still meeting on midweek. We had no space for them on Sunday mornings.

Like, that just wasn't even an option. So we just told like, not an option, but part of the responsibility.

We tell parents all the time, like, get them serving and I'll talk in a second about kind of my philosophy behind that. But we eventually hire a youth pastor. Honestly, he only lasted six months and there were circumstances that ended up him leaving.

So we went back to volunteer and that kept us going for probably another 18 months. And then when we moved into permanent facility space, we went ahead and hired another youth pastor. And then it just kind of went off from there.

Danny Parmelee: 00:27:21

So I was detecting a little bit of philosophy there as far as Sunday morning. Talk about that a little bit.

Lee Stephenson: 00:27:27

We made a decision pretty early on that we are never going to do Sunday morning youth group, at least for high school students. And the reason is this. I was a youth pastor for six years, led a pretty large youth ministry.

We graduated A lot of seniors out of our youth ministry and I watched year after year, our seniors leave the church, they go off to college, and we just never see them, maybe at Christmas, and that would be about it. And that we were following exactly what the national trend was, which still to this day hasn't really changed.

That 82% of graduating high school seniors stop going to church when they graduate high school. And I just went, well, if it's not changing, we must be doing something wrong. There needs to be a different way of doing this.

And so we just decided, like, my executive pastor was a youth pastor too. And so we just spent a lot of time praying and thinking through, like, how could we do this different? Like, why is this happening like this?

This isn't just a one time occurrence. Like, this is an epidemic affecting our churches all across the United States.

And we made a decision at that point that we think one of the greatest ways to keep youth connected is they need to build relationships outside of youth church, to put it that way.

Like, they, they need to experience the, the life of the entire church, not just, hey, we stick you in this room during this hour because we don't want you in here with us. So we, we felt like if our, if a high school student didn't like coming to the Sunday service, we were missing it.

And so we needed to make sure that we stayed relevant to the point that a high school student enjoyed coming to the service. And then the expectation was that they would serve.

So that was one of the things that we held our youth pastor accountable to, was that they were to filter youth into service areas of the rest of the church because we wanted them building relationships with regular adults. And it was, I mean, very adamant. Like, they're not a junior usher. Like, they're an usher. Like, they're not a junior greeter, they're a greeter.

Like, they were held to the exact same standards everybody else was. They had to go through training just like everybody else did.

They could try out to be a part of the band, they could be a part of any of those areas of service, but they had to meet the same standard everybody else did.

And I mean, what happened out of that is that they build relationships to the point that a high school senior graduates high school, they stay connected, they're still serving, they still have a place, people know them, they may go off to college, they come back on break, and people are like, hey, how's the semester? Like, there's relationship outside of their small little context.

And we found, like that that was Creating a platform that helped them stay connected to the church. Now we didn't work it long enough to do a full research project and go like, well, our numbers are this and all that kind of stuff.

But I felt like it was. We were trying to go. We're at least trying to do something different here. And I'm still a pretty big advocate for that direction. I.

We never had space to do junior high on a Sunday morning, even in a permanent facility, so they just by default got the same treatment.

I would be okay with offering junior high on a Sunday morning experience, but I personally lean to the point, like, when you get to high school, you need to begin to infiltrate into the regular point of the church.

Danny Parmelee: 00:30:58

That's great. Yeah.

We actually did the same thing, and it was because of our campus pastor who was in youth ministry, saw the exact same trends kind of, kind of going on and saying, hey, I want them to be part of service and to get in serving. It was harder. The serving part was harder for us to do. So we definitely.

They engage in the service and I would say, you know, the preaching and everything was at their level. They could, you know, access all that.

Some of the service stuff was definitely harder in trying to keep excellence in, you know, like, hey, if you, if all of a sudden this person sleeps in and misses, you know, you're, you know, you're. You have that gap there for us. But I think overall it did create. It helped. It helped not have a sub church of the church, which was the.

The youth group or the youth ministry.

Lee Stephenson: 00:31:48

Yeah. And I mean, one of, like one of our best greeters was a senior in high school. You know, like, he was just phenomenal out on the sidewalk.

And we had a guy that was, you know, he was 6 foot 5, football player, you know, probably 260 pounds, sophomore in high school, worked in the nursery.

Danny Parmelee: 00:32:09

Right.

Lee Stephenson: 00:32:09

And the nursery worker was like, he's fantastic. Like, the kids loved him. And he kind of took that mode, like, I'll just let him call on me and, you know, just played with the kids.

So, you know, it sometimes breaks the stereotype or the paradigm of the way it's been done. But we found good success with it.

Danny Parmelee: 00:32:27

That's great. One last thing that I'll share and then you can close us after that. So we didn't have volunteers, couldn't hire someone.

We utilize young life during that time. So for us, it was kind of saying when people say, hey, what do you have for our youth?

Say, we have a relationship with young life, they didn't meet at our facility or anything, but there was at least somewhat of that relationship that was there. So for us it was at least somewhat of a stopgap thing. But it also meant that we had zero control over it.

And it also meant that if things happen negatively within Young Life, then we were kind of associated with it. Like, hey, I went to Epicos, so.

Lee Stephenson: 00:33:08

There is a kid.

Danny Parmelee: 00:33:10

Yeah, my kids went to this thing and, you know, this is what happened or this is what was taught or not taught or whatever type of thing. What are your thoughts on that?

Lee Stephenson: 00:33:18

For I very familiar with Young Life and I have nothing bad to say about their mission and their desire to reach youth. Like, I'm all for that. My cautionary. And I think it's probably contextual based on the community you live in.

And the way that Young Life is done is a lot of times Young Life, at least in my personal experience, they don't see the asset of the local church. And so they were like, well, we're just going to do our own thing and we're going to reach youth this way.

And I think we're missing key steps in the discipleship process in the life of youth and their families and not connecting them to a local church. And that's my only beef that I had.

I wrestled with it as a youth pastor because I saw kids from our youth group started going to Young Life and they just disappear from church. I'd be like, where are you at? And like, well, I'm going to Young Life. Well, yeah, but you know, like, there's more to this than that.

And even talking with some of the directors just got stiff armed. And so that was just my own personal experience, but I'm sure that there are other nuances out there that operate a little differently than that.

Danny Parmelee: 00:34:24

Yeah, cool.

Lee Stephenson: 00:34:25

Yeah. Well, thanks guys.

This was a great conversation talking about children's youth ministry specifically, kind of within the framework of portable church. And thanks for sharing, Danny, and your hits and misses along the road as. As well, but it's been fun. Until next time, this is unfiltered podcast.

Keep it real, guys.