A headline crossed my desk this week out of a college paper: students impacting the lives of young people through local ministry. No scandal, no spectacle, no numbers to brag about. Just students giving hours they don't really have to kids a few years behind them.
I've watched it happen enough times to know the shape of it. A gym with the heat turned up too high. Folding chairs. A nineteen-year-old who got out of a chemistry lab at four and is now sitting cross-legged on the floor learning the name of a seventh grader who doesn't want to be there. Nobody is filming it. It will not appear on a résumé in any way that impresses anyone. And something eternal is happening in that room.
The letter Paul wrote to a young leader
There is a line in Scripture that young believers have clung to for two thousand years, and it was written because somebody needed it: "Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity" (1 Timothy 4:12).
Read what Paul does there. He doesn't tell Timothy to wait his turn. He doesn't tell him to go get seasoned and come back in twenty years. He tells him to lead — and to lead not by volume or cleverness but by the quality of his life. Speech. Conduct. Love. Faith. Purity. Five things a person of any age can start on today, and five things no amount of age guarantees.
Then he keeps going: "Do not neglect your gift, which was given you through prophecy when the body of elders laid their hands on you. Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress" (1 Timothy 4:14-15).
That is not career advice. That is a man telling a young leader that the Holy Spirit has actually put something in him, that it is real, and that it can be neglected. Gifts don't maintain themselves. A gift you stop using doesn't stay warm. It cools.
What the students are actually doing
Here's what I notice about the sort of ministry that headline points to. It's weekly. It's unglamorous. It involves driving. It involves remembering a kid's name and his sister's name and the fact that he had a math test. It's the kind of faithfulness that produces no visible result for about four years and then produces a human being who knows that Jesus is real because somebody showed up on a Wednesday.
And I want to say plainly: God moves in those rooms. Not only in the big meetings. I have seen the Spirit get hold of a middle schooler on a beat-up couch in a church basement while a college sophomore who barely knew what to say prayed anyway. The Holy Spirit is not waiting for us to get credentialed. He is looking for people who will be there.
And a word for the rest of us
Paul says don't let anyone look down on you. Which means somebody was. Usually not with words — with the subtler stuff. The door that doesn't quite open. The ministry handed over with so many conditions attached it can't breathe.
So the question for those of us further along isn't whether we approve of the young people serving. It's whether we're the ones handing them keys or the ones holding them. Paul laid hands on Timothy and sent him into a hard assignment. Then he wrote him letters. That's the pattern: release them, and then stay close enough to encourage them.
If you're reading this and you've been quietly wondering whether what you do with kids, or teenagers, or the neighbor's boy who hangs around your garage, actually counts — it counts. "Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers" (1 Timothy 4:16). Persevere. That's the whole instruction. Keep showing up.
We gather for prayer this Tuesday, October 13 at 11am. Bring names with you — the young leaders you know, the students giving away their evenings, the kids they're reaching. Those names deserve to be spoken out loud in a room where people are asking God to move.
Jesus took children into His arms when His own disciples thought they were an interruption. He has never once been embarrassed by the small, the young, or the overlooked. He is still gathering them. And He is still sending ordinary people — some of them nineteen years old — to go find them.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.