Podcast
Summary
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.
Show Notes
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.
In this episode
- 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
