In youth ministry there are cycles. Since we primarily serve youth, every few years we find ourselves in the position of rebuilding once again. Last June we graduated 16 seniors from our Kaleo Youth Ministry—many of whom we had met as freshman and sophomores during our Teen Center outreach events and Tuesday “drop ins.” This group had become our core, creating the culture and heartbeat of most of our ministry. As we prayed over them a couple nights before their graduations, we realized that it wasn't just their lives that was about to change: The face of Kaleo and the Teen Center was going to quickly change too.
September 9th marked the beginning of our fall programming. We opened up our doors that Friday afternoon to a solid group of middle school students eager to reconnect and hear about what this year would look like. That evening we also opened up our doors for our high school students. One student showed up early, a graduate of our middle school ministry. We ate dinner and waited for the others to come. At some point we looked at our watches and realized that almost an hour had passed since our start-time and only one student was there. So what did we do? We held the entire night of programming for that one student. Eight volunteers, games, worship, and an incredible message by our youth pastor, Erron Harris, for that one student. We ended up hanging out with David for an extra hour after our program was supposed to end, realizing the gift that God had intended for us that night—even if it was much different than we had expected.
As we processed afterward, this is the truth we landed on: “Obedience to God is more important than fruitfulness for Him.” It doesn't matter how many students show up to Kaleo each week if we are not practicing faithfulness and obedience to Him. We could have cancelled programming that night and saved it for another week, but we knew God was calling us to obey Him with the ministry He had placed right in front of us.
The next week, four students showed up. And the following week, eight students came. The best part is these students are solid believers—almost all of whom are LACS graduates and freshman at high schools across Los Angeles. They are leaders and are passionate about Jesus. We have a feeling that God is starting something new at our Teen Center, something far deeper and wider than we can even imagine at this point.
We recently received a phone call from three of our RED leadership students saying that they felt led by God to start a Bible club on their campus. We prayed for them before Club Rush began… then received excited text messages a couple hours later saying that over sixty students signed up to be part of their club! We are meeting with them this week to begin coaching them through the ministry that they are now leading on their campus.
Here's what we're praying for this year: To have a presence not just at the high school across the street, which the Teen Center opened for a few years back, but at another three local high schools as well. Pray for us as we continue to rebuild this year. Pray that God would direct our steps. Pray that God would keep our eyes open to His movement in our neighborhood and in the lives of the students we already have relationships with. And pray for this small group of leaders that God has placed in front of us, that they would be ambassadors for Jesus and agents of change in our neighborhood. We can't wait to see what God is going to do this year!
