Fully Invested and Free of Charge
| 2016-11-10 00:00:00 -0500
How Reliant made it possible for caring adults to be fully invested in the lives of college and high school students through Young Life, without touching the ministry’s budget.
Be With.
This is the phrase that my wonderful Young Life area director and friend taught our leadership about what a Young Life leader really does. He taught this so many times that the phrase became graven in our brains.
This is the power of Reliant working in Jesus-centered ministry partnerships.
He said the whole ministry boiled down to this: being with lost kids. Young Life weekly gatherings and camps could change, but our “contact work,” or being with kids on their turf out in their world, is absolutely written in stone and laid immovable into the foundation. If you were being with, you were a leader. If you were not being with, you were not a leader. Simple as that.
“Being with” takes time. It takes gas in the tank of your car as you drive kids home out in the country lanes. It takes cash for McDonald’s fries for the kid who doesn’t have enough during a hangout. It takes a scholarship for the $600 camp cost for the kid for whom even $50 is hard for his family to pay. It takes militant management of your schedule, studies and finances to make yourself available at the right times and places to connect with lost kids, kids who are entrapped in cycles of poverty, abuse, substance use, anxiety, depression and enough family and social baggage to crush even the most stout and resilient heart.
Today Young Life has ministries in about 7,000 schools and other locations, with almost 5,000 staff and 70,000 volunteers, making an impact on nearly 2 million kids annually in 99 countries! Eleven of these ministries are in the high schools and middle schools of Monongalia and Marion Counties in West Virginia, and one of them is Young Life WVU, the ministry I partnered with through Reliant for six years. I volunteered as a YL leader in a local Mon County high school while enrolled at WVU, and I never dreamed that one day I would get to bring the wonderful simplicity of this effective ministry to the crazy college students of Mountaineer Nation.
In West Virginia and many YL ministries in the national “Small Towns/Rural” initiative, the committee (committed adults in the community who are responsible for stewarding the staff and volunteers who lead kids) struggles to raise money for even one staff person, let alone for other staff or for all the ministry needs of leaders relentlessly pursuing kids.
In our area, Reliant effortlessly solved this financial problem.
When I approached the area director about working with him to both launch a new outreach ministry for college students (Young Life College) and to care for leaders who were reaching out to high school and middle school students, he said, “I can’t pay you,” and I said, “ No problem; I can help you out as a fully-funded missionary of Reliant Mission."
Many times since then he has gratefully boasted to committees, donors, adults in the community and parents of leaders that my wife and I came fully invested and free of charge to “be with” college student leaders as they went to “be with” younger kids. Reliant paved a way for my wife and I, our kids, our home and our lives to be available as a sanctuary to turbulent college students to whom we reached out and to ones we shepherded in their own incredible ministries — all “for free” for the Young Life area, not making one dollar of impact on their budget.
Being with those who are being with others. Freeing kids for free. This is the power of Reliant working in Jesus-centered ministry partnerships.
(I want to thank all the fantastic donors giving to Reliant for the account for which I’m responsible — you are the generous ones whom God used to make this “being with” ministry possible!)
