Strength for the Future

All right, honey, I've got a word for you to see if you know what it is. Okay.

Expangelical. I heard it for the first time this week. Yeah, you heard me say it, didn't you?

Maybe. What's it mean? Well, it's interesting. I think this is a great topic. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.

And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. Expangelical.

It's the exit. That's what I feel like of evangelicals from the church. And specifically, from what I've read, it's 20s and 30s that are leaving the church. Yeah, I mean, it seems like we're hearing more and more. I mean, it's always been true. But recently we're hearing a lot more.

I mean, names like Joshua Harris. Recently, the New York Times did an article on a son of a prominent writer, pastor, who's just sort of walking away from the faith. And there's millions of people following these people and going that way. And I think it leads a lot of us Christian parents and even our listeners to go, what do we do wrong? You know, and how do we do this right? And we want to raise children that are walking in the faith 50 years from now.

I hope that's our dream. And so we're watching this thinking, OK, what is it that's going to create that kind of disciple? Yeah, and I think today we really do want to talk about what we can do as parents to help our children be spiritually resilient. Oh, you just threw out the word resilient. Because we are talking about a book today that's called Resilient.

The subtitle is Child Discipleship and the Fearless Future of the Church. Yeah. And the fun thing is we've got Valerie Bell, we've got Matt Markins and Mike Handler in here, and they've written Resilient. And I'm not kidding. We told you this last night as we were reading this book.

Actually, to be honest, Ann was reading it. As you were trying to avoid it. I was annoying him because I'm like, listen to this. Listen to this.

I'm on Facebook Marketplace looking for a motorcycle. That's what I'm doing. And she keeps reading and I'm going to get to it in 20 minutes, but she couldn't stop talking about this. You have written a fantastic resource. And we're excited to have you. So welcome to Family Life today. Thank you so much. We're excited that you read it.

Yeah, we did. Honestly, I hope millions read this. This is for parents and it's for church leaders and people in the church. Anybody that works with kids really, right? Yeah.

If your heart beats or breaks for discipling kids, this book's for you. Yeah. So we'll give you a little bit of an introduction, but we'd love to hear you guys introduce each other if you want. But Valerie Bell is the CEO. Yes, that's my job. Of Awana.

Yes. And I try to keep these guys in line, which is impossible. I gave up a long time ago, but part of my job at Awana is vision casting.

That's what CEOs do. And as I began to put into words what I had been feeling really since I was even a young child about kids, what's happening to kids and trying to advocate for them. I found that it was resonant inside Awana, which is a 70 year old ministry to kids. You know, you'd think that everything had been said about kids by then. Right. But I was speaking this and these two guys in particular began to pick it up, what I call their first adopters.

That's another way of talking about it. But to this messaging, they brought particular gifts. You guys helped me describe this with each other, but Matt, he was resonant with it. But then he's got these gifts of strategy, word gifting as well, and knew to get the research behind all of these things that I was expressing and feeling. And so he brought a real professionalism and a vision for this being more than a book. I'm looking over and he's got a whole strategy on this piece of paper.

It looks like a football play to me, but it looks like you know what you're doing. So you're the chief strategy officer at Awana, right? Yeah. So Valerie talks about that vision. So what are we going to do? How are we going to go from here to there? So I work together with Valerie, Mike and an entire team of people and we're kind of charting the course.

How do we come alongside of the church and parents help them to make resilient disciples who are going to engage the culture and shape the church of 2050? And so I work very closely with Mike Handler. Mike is a chief communication officer at Awana. And Mike brings thoughts to this book, structure and all the creative. It's a very, very textured, rich, I think, work of art and largely due to a lot of the gifts that Mike brings into this conversation. So Mike's the only one in our group with a radio voice. So you'll know when Mike's talking.

But what I say about Mike is that he's like the extension of my right brain. You know, so I'll try to write something and I'll think, wow, that is fabulous. And then he'll get hold of it and I'll go, no, that wasn't fabulous. That's exactly right. Now it's fabulous. And all three of your parents.

Yeah, that's true. How many kids? Tell us a little bit about your families. I have two grown sons and six grandchildren. How many years have you been married, Valerie?

50. Oh, way to go. How about you, Matt? Two sons. Katie and I have been married 23 years. All right.

And Mike? I had to quickly do the math and the marriage question. I freaked out for a little bit there. Your wife might be listening. You better get this right. No, I'm firm on that. I know where I'm at now. So we've been married 17 years.

We have four kids. So coming at this resilient idea, your parents trying to raise what we started talking about young men and women who are resilient in their face. So describe resilient. First of all, what's that word mean? How did it end up being the title of your book?

Where's that take us? So since this was a group project, I brought some of the things I've been writing and I thought I was writing a book called Future Proofed. That was your title? That was my title. And I can tell you're sort of proud of that title. Well, I was. I thought it was good until I laid this offering in front of them. They were like two thumbs down on that. There was probably more grace involved.

This is the author of quite a few books. We still kind of argue over who came up with resilient. I say it was a group process because that word describes something that's so important. It's not protection. It's not, you know, being separated. This word means that you are involved.

You're engaged. You're engaged in two areas. You're engaged in the culture and you're engaged in the church as a leader. So the definition of resilient is a quality that allows a person to bend and flex without breaking under the weight of culture. I think that the fears that we have as Christian parents as we see the culture becoming weightier and weightier and more influential and more difficult to handle with our kids. And here's the thing that's so fabulous about resilient. It can be learned. We can teach our children how to be resilient and to be able to manage and even influence the culture that we are currently seeing coming at us like a tsunami. We can conquer this. We can give our kids the tools to be able to be successful, but to be Christian in the midst of a culture that's beginning to be less and less Christian, less and less respectful of Christian views.

I think this is so good because as parents and you guys have teenagers today and I think a lot of parents are feeling fearful and they want to take their kids and hide in a bunker based on what's happening in our society. And yet you're saying, no, let's help them be a part of the world. Not only that, but influence like they are the ones that are influencing culture.

I would think our collective dream would be that why wouldn't the next down the line president be somebody who is a Christian, a professing Christian? Why do Christians need to separate themselves from culture? They should be the ones influencing culture, influencing the arts, influencing the church, influencing communities and ultimately influencing families.

There's no reason why Bible believing Christians through the power of the Holy Spirit with an allegiance to King Jesus shouldn't be in those places of influence. So you guys have published books and there's this nervous feeling it goes off the press and it goes into the marketplace and there's a moment of silence and you're waiting for the response, right? And the early response that we got from this book that has not stopped since was you gave me words for something that I've been feeling for quite some time. So whether you're a parent of young children, teenagers, or you're looking at grandkids, Resilient has helped put the finger on things have changed. We're no longer living in a majority Christian culture, right? And depending on where you live in the United States, you might be very much in a post-Christian culture society. But we're still engaging our children.

Many of us are still engaging our children, perhaps in our local church ministries, the way we were doing it a decade ago. Does that need to change and where does it need to change? Those are some of the questions we're asking. And obviously it does need to change and one of the things you talk about in the book is having eyes to see and understand the culture, sort of the concept or the mindset of Issachar, right? Talk about that.

Any one of you talk about that. That's a fascinating study and every parent and every leader of children's ministry needs to understand this. So the tribe of Issachar comes out of David's lifetime when he is starting to be king and he's bringing together all the tribes. And most of the tribes are just given a name and a number except when it came to Issachar and it has this fabulous description of their spiritual giftedness. They understood the times and they knew what to do. They were culture vultures. That's true, right? They were culture vultures.

Listen to this though. What if the church was culture vultures? What if we understood the times and we knew what to do? We make a point there's a difference from our traditional approach to raising children, which is protection, which makes sense. I mean, I've been a mother.

I know it's dangerous out there. I said all those things to my kids. So protection meaning I'm going to pull my kids out? I'm just going to put a moat around us and try to stay low here. But the problem with protection is that it cannot raise up kids who are strong, courageous, bold and resilient. It takes another P word to do that and that word is prepare. Prepare them to be able to not be blown away by the things that they're going to be facing.

Prepare them with the kind of talk that allows them to speak into the culture and be heard. There's just all of this new kind of territory for us to discover as Christian parents. So let me give some context of how we arrived at this moment.

The secular culture at large is identified as being about personal autonomy, right? You hear phrases like U-B-U. We could just keep going and listing on all these phrases. I would actually say and others are saying it's actually about hyper individualization. So let's put a date to this. In 2007, what happened? It was the year the iPhone was invented.

And in that same time period, Twitter, Facebook, if you now have an email address, anyone can have it. This has created a supercharged culture where we can celebrate our hyper individualization, right? And so what we now have to do with our children is help them to understand to be a resilient disciple, a disciple that's going to thrive in that, we have to ask different questions. And leaders are asking, are we adequately preparing today's kids to thrive in a very different future than we grew up in? And we've never experienced anything like this.

No, it's unique. And it's a new time that we were, as parents, were asking for help. Some of the stats that you included in the book, Matt, were fascinating to me. Can you share some of those of what's going on culturally?

Yeah. So we believe there's a handful of shifts that have taken place. And one of them would be what I just mentioned, which is really the digital disruption. The digital disruption has created an opportunity for secular culture to become very pervasive.

Smartphone is an interstate system where a lot of information can run through that conduit. And then we also have what's happening with the family, right? Valerie, talk about the shift in the family. Today's kids, 50 percent of them will be raised in single parent families. Some of those kids, in fact, the majority of those kids will experience a certain degree of fatherlessness. And so these children have special needs and their parent who is raising them has special needs. Let's be extremely caring about them as well. But we haven't had this before.

We haven't had to look at that cultural shift and say, why are we doing things the same way? I grew up in a home where when I was six years old, my mom and dad divorced. And so I can remember sitting in elementary school, Furman Elementary School in Finley, Ohio. I was the only kid in the class without a dad in my home.

And probably 30, 40 kids. And that is not the world we live in today. And yet, like you said, we're still sort of doing things the way that they did in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. You know, at Awana, we're self-examining. We're looking at ourselves, too. And I remember when my, this real short story, because we have so much to cover. But I want to tell this because it does illustrate this point exactly. My grandson was at Awana and I went and watched him and then I'd take him home.

I'd ring him and take him home. And there was a little girl who was in charge of his group. I think it was the red group. And she had one of these vests that had every award known to mankind on it. And she was bossy and pushy and she could have run a third world country and she was 10 years old, you know. And I could tell my grandson had a crush on her because he did what she said. And I kind of got a crush on her, too.

I just was so charmed by this little girl. And then during the group time when they asked for prayer, she raised her hand and she said, Pray for my daddy. He doesn't know Jesus.

And when I heard that phrase, he doesn't know Jesus, I knew that contained a world of pain for that little girl. Do you know the next week we had our Grand Prix race day, which is a big deal. It's computerized. They make the cars at home.

It's a major deal. And guess who wasn't there? She didn't have a daddy to make her car with her.

She didn't have somebody. And we could have picked up on that, couldn't we? We didn't pick up on it. So we need to pick up on those cues from the kids. And we're trying to be a lot more aware of the things that we do that could actually cause pain.

Think of it, over half of the kids fit into that category now. Yeah. I mean, it's a different world. So you've got the sort of discipleship going on via digital.

There's some good with that, but there's obviously it's a different world. You've got the family breakdown and then you talk about the church decline. Yeah, the church in the West is facing decline. I mean, there are other parts of the world where the church is vibrant, right?

Where through the Holy Spirit, God is doing amazing work. But here in the West, I don't think any of us would be surprised or taken off guard to think about the number of churches that closed, even pre-COVID. And then you add in what we've just endured and still walking through in terms of this pandemic. And the number of churches that have closed, it's staggering to think about. So when you add these factors together, it can seem pretty bleak, right?

It can seem pretty hopeless. And when we come up with resilient child discipleship and the fearless future of the church, it seems almost like... Are they living in another world? What news are they reading?

What are they looking at? You know, a couple of things happened to me during this pandemic. Of course, I'm worried about Awana. Forty-three percent of our churches did not sign up for Awana again because of their own situations. And in case somebody has never heard of Awana, how would you describe it? I would say that it's a kids' club through churches that emphasizes discipleship, particularly Bible memory and fun, and the discipleship by mentorship.

We'll talk a little bit more about that. Those are three of our corners that we work with. There are 126 countries where Awana operates. We work with almost five million children every week. You may have seen it down at your church in a corner church or something like that, but it is a movement. It's more than an organization now. It's a movement that God is using.

That's another whole thing we could talk about what's happening there. But I'm so worried, you know, and I'm going, God, why did you make me in charge of this? I don't know what to do in a COVID situation. What were you possibly thinking?

The word would come back to me continually through my probing of God and what in the world were you thinking to this phrase? Raise up the greatest generation of disciples. Don't get stuck in COVID, Valerie. Think about all over the world. You've got five million kids and a lot of them now are on the Internet. They're learning how to connect. It won't be long before we can connect this whole global group in a relationship like we have never had before. OK, so that's possible.

That's not just crazy thinking. And then my grandson said to me, Lovey, have you ever heard God talk to you? He's six. And I'm you know, I want to be theologically correct. And I said, I think he's spoken to me through his word. I think he speaks to me in messages that should encourage you, pastor.

And other things like that to the Bible. And he said, no, I mean, God's voice. Have you heard God's voice?

And so I'm beginning to get this feeling, you know, like, oh, boy, what's this? And so I said, Reese, I haven't. Have you? And he said, yes. And I said, what was that like? Were you afraid? And he said, no, I was really, really happy.

So I'm hooked. And I said, OK, tell me what happened. He said, I was not able to sleep.

Everybody else was asleep. And I felt a hand on my shoulder. And God said to me this, Reese, I want you to love Jesus for the rest of your life. Now, you may hear that and think, I don't think that really happened that that kid heard from God.

And that's fine. But forgive me, I'm his grandma and I believe it. And I knew that that was something that God would have said to every one of our children. Absolutely. I want you to love Jesus for the rest of your life.

We've got to get that message through to the generations behind us. I mean, that's like a definition of resilience. It is. You know, it's a long journey with Christ to the very end. And that's why we're sitting here. You know, the thing I picked up even at lunch with you is you are excited about the future. And again, I've been in pastoral ministry 30 years and I don't sense a lot of excitement, even from us leaders in the church world, about the future. It's like, oh, my goodness, the culture's taken over.

And I don't sense any of that with you. I think that's what makes this unique. We've done a pretty good job of articulating. Like, we're all feeling, everyone's feeling like a lot has changed and the culture has changed. What Valerie's describing here is optimistic. It's hopeful.

It's distinctly unique. And the reason it is is because this is about something that every church and every parent can do to come alongside of their kids. I could add to that, too, that on staff sometimes I put on my Pastor Mike hat. I used to pastor and sometimes Pastor Mike comes out.

This might be a time where that's happening. Oh, good. Come on, Pastor Mike. Fair warning.

Do you have a different voice? But I also think we have to be very aware of the fact that God actually wants this more than we do. So any optimism that we have will inevitably fail or fall short if it was just only solely based on us. And I know that you guys have well-meaning, high-functioning leaders that listen to these episodes and get charged up and challenged. Right.

But at the same time, we have to realize and be firmly aware of the fact that God has a Plan A. That's the local church. It's influence in the home.

It's influence in the community. And He wants this more than we do. All of us collectively.

He wants it more than that. So why would we have to fear to the point of paralysis as we look out onto the reality that we face? Yeah, it's pretty cool. When we were having lunch together, you know, as you think about the culture, which we've done a great job defining, and you open the book sort of with that, you can get discouraged until you step back and go, so what's God's answer to that? The family, the church. And you got to tell this, because it was great when you said it at lunch where you had a staff meeting and you asked everybody to tell their story. Tell that, because that's hopeful. Yeah. So, you know, anybody can come and do what we just did, relate a lot of very discouraging statistics. And sometimes it stops there. And I hope that you hear us say, we're not stopping there.

You know, we are very, very excited about this vision and the way God's put some flesh on it and experiences He put us through to get us here. And one of them is one of these first meetings that my staff had after I had come on board. And Matt Markins said, he had this great idea for programming.

He said, let's go around the table and talk about our childhoods. That was your idea, Matt? Yes, sir. All right.

He's a genius, yeah. Were you, like, envisioning where this could go, or are you just throwing out a question? Yeah, through, you know, we want to build trust, right? How does trust? Trust can be built in an environment where vulnerability can take place. So if we went around this table and we started with Mike, what would Mike have said? I read actually a eulogy I prepared for my dad who had passed away, I think a couple years prior, maybe a year prior to that. I mean, if we're going to be vulnerable, let's just do the thing.

Like, well, we're going to just go in and go at it. I was honest yet honoring with my father and the reality of my childhood. However, the part of my story and all of our stories together was the fact that no matter how traumatic or awful or just almost nauseatingly bad that childhood experience would have been, and everybody had a story of pain, there was always a church. There were always leaders. And I'm sure you guys have them too, right? And probably the people listening have them as well. Individuals who you can remember from your childhood and your youth, you may not remember sermons. I'm sure none of us probably remember the sermon that we heard two weeks ago, let alone 20 years ago, right? Oh, Mike, I remember every one of those.

That's because you could cheek them all. So, you know, 99.999% of us. But that being said, I'm sure almost 100% of us can recall a Miss Sally or a Mr. Dave or whomever it might be in our lives who played a pivotal role in introducing us or walking alongside us in a relationship with Christ. So as you went around, that was the story of everybody. What about you, Matt?

What did that look like for you? One of my earliest memories is the day that my dad left home. I'm sitting on the floor. My brother, who's five years older than me, is kind of towering over me. So I'm facing the door. My parents didn't have the foresight to close the door in my bedroom. How old were you? Probably three. My dad is walking back and forth, screaming, yelling.

Just the emotional violence of that day was traumatic. And I see cardboard boxes leaving the house. I see coat hangers hanging over his arm. And my brother, being eight, had the vision and foresight to distract me with the Disney golden books. You know, I remember Pinocchio. I remember Bambi.

And he's doing anything he can to capture my attention. What a brave little eight-year-old he was. You know, that's kind of set the tone for decades to follow. But fast forward to those teenage years, where by that point in time, the names that were attached to me, the identities attached to me were divorced and child support and custody. But the church was giving me a new name. You know, Nancy, the pastor's wife, would write me handwritten cards and say, you're an encourager, you're a leader, you have the gift of mercy. She's speaking identity.

Yeah, she's speaking. She's helping me to look forward and see a different pathway that I've not seen before for myself. But between Nancy and the pastor and the youth pastor and a deacon, all of a sudden, all these people are pouring into me, and I've got a hope and a future.

My parents did the right thing, by the way. My mom and my stepdad, they got me to church. And at the church, I got access to this broader, loving community. Valerie nailed it with the wording, but there was a church.

I heard 20 stories like that that night. And I said, what a group God has brought together. All of us so broken as children, we understand what children go through. But all of us healed by Christ through the church. And, you know, sometimes if I have a chance to talk to people about the resilient book, I say, actually, this is a love letter to the church, because the church has the power to heal.

It still does. The church has the power to make things be in perspective. The church has the power to continue to dream, spiritual dreams for its children. And sometimes we say, when did we stop dreaming? When did we become so discouraged that we don't have dreams for these generations anymore? You know, we don't have a sense that God has not let go of them or given up on them. And so that night, you know, it was just so very clear that this movement that was starting was not about Awana, period. But it was about the church and whatever we could do to come alongside and envision strength and power and love on the church.

We were going to do it. I think about your listeners. I've been blessed in my whole adulthood.

I've been listening to this podcast and broadcast. And how many of them out there maybe have a similar experience? Like as an adult, they've had access to tools and resources like family life today. And they're raising their kids, they're discipling their kids. But do we have the vision, as Valerie just insinuated, to lift our eyes and look throughout our church congregation and identify some of these other kids that may not be getting that at home?

How can we be the loving, caring adult, engaging them and discipling them? If those four people wouldn't have done that for me, where would I be today? And Matt, it didn't take much for you, right? I mean, it took just a word of encouragement. It took showing up. It just took consistency, presence.

Yeah. And the truth is, I mean, even as we listen to you, and I hope our listeners are encouraged as well, is I'm encouraged. It's like I'm not hopeless.

I'm hopeful. The culture is still where it is. But the family and the church and the family is sort of a microcosm of what the church can be. Unity and, of course, we just heard a couple stories here of divorce, including mine. And yet my mom, God bless her soul, as a single mom in the 60s when there were very few single moms, got me to the church. You know, and even when my little brother died within a few months after the divorce, who shows up at our house, Reverend Ashton.

I don't even know his first name. But he was that representative of Christ from the church that got my mom through and got me, a little boy, through. And that's why I think we're here today, resilient. And I was going to say, too, Dave, as we look at our homes and we look at the kids or the grandkids that are around us, these aren't just these scared little kids. These are future men and women who are world changers. And the enemy, Satan, is trying to get us so defeated by how can we impact the world?

They're under our roof. These kids have the ability and the gifts. God's not surprised by our culture. God wants to use these kids.

And we have this incredible opportunity to get on our knees before God and say, God, we can't do it apart from you, but with you, we can do all things. I've never forgotten something that Tim Kimmel said in the Art of Parenting video series at Family Life. He said when a mom and a dad know how long a child is going to live, that changes the way they parent the child. And Tim goes on to say, I know how long every child is going to live.

They're going to live forever when we have eternity in focus and we're thinking about our kids in light of eternity. It does change the strategy we employ as parents and the strategy that churches should be using to connect with kids. David and Wilson have been talking today to Valerie Bell, Matt Markins and Mike Handler. They are the co-authors of a book called Resilient Child Discipleship and the Fearless Future of the Church. We've got copies of the book in our Family Life Today Resource Center. This is good not just for church leaders, this is a great book for moms and dads to be thinking strategically about how we disciple our sons and daughters. You can go online at familylifetoday.com to get a copy of the book Resilient. Again, our website is familylifetoday.com or you can call 800-358-6329 to order your copy.

That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. Now, many of you have heard us talk on Family Life Today about a core group of people who make this daily radio program, make this podcast possible for all of us. It's our monthly legacy partners, those of you who support this ministry month in and month out financially. And here at the end of August, we are praying that God would raise up in every city where Family Life Today is currently heard two new families who would join us as monthly legacy partners. You would be a part of the team that makes Family Life Today possible in your community and would help us reach more people more often. If you're a longtime listener and you've thought about becoming a legacy partner, this is a great time for you to join.

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All of that when you become a monthly legacy partner. And again, we're praying that in every city where Family Life Today is heard, there would be two families who would step forward and say, we want to help make Family Life Today possible in our community. So would you be one of those two families? You can find out more by going online at familylifetoday.com and click the button that says donate or just call us at 1-800-FL-TODAY and say, I want to be a Family Life Today legacy partner and help make Family Life Today possible in my community. Again, the number is 1-800-FL-TODAY and we do hope to hear from you and join us in praying, would you, that we would achieve our goal of raising up a team of legacy partners in every city where Family Life Today is heard. Now tomorrow, Dave and Ann Wilson will be back with Valerie Bell, Matt Markins and Mike Handler to talk about how we raise resilient kids and what our ultimate goal as parents ought to be. I hope you can join us for that. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.