How can churches spark a more authentic youth ministry? In this episode, Kristin Franke, Director of Youth and Family Ministries at National Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, describes what good youth ministry looks like today and how church and lay leaders can better welcome and include youth as part of the congregation.
Listen on Apple Podcasts | YouTube Music | Spotify
Watch on YouTube
- Transcript — Click or Tap to Read
-
Craig Meek: Welcome back to Leading Ideas Talks. My name is Craig Meek. I’m the Program Manager here at the Lewis Center for Church Leadership, and today I’m talking with a friend of mine. Somebody that, I would go to and ask questions about ministry if I had them, not just about youth and family ministry, but just ministry in general.
I have tremendous respect for her. Her name is Kristin Frankie. Here sitting to my right. She’s the Director of Youth and Family Ministry at National Presbyterian Church. Kristin, thank you so much for taking some time to come and talk to us. I think we’re gonna have some fun talking about youth ministry.
Kristin Franke: Absolutely. Thanks for inviting me.
Craig Meek: Yeah. So, let’s dive in a little bit here. You know, ministry has a lot of different aspects to it, and youth ministry is a particular kind of ministry. What exactly would you say we’re trying to do, in working with youth and young people?
Kristin Franke: I always go back to the quote that one of my youth ministry professors, the wonderful Kenda Creasy Dean, gave in my first youth ministry class in seminary, and she said, “Good youth ministry is just good ministry with youth.”
And I think youth ministry is just recognizing in many ways that all of the things we do in the church—with our adult populations, with our children’s populations—youth are just a particular cultural context that we’re working within and doing ministry. So that’s pastoral care, that’s missions, that’s faith formation, that’s scripture reading, that’s fellowship. That’s all of the things that we think about on the broader scale of the whole church in a microcosm for young people.
Craig Meek: Yeah, that’s excellent. I wanna unpack that a little bit and maybe highlight a few aspects of what that ministry is in the cultural context of youth. Are there key aspects or components that you think good youth ministry sort of highlights or focuses on maybe a little more or a little differently than we would with with adults or with children.
Kristin Franke: So, I think to start, you have to think about where youth are developmentally and think about who adolescents are. And if you can think back and put yourself in your old middle school shoes, you know, your Doc Martins and flare, bell bottom jeans from the nineties, and remember all of the things that were stressing you out. We all feel it every time we walk back into a middle school cafeteria. If you’ve ever had that joy, all of those memories come rushing back. So, it’s real easy to place yourself there if you need to.
But all of the things that young people are worried about in Middle School and High School are: Who am I? Where do I belong? and What am I trying to do with my life as I go on? And I did just steal those a little bit from Fuller Youth Institute’s research and book that was called 3 Big Questions That Change Every Teenager (Baker Books, 2021). And I think that, that’s true, right?
You think about when you’re a child, especially if you think about it in the context of Church, up until about fifth grade, your parents can drag you to church without you putting up a fight. Your parents say, “We’re going to church on Sunday. You’re going to Sunday School,” and you follow along.
And then in, somewhere in about sixth, seventh, eighth grade, you discover that you have autonomy and that you don’t have to do what your parents say. And you might not want to listen to your parents. In fact, they become the least important influence, so you think, in your own life. And so, all of a sudden, there’s this space where youth are trying to determine who they are outside of who their parent has previously told them they are, and what does that mean for their faith?
So, what does that mean? Who is God in this context? Who is God to me and not just who my parents said God was? And similarly, even from a brain development standpoint, that move from childhood to adolescence is also a move from concrete to abstract thinking.
So, as you think about how you read books in English class. When you were in elementary school, you worried about plot, you talked about exactly what was being said, the characters, what they were doing. And then, you got to middle school and high school, and they started asking you, “What does this mean? What does this symbolize? What are the themes?” Things that aren’t explicitly in the text.
And that’s the same thing that’s happening as kids go to youth in how they read scripture. It goes from reading the story of Noah’s Ark and saying, “Oh, God loves the world. He saved Noah,” to “Wait a second. There’s a lot more questions going on at the same time.”
And so, all of that feeds into who youth are and how our ministry with them is going to be shaped. They’re in this in-between, kind of limbo state between childhood and adulthood, which is really exciting because it’s great. It’s a time that they’re rearranging their own lives and their own worldviews, and the gospel could really speak into that.
Craig Meek: Yeah, that’s excellent. That’s really interesting. This movement from concrete to abstract—I’m really interested in that idea in particular because a lot of my work is with adults. And with adults, we like really neat, concrete things.
Specifically, you know, how many times have we heard from our preachers, “We want practical insights from sermons.” I personally find that a lot of our adults don’t like to do the hard work of abstract thinking to sort of embody the values of faith in their own lives in particular ways.
But you’re suggesting that this is, in fact, what we’re trying to do with youth. We’re trying to get them to not be impractical, but to sort of embody their own faith. We’re trying to get them to sort of hold it as their own rather than as be given it from somebody else.
Kristin Franke: Yeah. And even as you’re saying that about adults, again, “good youth ministry is just good ministry with young people.” All of us, there’s the easier way to approach our faith, which is black and white, which is do this, don’t do this. And everybody, at a certain point in their life, whether that happens when you’re 10 and your dog dies and you need to know if your dog goes to heaven, or whether that’s you’re 50 and you’re facing different diagnoses or somewhere in between. That black and white thinking is always gonna get challenged.
And so, youth are really often wrestling with that because something has challenged the messages they learned in their children’s Sunday school about God is love, God loves us, God wants good things for us. All of those kinds of messages when they’re that simple. Which you have to be simple for a four and 5-year-old.
Craig Meek: Sure.
Kristin Franke: When you’re at 14 and 15, that falls apart in the face of everything that you’re seeing in the world because you’ve also read the news for the first time.
Craig Meek: Yeah. That’s … It’s interesting how the world that we live in is what disrupts our faith. And prepare—How do you prepare youth for that disruption? How do you sort of get them to thinking abstractly about their faith in a way that they’re trying to, kind of, grasp it at another level now, but in a way that prepares them for such and such country is going to war. So and so is, you know, suffering famine in a country. You know, all the different things that we read in the news nowadays. How do you prepare them to be able to think theologically—or maybe that’s the wrong words—just think “Christianly” about the world that they’re in.
Kristin Franke: I think that at least the way I’ve always understood the teaching I do, or the Bible studies we do, or how we talk about the world. They’re—at the root of it, we have to root ourselves in who Christ is, and we also have to root ourselves in understanding that we can’t fathom who God is. We cannot wrap our heads around how big God is.
But a lot of it, again, this goes back to the good ministry piece is listening. When a student’s in a crisis moment, or whether that’s an internal family issue, whether that’s a mental health situation that’s really personal, or all the way to what is happening in the world. A lot of it has to do with listening. Sitting with them in that time and not trying to answer those questions, often, or asking them questions back to let them reflect on “what is it I’m trying to figure out.” And again, I think, I haven’t done a lot of work with adults in pastoral care issues, but I feel as though that’s some of the same principles that those who do adult ministry would say the same things.
Craig Meek: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a ministry of presence, right? They need to trust you in order to be able to hear you when you do have things to say. But they have to be able to trust you to not just answer their problems or answer their questions, but to hear them as people. Right?
Kristin Franke: Yeah.
Craig Meek: And yeah, I think you’re exactly right that adults and youth are human beings at different stages. And so, that principle just applies to people of all ages. And so, I think that’s a really good insight for us.
I wanna think a little bit more about faith formation in young people and think … I wanna think a little bit about the different kinds of factors that shape who they are. As you said before, they are engaging the world and their faith from a particular stance or viewpoint, and now they’ve got more information than they’ve ever had before. They’ve got more voice that previous generations didn’t have because they have a little electronic device in their hand that is their megaphone.
Kristin Franke: Gen Z does, with Gen Alpha that’s swinging.
Craig Meek: Oh, really?
Kristin Franke: That pendulum is swinging on phones. Well, all of the research that’s coming out about the danger of phones—we’ll see where Gen Alpha lands with that and how many parents put smartphones in their hands.
Craig Meek: That’s really interesting. I mean, part of that is in response to what we’re seeing are some of the harms of social media, some of the harms of just the inundation of information and voices. Right?
Kristin Franke: Exactly.
Craig Meek: So that’s really interesting. So how do you, as a youth minister, navigate working with youth who, currently, have that phone in their hands.
Kristin Franke: The phone itself, as we all know, technology is … technology is neutral. And then how is using the purposes it’s put to go all the directions, right? So, on one hand the value of it is—I think Sherry Turkle I believe is her name—she talks about how you have your friends in your pocket, right? Because you have your phone with you, you have your friends in your pocket at all times, friends from all over the world. And I, can relate to that. I lived overseas for a while and so my phone was my connection back to those friends when we moved back to the United States. And so, students feel that, right? They got their friends in their pocket. But that also means like their church can be in their pocket.
I have the ability to text our students and say, “Hope you do well on that final. Good luck at your game today. Have a great first day of school”. And that somebody is speaking into their lives that cares about them through that device in a different way than just the social media feed and isn’t asking anything in return either.
Craig Meek Sure.
Kristin Franke: And so, it’s not transactional, I would hope. So, I think, there’s positives about connectivity that you can have without having to be in the church building on the church site. And yet there’s also all the harms that have been well documented, especially in the last year.
Craig Meek: So, are you suggesting that like the phone, used correctly, in ministry is another way of ministry of presence, essentially?
Kristin Franke: I believe it can be. And obviously there are all kinds of boundaries and all kinds of best practices that our churches find to be the correct ways to deal with that because there’s equally harm in that.
Craig Meek: Absolutely. And I think we would dive into those best practices, but it’s such a big issue we’d have to take a lot more time than we [have].
Kristin Franke: That wouldn’t be very fun.
Craig Meek: But I think we should put a bow on that by saying at least if you don’t have a best practices kind of policy in mind or stated clearly in your church for your youth volunteers, for your youth ministry director if you have one, you need to have one.
Kristin Franke: It needs to be written out. Yeah.
Craig Meek: It needs to be written out and it needs to be, you know, all your church leaders need to be on board with it.
Kristin Franke Yeah.
Craig Meek: And that’s a great point. If you don’t have some kind of policy in place and you’d like to work on that, I would encourage you to do so. We’ve got some resources on our website that you can go to and that’ll help you craft those statements so that you can maintain healthy boundaries in your congregation. With that, I think let’s take a break for a few minutes.
50 Ways to Strengthen Ministry with Youth
How can your church help youth claim a vital faith? No question is more critical to the future of the church. Learn effective tips your congregation can use to improve ministry with teens and their families in 50 Ways to Strengthen Ministry with Youth. Read now, download free, and share.Discover tips and strategies on more 50 Ways topics.
Craig Meek: Welcome back to Leading Ideas Talks. We are here talking with Kristin Frankie, the Director of Youth and Family Ministry at National Presbyterian Church. We’ve been talking about youth ministry, in particular, how good youth ministry is just good ministry with youth and some of the aspects of that.
Kristin, I wanna dive into some numbers now. I want to think about there’s a lot of research out there these days. There’s a lot of data about churches, about staffing, about youth themselves, and I’m wondering, is there data out there that you pay attention to that you’re interested in? And what do the numbers tell you? How do you factor that into what you do?
Kristin Franke: Sure. One of my biggest resources is the Fuller Youth Institute out at Fuller Seminary, and they’ve been doing kind of qualitative and quantitative research for decades on youth ministry.
One of their most well-known books is probably Sticky Faith (Zondervan, 2011). One of their opening statements out of that book was that they think that approximately 40 to 50% of involved church kids—so this is not kids who call themselves Christian on a survey, this is kids who came through a church youth group—about 40 to 50% of them would step away from the church during college.
And that, you know, sparked a lot of research. I think around the same time, there was also the National Study of Youth and Religion, which was a longitudinal survey of young people and their faiths journeys. And so that was informing that conversation about 15 years ago. Which about 10 years ago is when we started hearing about the rise of the nones, which tracks with those teens became young people who were affiliating as none. And now, we’re hearing about things like the “Great Dechurching,” which is tracking those same numbers just another decade later as those youth became adults.
But the 40-50% number feels really shocking ’cause you think, “Oh, look at all these great seniors we see on senior Sunday, and how many of them are gonna be in the church in four years?” And we don’t know that. And then we pray that the Spirit moves them to find a church and that people reach out to them in their college towns if they go away. But that, that number has always been stuck in my mind, and I found that research really compelling.
One of the things they talked about, there was no single magic bullet. There’s never a single magic bullet. But one of the things they found as most closely correlated was the amount that students knew adults in the larger congregation. So, even though youth say, they just wanna be with the young people, “the adults are boring,” or the adults think the youth think they’re boring—the youth actually benefit most when they’re integrated into the life of the whole congregation and when there are multiple adults in the congregation who know their name and who care about them, not just the youth pastor and not just the people over in the youth building, but that they’re part of the whole. And that was most closely correlated with Sticky Faith that lasted through college. It was the biggest factor.
Craig Meek Yeah, that’s really interesting. Our adults need to not just entertain having or welcoming our youth, they need to invest in the youth. They need to get to know them, they need to figure out how they can, in appropriate ways, shape the lives of the young people in their church. Are there other factors that you think are really helpful or are there specific ways you would suggest youth ministers or people working with youth go about doing that investment in youth?
Kristin Franke: I think that those of us who are paid staff, that’s our job, right? Yeah. And our kids know it’s our job, right? My youth know that, “oh, that’s our youth director, she’s great, she’s wonderful, but she’s paid to do this.”
But it’s when there’s those other adults that are not paid to do it, whether that’s just their parents’ friends, whether that’s just the person who volunteered to be a confirmation mentor, but particularly, when it’s the senior pastor who knows who they are, that tells them that they are part of this church.
I’ve had students mention that the relationship they’ve had when the senior pastor knew their name, knew about them, knew where they were going to school, things like that, it just meant that they weren’t just the child of this person. They were an individual who mattered to the senior pastor, and who was not paid to do youth ministry, usually, specifically. But those relationships really mattered to our students. And that constellation of adults surrounding them really matters.
Craig Meek: Yeah. Absolutely. And that makes good sense, right? Again, if good youth ministry is just ministry with youth, the senior pastor is doing this with adults already, right?
And so, expanding that bandwidth a little bit. When a youth passes in front of you on a Sunday morning in the receiving line, before or after church: “Hey, how are you doing, John? I see you.” Maybe, “How did the football game go?” “How’s school going this semester?” Little things like that are just ways to stick your foot in. To just start trying to get to know some of these folks that just happen to be a little younger in your congregation.
Kristin Franke: And at least in my tradition, we’re Presbyterian, and when our youth get confirmed, they are full voting members of this congregation. There is no such thing as youth membership. You are a member, or you are not. So, they are members just in the same way that the person who’s been a member for 40 years is a member.
Craig Meek: Yeah. That’s interesting you bring up confirmation. Again, another topic that we could take a long time to unpack and talk about, but a lot of mainline denominations have some type of confirmation where we recognize our youth, and it’s sort of, at least ideally, a sort of turning point where we think about these youth in a slightly different way: maybe they’re full members or maybe we’re just recognizing their sort of transition as, sort of, into young adults that we would hope are a little more active in the church.
Are there ways that you can suggest any of our pastors listening out there to take confirmation a little more seriously somehow, or to maybe think about just, how can we do more than just—for lack of better term—just parade the kids up in front of everybody so we can clap and smile at them.
Kristin Franke: One of the things that we’ve done over the last few years is when our pastors have come to speak about confirmation on like our information meeting, so we’ll have a parent and student information meeting, and we know particularly in our context, there are families who, for them baptism and confirmation are very important.
Craig Meek: Sure.
Kristin Franke: The youth know that pressure. The youth know that their parents are expecting them to get confirmed. And one of the things, the greatest gifts that our pastors have done is to say, “Don’t do it because somebody else wants you to.” And they’ve been very explicit with our students and our parents that this is a decision that we’re making, not for our parents, but for God. And so, if we’re gonna get up and lie about it, we’re lying not to just the people around us, but also to ourselves and to God.”
Craig Meek: Yeah, absolutely.
Kristin Franke: And so, having the parents hear that I think has been just as valuable though. I think one of our pastors once said, “Your parents can force you to go through this class, but they should not force you to get confirmed.” You know, I count it as a win that almost every year we have about one student who goes through the process and says, “this isn’t for me at this time.” And I have found that those students have done the most thinking about what it is they truly believe. And they’ve come to the point of saying, “I don’t believe it enough to get up and make those promises in front of the congregation.” And I actually think that’s really beautiful that they’re putting that much thought into it. So, getting that option and making it clear that we’re not expecting you just to do it for the sake of doing it, I think has been really helpful.
Craig Meek: Absolutely. And I think you’re 100% right. I mean, when you’re choosing not to do something, it’s just as thoughtful. It takes just as much effort to figure out why in these kinds of contexts. And I think the thing that I wanna highlight in that is a youth saying “no” at that point in time is not a youth banished forever. It’s just … God’s up to something. It’s gonna take a little extra time. And I think we as adults, as church leaders, as pastors, we’ve gotta trust that God will continue the work in that person.
Kristin Franke: Exactly. Exactly.
Craig Meek: And so, it takes a little humility, I think, on our part to think long term. Confirmation doesn’t have to be a staple program every year where we confirm everybody because they’re of the age. Like, it’s a point in time where maybe it’s more like we’re taking stock of where these young people are at in their faith or adults because adults can do confirmation too, just so you know. That’s not a rule that it’s just for youth. That’s a good shout. That’s really good stuff. Kristin. I wanna get back to numbers again. Are there any other numbers that you find interesting or wanna bring up?
Kristin Franke: This is again from Sticky Faith. They talk about a one to five and a five to one ratio. So, all of us who are in youth ministry or children’s ministry know, if you’re going on a trip, you’ve gotta have one adult for every so many youths. And five is a really great number. If you’ve got one adult for every five youth when you’re on a trip, you’re doing great. But the question they ask is, what if our church is flipped it to be a five to one ratio. To say that every youth was known by five adults (not their parents), five adults in the congregation.
And how do we as youth ministry leaders or as pastors, help build that constellation? And the way I look at that from my job is I, as an individual, can get to know our youth. And I can get to know them on a certain level, but I can’t really get to know all of them on a great level.
But what I can do is I can find other leaders. We have Sunday school teachers, we have youth group leaders, we have confirmation mentors, and to help build that constellation around these youth. So, one youth who goes through our whole program, will have Sunday school teachers in middle school, Sunday school teachers in high school, youth group leaders in middle school and high school, and a confirmation mentor, hopefully (if they’ve gone through all of those programs). And so that’s at least five people who they’ve known for more than just one Sunday at a time, who they could go to, or who can know them well.
Craig Meek: Man, that’s excellent. That’s such a great idea. Again, not just for youth, but for ministry in general. I mean, Pastors are tired. They have a lot to do, and there’s a lot of expectations on them. And yet, you know, in the book of Acts, what do the disciples do when they realize we can’t care for all of these people and teach at the same time? They create a new body of Deacons. People tasked with caring for others so that they, the pastors are relieved to focus on what their call is.
And we’re just suggesting the same thing with this idea of constellation, right? We need to find other people to get involved, so that people, our individuals, whether they’re youth or adults, feel seen, feel heard, feel valued, feel included.
And with youth, think about that ratio. We think about what we have to do so often to do things like a trip. I need one leader for five kids, right? But let’s set the bar higher. Let’s figure out how do we get more adults to know the name of one youth? Let’s build that constellation out and be able to have different pockets of people that are investing in individuals meaningfully and deliberately. That can make all the difference in some of the lives of these young people.
So, I’m interested a little bit in, in youth pastors and their job, do you have any experience kind of dealing with youth pastor burnout? What are the factors that sort of, you know, have you seen that really push youth ministers to the brink?
Kristin Franke: Some of the factors that probably lead to burnout are clarity of expectations. I think there are some. Again, I’m speaking about paid youth workers, not volunteers, but particularly from paid youth workers, there are sometimes just the expectation of… “Oh, you’ll have a big youth group.”
And I am a huge fan of the book, Sustainable Youth Ministry by Mark Devries. And one of the things he talks about in that book is that it honestly doesn’t matter what the numbers are, as long as both the church and the youth director are clear on what the expectation is. Because when the youth pastor is just hearing, “Well, it’s not as big as it used to be.” “We don’t have as many kids as we used to have.” “Back in those good old days, we used to have a hundred kids coming to our mission trip.” Without reflecting on either the current state or without having actual concrete expectations, that can lead to burnout. I think the feeling of having to do it all: go to every kid’s soccer game, being on call all the time again. Again, drawing boundaries about what is Sabbath which is again, a good practice for all ministry leaders, leads to some of the same questions about youth ministry burnout.
And again, we talked earlier about phones and being in contact with students. Where are you drawing your lines? That these are your students that you’re caring for and this is your life, and they are not the same thing. I think there’s also, there are financial factors. Youth ministry is sometimes seen as the steppingstone into other ministry, and is therefore paid as such. And that alone can be enough that somebody says, “I can’t make it in this world on that salary, and I need to go find another job.” So those are some factors I think of.
Craig Meek: Yeah, that’s really interesting stuff about burnout and some of these factors that you’ve seen, that you’re familiar with. I think think those are … I think you’re right, that those are, that those are across the board in a lot of ministry. And it sounds to me like it would be really important for us to really take stock of how we’re supporting correctly our youth ministers. Are we making sure they take Sabbath, not just as “I need a break so that I can be better tomorrow,” but like actually taking a break to breathe and spend time with God, to not just recharge the batteries for more productivity, but for fulfillment. For personal, just kind of, rest. As well as, we talked about constellations, creating healthy constellations so that it’s not all on the youth pastor. That’s again, another really excellent insight.
We can talk all day obviously, so I’ve only got a couple of more questions for you. I think this has been a really fun conversation. Aside from keeping, young people physically and emotionally safe what do you think is the most important thing for youth leaders and volunteers to really focus on in their work with young people?
Kristin Franke: So, I very early on heard that old, I think it’s Young Life statement that was, “They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
And the buzzword for a very long time was the idea of relational youth ministry. That we have to be in relationship with young people, and we had to be vulnerable with them. We have to be showing them who we are. And I think another quote I recently read was that “our lives are on display.” And so, students and youth, they’re not just hearing what we say, but they’re seeing and how we act, how we live our lives out, how we take Sabbath. Are we taking Sabbath and showing that to a student of what that can look like? How do we use our phones? How do we use our technology all, and how are they gonna model that?
And so, I think recognizing that, when we’re in a relationship with people, we show them who we are. And that’s, with boundaries of transparency between young and old. But showing who we are and showing that we care about them as individuals, not just as projects, right? Not just as receptacles for our teaching. But do we care about them? Do we care about the individual student? And that’s, again, I think that’s what everybody wants to know is do you care about me? And if you care about me, then. Maybe I’ll listen to you.
And I think the other word that has sometimes replaced relational in some of the literature is “incarnational.” And the idea that in John 1, it says, Jesus came into the neighborhood. In John, in the Message translation, it says that “Jesus moved into the neighborhood and lived among us.” And so how do we live among the youth that we’re entrusted with? How do we enter their lives and how do we sit with them through whatever they’re going through?
Craig Meek: Yeah, that’s, I think that’s an excellent place to wrap up. We have to invest in spending appropriate time with youth, believing in them, seeing them, but also helping shape their lives in positive and healthy ways. And hopefully, you know, the whole idea of the church is pointing them to Jesus.
If we’re not doing that, what are we doing? And so, figuring out ways to do that, figuring out structures in our churches, constellations of volunteers, our programming. This is what we’re after, right? Faith formation, pointing our youth to Jesus Christ, and letting God do the work in their lives. We are not miracle workers.
Kristin Franke: Amen to that.
Craig Meek: We don’t save anybody. That business is taken up by our Savior. So, Kristin, thank you so much for being with us today. This has been a lot of fun.
Kristin Franke: Absolutely.
Craig Meek: We’ll put some of the resources that Kristin’s talked about, the book, Sticky Faith, which is again, an oldie but a goodie with a chocked full of really helpful ideas, as well as just the Fuller Youth Institute website. We’ll put some of those below. You’ll be able to get those links and see what those resources are about, and hopefully, they’ll be helpful to you in your ministry.
Thanks for being with us today. We’ll be back in a few weeks. Until next time, we’ll see you then.
Announcer: Thank you for joining us for Leading Ideas Talks.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our free weekly e-newsletter, Leading Ideas, to be notified when new episodes are published. Visit churchleadership.com/leadingideas.
Related Resources
- New Approaches to Help Youth Form Lasting Faith featuring Brad Griffin — Watch the Leading Ideas Talks podcast video | Listen to the podcast audio version | Read the in-depth interview
- 50 Ways to Strengthen Ministry with Youth, a free Lewis Center resource
- The Changing Contours of Youth Ministry featuring Deech Kirk — Watch the Leading Ideas Talks podcast video | Listen to the podcast audio version | Read the in-depth interview
- Youth Ministry by Any Other Name by Kenda Creasy Dean
- 5 Compass Points Guide Character Formation and Lifelong Discipleship for Youth by Kara Powell, Jen Bradbury and Brad Griffin
If you would like to share this article in your newsletter or other publication, please review our reprint guidelines.
