Today I'm joined by Ryan Howard, an LC—MS DCE (Director of Christian Education), to talk about youth ministry.

Follow Ryan:

Please Consider Giving

Nifty Links:

👉 Join the Community

👉 Click Here to Check Out the Store

👉 Click Here to Donate

👉 Greatest Theology Newsletter on the Planet

Transcript

[00:00:04] Remy: Thank you so much for joining me on Lutheran Answers.

How you doing?

[00:00:11] Ryan: Doing okay. It's been kind of a crazy couple of weeks. We had a really big wedding at our church, and we were involved in that. It was our. Our senior pastor's daughter got married, so.

[00:00:24] Remy: Oh, wow.

[00:00:25] Ryan: Really big deal. And my kids were in it, and we were in it, and we were doing all kinds of stuff. And so that was last week, and then this week we've been trying to recover, and of course, you know, my kids got sick, of course, and all that. So crazy. And we also have family in Florida, so we've been worried about them, but they're all okay. Everyone's good.

[00:00:47] Remy: Good, good.

[00:00:49] Ryan: So how are you?

[00:00:50] Remy: I'm all right, man. Tired. Just, you know, working and school and everything else. Just getting through it. Thank you for asking.

[00:00:58] Ryan: Yeah, of course.

[00:01:00] Remy: So we were talking a little bit before we got started here, and you're a DCE, and you come from a long line of DCEs, or educators in general, I guess.

[00:01:10] Ryan: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:01:12] Remy: Recap that for me.

[00:01:13] Ryan: Yeah, so I. I've been a DCE for almost 10 years now.

I'm currently serving in the Houston, Texas area. Before that, I was in. I was on Long Island, New York.

That's a. That's a distinction. You can't say in Long Island. You have to say on Long Island.

[00:01:30] Remy: Okay.

[00:01:32] Ryan: What I learned that I'm not from there, but. Yeah. So I got my DCE certification at Concordia University in Chicago, and that was great. My father is a DCE now. He does primarily music ministry.

He's an organist and choir director, but he also did youth ministry before that. And his parents were both Lutheran educators. My grandmother taught kindergarten for, like, 40 some years.

My grandfather was a teacher and then a principal in Lutheran schools for a long time. And. Yeah, so it's kind of run in the family. This Lutheran education has always been a part of who I am and. And hopefully will continue for a long time.

[00:02:23] Remy: Yeah. Good. That's awesome. What's your favorite part about being a dce?

[00:02:29] Ryan: I love.

I love lots of. About being a dce. Probably one of my favorite parts is the awesome people that I get to work with, like other DCEs and other pastors, you know, being able to connect with other Lutheran teachers and. And learn from them and grow with them and talk to them. And, you know, you're the. The ministry team that I have, you know, and even my. You know, it's just me and. And my pastor at my church, which is great, but, you know, just in our District, we have other DCEs and other workers and professionals that I get to connect with regularly. And, you know, the Lutheran world being kind of small, I really enjoy that because I really love meeting people and seeing what they're doing and, and yeah, just we're all, we're all going about the same mission in lots of different ways and it's really cool to, to see what other people do and, and grow with them.

[00:03:29] Remy: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

For those not in the know, what is a dce?

[00:03:36] Ryan: Yeah, yeah. So stands for Director of Christian Education.

And it is a. In the lcms, it is a commissioned minister.

So I am not ordained. I do not have the collar. Therefore I cannot, you know, do the cool pastor stuff like communion or, you know, absolution or anything like that. But I can teach. It's a lot of teaching.

I. So at my current call, what I do is I, I run the youth ministry, so I run youth group and youth Bible studies. I do teach a lot of confirmation classes.

You know, I'll sub in for pastor if he can't do an adult Bible study one week and, you know, visit people and hang out with them and especially kids, youth, you know, help. I help run the Sunday school, make sure all the teachers know what's going on, all that stuff. So it's a lot of education, a lot of, you know, making sure that others, you know, equipping volunteers to teach as well, making sure everything's on the up and up, evaluating the curriculums that we use and all of that stuff. So, yeah, that's primarily what I do. And I also get to, you know, play games a lot because I work with kids and kids love to play games. So we get to play games and eat pizza and have fun and, you know, go to church and just, and enjoy life.

[00:05:12] Remy: What's, what's the most, like, nerve wracking part do you think of being a dce?

[00:05:20] Ryan: The nerve wracking part is when, you know, the normal nerve wracking stuff of life happens and, you know, you have a lot of fun with kids. But then also, you know, teenagers especially go through stuff and they go through stuff fairly intensely. And so, you know, you never know when, you know, a young man comes to youth group one week and you can tell, you know, something's going on and you pull them aside maybe and you find out the real stuff that's going on in life that he's not gonna, you know, share all the time. But, you know, if, if he trusts you enough to talk to you about it, you know, that's great. And I love being there for him. But also, man, some of these kids are going through some tough stuff.

[00:06:06] Remy: Yeah.

[00:06:07] Ryan: So that's, it's, it's fulfilling and also really hard.

[00:06:11] Remy: How do you build that trust?

[00:06:15] Ryan: I find you, you keep showing up a lot. A lot of teenagers are. They're very, you know, if they want to know that you're going to be there and they'll get, they get burned by people leaving. They get burned by, you know, teachers, you know, they move on. They, they're no longer with their favorite teachers or even, you know, they have family members leave or pass away or things like that. And, you know, other churches, you know, pastors take calls, people leave, you know, this, that and the other thing. So the more that you can say to them, well, I'm here, and then prove it by being there, they'll. They'll trust you a little bit more. So, you know, a lot of times that looks like, you know, going to their sports games and choir concerts and theatrical shows and stuff, and then just being there on a Sunday, like, yeah, I'm here. We've got, we've got Bible study every week. You know, I've got it and I'll be here and I'll keep being here. And eventually they start trusting you and they start showing up, too, because you're, you show it up and they, they keep showing up.

[00:07:30] Remy: I'm sorry, I'm taking notes.

[00:07:32] Ryan: Yeah, yeah, you're good.

[00:07:33] Remy: I, I realized very quickly into this conversation it was going to be a note taking conversation for me.

[00:07:42] Ryan: Probably good that it's being recorded then, so you can make sure you don't miss anything.

[00:07:47] Remy: Yeah, yeah. Show up for your people, man. That's huge.

So you mentioned the youth and doing the youth groups and whatnot. Do the kids, do you find that they want contemporary worship? Do they want liturgy? Do they care?

[00:08:05] Ryan: They do care.

I've got a great mix of both.

There's some kids that are. So we have two services at our church, one of each, you know, you could say, and I've got some kids that are, that they're at that 8:00 service and they love it, and that's the one they want to be at. And then, then there's others that are at the, you know, 10:30 service and they love that one. And, you know, in our church, at least, the difference is not. We, you know, we do liturgical things at both services.

[00:08:35] Remy: Right.

[00:08:35] Ryan: You know, so the first service is, you know, straight up out of, you know, whichever setting we're using that Month. And the second service is the same things just with, you know, know, guitars and diff, slightly different words, but it's the same.

[00:08:49] Remy: Gotcha. Gotcha.

[00:08:51] Ryan: Yeah. And they care and they, and they like having, you know, options. I think they, they enjoy, you know, and, and again, a lot of it is about their, their people. You know, if they've got their friends who go to one service or another, then they'll, they'll, they're like, no, I need to go to the early service because that's where the people that care about me go.

[00:09:12] Remy: So you mentioned their people, their friends or whatever. I guess that's. And it may be because you're at a Lutheran school, so I guess maybe it's a bit different than public school kids who maybe. I'm sure you have a few of those as well. But it seems to me then that it's very important to build sort of a culture with the kids in your youth group, in your confirmation class, so that the kids they're being peer pressured by are other Christian kids who are peer pressuring them to come to one worship service or another, as opposed to like doing drugs and driving fast cars or whatever.

...

Youth Education, with Ryan Howard