A REAL Youth Group

Last night the women of Crossroads had their final wrap up session in the study they were doing. At the same time the youth group of Crossroads was wrapping up it's study of Victory Over The Darkness. A lot of times at our church we have brought attention to the amazing victories we have won in outreach. We talk about the skater outreach that 30 or more teens attend weekly. We talk about the salivations, and the lives that are changed. But rarely do we talk about what is going on in the smaller discipleship group that is made up of youth. On Monday nights six teens have been consistently coming to the group. Larry has been trying to grow them in their faith, and often feeling like a failure because they just won't seem to open up. Well last night some things changed.

Youth group last night moved from the comfortable Sunday school answers to the kids really talking about what was going on in their lives. No more was the application of the lesson about silly little things that don't matter, but these kids actually started opening up about feelings of suicide, not feeling loved, the desire to be someone else, etc. They all made a covenant with Larry, their leader, to be real and follow him. They all agreed to be open and be discipled so that they might someday disciple someone else. We told them the real youth group of Crossroads was in that room, the 30 or so kids on Friday night were flirting with the youth group and if we begin to minister as a team and grow in our faith those others might end up being in the group someday. I am not saying that every problem they had was solved last night, but it was a good start.