Growing Young Quotes

“The first job of a leader is to define reality.”
― Kara Powell, Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church

“John Ortberg, also a research advisor and senior pastor, added, “You can’t build a great church with a bad student ministry, and you can’t build a great student ministry with a languishing church.”
― Kara Powell, Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church

“congregation. For example, rather than ask for a volunteer to fill a role, they ask for participation in the community. Volunteers feel like they are giving time and energy in order to fulfill a civic duty. In contrast, participants contribute work essential to the life of the church, work that binds them to other members of the body. “Many of our high school kids help with children’s ministry, not because they have to but because they love it. One beautiful thing that we do is set out a prayer chair in our kids’ ministry. You can sit in the prayer chair and tell God whatever you want. When we do the prayer chair, the high school kids all want to sit in it too. It warms my heart that they are modeling prayer for our younger kids.” —Susan, ministry volunteer”
― Kara Powell, Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church

“Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.” I have”
― Kara Powell, Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church

“But this appreciation for diversity—meaning an appreciation of others who are different—can also devolve into pluralism, meaning an acceptance of different religious and value systems as equally valid.36 It takes intellectual, social, and worldview maturity to be committed to one belief system while simultaneously recognizing the value of other belief systems. Not all young people (or adults) have this maturity. Thus”
― Kara Powell, Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church

“As today’s young people seek a more coherent sense of identity, the stress that formerly hit them in college, or even after college, now begins in middle school (or younger). By high school, many middle- and upper-class teenagers juggle digital calendars jammed with extracurricular activities that begin as early as 6:00 a.m., after-school study sessions, college entrance exam tutoring, and sports team practices that leave them trailing home after 10:00 p.m.11 Followed by two to three hours of homework.12 Athletes used to specialize in a single sport in high school; now that starts in elementary school. Previously, musicians and artists could freely dabble in various media and instruments throughout high school; present-day teenagers have to claim their craft in middle school. No longer can a kid flirt with a handful of hobbies, discovering various facets of their personality and passions, before choosing what they love. There’s so little time for thoughtful and measured exploration in high school that young adults end up exploring their skills and passions well into their twenties. A recent study showed that 13- to 17-year-olds are more likely to feel “extreme stress” than adults.13 Even more alarming is that the adults closest to young people are often blind to their heightened stress levels. Approximately 20 percent of teenagers confess that they worry “a great deal” about current and future life events. But only 8 percent of the parents of these same teenagers report that their child is experiencing a great deal of stress.14 Parents often don’t realize the constant heat felt by adolescents, increasing the pressure for them to figure out who they are and what’s important to them. After adolescence, emerging adults race from the proverbial stress-filled pot into the stress-fueled fire.15 Fewer college students are reporting “above-average” health since this question was first asked in 1985.16”
― Kara Powell, Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church

“The first job of a leader is to define reality.”1”
― Kara Powell, Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church