Creating an Environment of Equipping

I gave my life to Jesus at a camp in Orange Beach, AL, the summer before my senior year of high school back in 2011. I didn’t come from a Christian household and went to this camp simply because some friends from school were going, and it was at the extra nice beaches in OBA. I didn’t go looking for God, but He was looking for – and saw – me. I went off to college, where I was at a junior college playing soccer and softball in a rural town without many options for church. I fell flat on my face when it came to following Jesus those two years. I had this new allegiance to Jesus, but I had no idea what to do with it. Not to mention that none of those sin struggles that I thought would just disappear once I trusted Jesus with my life ever did. Then, I transferred to a four-year university for my junior and senior years to continue my athletic and academic pursuits, and it was there that I got truly plugged back into a church for the first time in over two years. It was through this church that I met a girl who was just a few years older than me, and as we got to know each other over meetings that always included coffee, she asked me about my experience with reading the Bible. I had to tell her that I honestly had no clue what I was doing when it came to reading the Bible. I had been an FCA leader, even had an FCA bible that I occasionally read the devotionals in the back of, but I had no idea how to handle God’s Word for myself. I told her that I felt so lost and so insecure being a 20-year-old and still looking in the Table of Contents in my Bible at church, but I struggled to have the humility to ask for help. We began a journey of discipleship together, and the rest is history, which marked the beginning of learning to read and love God’s Word.

One of the things that I have observed over the last 7 years doing high school ministry with FCA is that Biblical literacy for high school students is all over the place (which I’m sure doesn’t surprise you). Most of the students I have sat across coffee shop tables from have shared that they just don’t know what to do or where to start and don’t know how to ask for help. They felt like they had a map they knew could help them navigate life, but they didn’t have a compass or a legend to help them understand what they were looking at. To be honest, they sounded a lot like I did as a 20-year-old.

One of the things I’ve found to be true in my own ministry as I have stopped and evaluated it over the last few years is that I have spent a lot of time teaching my students a lot of good and right things – who God is, who they are to Him, how He calls them to live, how to love their neighbor, how to be bold in their locker room, etc. One thing I can confess that I haven’t spent nearly as much time doing is equipping them with the tools they need to have a flourishing faith outside of FCA.

Ephesians 6 tells us that “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”  How are we to engage in this battle so that we can “withstand in the evil day” and “stand firm” (Ephesians 6:13)? Not with carnal weapons but spiritual ones. Almost every weapon listed in Ephesians 6 is defensive in nature: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of readiness given by the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation. There is one weapon, though, that encompasses our entire offense against this evil Paul speaks of. We can be confident that if God Himself, through Paul in Ephesians, has specified this singular weapon that we have to use, it is indeed sufficient to bring victory in our lives and the lives of all who trust in Him in this battle against the rulers, authorities, evil, and cosmic powers of darkness. This weapon is the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. If this is the one weapon our students have to fight against the powers of evil in their lives, then shouldn’t we desire every last one of them to know how to handle God’s Word for themselves and know how to fight sin in and around them with it? I believe that you and I would give a hearty yes to that question, and I believe that it’s also in God’s heart for our students to live in that reality. And if it’s in His heart, then it should certainly be on our calendar.

No matter how you choose to go about trying to help your students be equipped as it relates to God’s Word, this is a worthy effort for us all in youth ministry to pursue. May God bless the work of your hands and strengthen the grips of our students as they hold on the sword of the Spirit and fight the good fight to which God has called them to. 

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Share your thoughts with others in our YM360 community:

• Do you feel like you have a pulse on the current reality in your ministry as it relates to the nature of the relationship between your students and the Bible? If so, what is it? If not, what can you do to figure that out?
• What ministry environments do you have that are targeted toward this equipping effort? I would encourage you to evaluate them based on these three factors: frequency, effectiveness, and alignment with your ministry’s overall vision.

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