Matt Markins and Mike Handler open with a 2014 Awana research finding that keeps Matt awake: asked how carefully they evaluate and track the impact of their children’s ministry, leaders averaged 2.99 on a five-point scale. A collective shrug. Mike’s analogy is the car with no fuel gauge and no temperature reading, driving toward a failure point it cannot see coming. The hosts frame the problem using 4DX language of lead and lag measures, or drivers and outcomes. Lasting faith at 37, 47, 80 years old is the lag measure. Nobody in ministry gets to read that gauge. So the question becomes which drivers plausibly shape it, given that worldview largely settles by age 13.

Their answer is the belong, believe, become framework. Belong is relational: is every child named, noticed, known, greeted by a specific adult with multiple touchpoints? Believe is scriptural: is Scripture read weekly, sung, memorized, spoken creedally, held as a physical book rather than a screen? Become is experiential: is there silence and stillness in a high-energy room, practiced prayer, service, drama, parents equipped for bullying and cultural pressure? Each church identifies its own top three to five markers per sphere, tracks them week to week, and notices when one quietly drops out. Mike closes with Carl Trueman’s medieval cathedral builders, men who broke ground knowing they would never see the roof. The blueprint, Matt adds, is the point. Faithfulness without visible fruit is still faithfulness with a plan.

Most children’s ministries cannot tell you if what they’re doing is working. Awana’s research puts the self-assessment at 2.99 out of 5. Matt Markins and Mike Handler take on the hardest problem in child discipleship: the outcome we care about most, lasting faith in adulthood, is one most of us will never live to measure.

• The 2014 data point that still keeps Matt up at night
• Lead vs. lag measures, borrowed from Chris McChesney’s The Four Disciplines of Execution
• Why age 13, not 18, is the real deadline
• Belong: named, noticed, known, and what that looks like operationally
• Believe: the irreducible minimum of weekly Scripture engagement
• Become: creating stillness inside a high-energy room
• “Every system is perfectly designed to produce the results it gets”
• Carl Trueman on medieval cathedral builders, and why blueprints matter more than timelines

• The Faith of Our Children
• The Four Disciplines of Execution, Chris McChesney
• Appleton Alliance Church
• Child Discipleship Forum
• childdiscipleship.com

The post Effective Child Discipleship: Looking at Outcomes Rather Than Just Activities appeared first on Child Discipleship.

In this episode, Matt Markins and Mike Handler take on a frustration nearly every children’s ministry leader knows: parents aren’t using the resources the church hands them. Their diagnosis is that this isn’t a resource problem or even an implementation problem. It’s a culture problem. Most American homes, including church-attending homes, are shaped by cultures of achievement, sports, screens, or convenience, and discipleship gets rejected like a cartridge that doesn’t fit the system. Handing parents another plan won’t fix that. As Mike’s childhood story of receiving train set accessories without the train set illustrates, resources without vision are just spare parts nobody knows what to do with.

The conversation then walks through the first two of four spheres from the Forming Faith pathway that help parents cultivate a culture of discipleship at home. Vision asks parents to picture their child at 40 and name the values and convictions they hope that adult holds, because a family without a clear vision will absorb one from the surrounding culture. Time and place is about deliberateness: owning the calendar before it owns you, establishing intentional rhythms like shared meals, and using organic ones like car rides, seasons, and even a child’s disappointment after a failed audition as moments to talk about God. The episode also touches on language (dialogue over monologue, drawn from Deuteronomy 6) and community (every child needs a team of five caring adults), and lands on the line Matt calls his most important of the season: the shortest pathway to Jesus for a child is always through the parent.

• Why the American home, even the Christian one, defaults to achievement, sports, screen, or convenience culture, and why discipleship gets rejected by those systems
• Culture eats strategy for breakfast: why you can’t out-plan a bad home culture
• The four spheres of the Forming Faith pathway: vision, time and place, language, and community, and how they map onto Belong, Believe, Become
• Vision: five questions to ask parents about who their child will be at 40
• Mike’s train set story, and why resources without vision are just spare parts
• Time and place: intentional rhythms vs. organic rhythms, and owning your calendar before it owns you
• Redeeming the car ride, the waiting room, and the disappointment of not getting the part
• Language: dialogue over monologue, and the story of Katie discipling a newborn with a leaf
• Community: the 5-to-1 principle from Kara Powell’s Sticky Faith, and the ministry leader’s role as a connector of adults around each child
• The research: only 12% of parents use church-provided resources most of the time
• The line of the season: “The shortest pathway to Jesus for a child is always through the parent”

• Forming Faith (the Formational Home chapter)
• Sticky Faith by Kara Powell

The post Creating a Culture of Discipleship in the Home appeared first on Child Discipleship.

In this episode, Mike Handler sits down with Sam Luce to challenge a default assumption in children’s ministry: that a kids or youth pastor’s primary job is to disciple the kids in the room. Sam argues the more faithful and sustainable calling is to disciple the people who disciple kids, namely volunteer leaders and parents. Drawing on his years at Redeemer Church, where his kids ministry tripled in size with no added staff budget, he explains how he treated volunteers as staff, wrote job descriptions that gave them a clear picture of what winning looked like, and used the short windows before and after service to train and encourage leaders instead of scheduling separate meetings nobody would attend.

The conversation then turns to parents, where Sam pushes past the familiar “parents are primary” line to unpack the second half of Deuteronomy 6, the stones of remembrance set up outside the home as a communal witness to God’s rescue. He argues discipleship was never meant to be a solo home responsibility handed off with a curriculum; it’s a partnership, and ministry leaders are called to actively disciple parents through small groups, prayer gatherings, or a simple text photo of their child worshiping. Sam and Mike close by urging listeners not to be paralyzed by the size of the task: one job description, one conversation, one parent connection at a time.

• Sam’s reframe: your primary job as a children’s or youth ministry leader is not to disciple kids, it’s to disciple the people who disciple kids.
• Two groups to disciple: the volunteer leaders on your team, and the parents in your congregation.
• How Sam led through explosive growth at Redeemer with no staff budget by treating volunteers as staff and writing job descriptions for them.
• Using the natural windows before, between, and after services to train and encourage leaders instead of adding a separate meeting.
• Why job descriptions matter: clear expectations, a realistic picture of what to expect, and one sentence that defines what winning looks like.
• The practice of praying for one person a week rather than trying to reach everyone at once.
• A story about texting a mom a photo of her son worshiping, and why that small gesture is discipleship.
• Giving up what you like (teaching the Bible story yourself) for what you love (multiplying disciple-makers).
• Deuteronomy 6 revisited: the well-known “parents are primary” passage, and the often-skipped second half about the stones of remembrance and the role of the community.
• Practical on-ramps for discipling parents: men’s groups, moms’ groups, prayer gatherings, coffee, or a simple play date.
• Elizabeth Elliot’s line on doing the next thing God puts in front of you, and why starting small beats staying paralyzed.

The post Discipling the Disciplers: Why Your Job Isn’t Just the Kids appeared first on Child Discipleship.