The Child Discipleship Podcast

SHOW NOTES

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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.

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.

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In this episode, Matt Markins and Mike Handler take on a frustration nearly every children’s ministry leader knows: parents aren’t using the resources the church hands them. Their diagnosis is that this isn’t a resource problem or even an implementation problem. It’s a culture problem. Most American homes, including church-attending homes, are shaped by cultures of achievement, sports, screens, or convenience, and discipleship gets rejected like a cartridge that doesn’t fit the system. Handing parents another plan won’t fix that. As Mike’s childhood story of receiving train set accessories without the train set illustrates, resources without vision are just spare parts nobody knows what to do with.

The conversation then walks through the first two of four spheres from the Forming Faith pathway that help parents cultivate a culture of discipleship at home. Vision asks parents to picture their child at 40 and name the values and convictions they hope that adult holds, because a family without a clear vision will absorb one from the surrounding culture. Time and place is about deliberateness: owning the calendar before it owns you, establishing intentional rhythms like shared meals, and using organic ones like car rides, seasons, and even a child’s disappointment after a failed audition as moments to talk about God. The episode also touches on language (dialogue over monologue, drawn from Deuteronomy 6) and community (every child needs a team of five caring adults), and lands on the line Matt calls his most important of the season: the shortest pathway to Jesus for a child is always through the parent.

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In this episode, Mike Handler sits down with Sam Luce to challenge a default assumption in children’s ministry: that a kids or youth pastor’s primary job is to disciple the kids in the room. Sam argues the more faithful and sustainable calling is to disciple the people who disciple kids, namely volunteer leaders and parents. Drawing on his years at Redeemer Church, where his kids ministry tripled in size with no added staff budget, he explains how he treated volunteers as staff, wrote job descriptions that gave them a clear picture of what winning looked like, and used the short windows before and after service to train and encourage leaders instead of scheduling separate meetings nobody would attend.

The conversation then turns to parents, where Sam pushes past the familiar “parents are primary” line to unpack the second half of Deuteronomy 6, the stones of remembrance set up outside the home as a communal witness to God’s rescue. He argues discipleship was never meant to be a solo home responsibility handed off with a curriculum; it’s a partnership, and ministry leaders are called to actively disciple parents through small groups, prayer gatherings, or a simple text photo of their child worshiping. Sam and Mike close by urging listeners not to be paralyzed by the size of the task: one job description, one conversation, one parent connection at a time.

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In this episode of the Child Discipleship Podcast, Matt Markins and Mike Handler tackle one of the most persistent tensions in children’s ministry: who is primarily responsible for discipling kids? Using two imagined gatherings, a late-night circle of kids pastors on the East Coast and a multi-generational family dinner in La Jolla, they surface a striking gap from Awana’s 2022 research with the Barna Group. Roughly 95% of kids pastors say the home is responsible, while parents and congregants split nearly 50/50. Matt and Mike call this the “church-home stalemate”: two agents of formation who genuinely value each other but remain stuck, with leaders declaring responsibility to parents who often feel unequipped and unsure how to actually do the work.

The hosts argue that the way out is a shift from declaration to dialogue. Walking through Deuteronomy 6, they frame discipleship as ordinary, relational conversation woven into daily life rather than seminary-level instruction. The practical pivot, they contend, is how kids pastors spend their time: recalendaring away from weekend prep and administration toward relational investment in parents. Matt illustrates this with a candid personal story about “declaring” a cross-country move to his wife instead of walking with her through it, drawing a parallel to how leaders often tell parents they’re responsible without ever showing them how. They close with a scalable “wave pool” model of parent equipping, from simply learning parents’ names at pickup to a full four-week discipleship course, plus mid-range ideas like parent meetups, think-tank teams, iterative testing groups, and mentor families.

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This episode of the Child Discipleship Podcast centers on a confession before it becomes a lesson: Matt Markins openly admits he spent years treating prayer as a management failure — something you turned to when leadership wasn’t enough. That honesty drives the whole conversation. Both hosts work through how children’s ministry workers (and ministry leaders at every level) default to strategy, logistics, and human effort, then bolt prayer on as an afterthought. The corrective they’re arguing for isn’t a new technique — it’s a posture shift: prayer as the first, central, and last thing, not a transitional element between the “real” work.

The second half gets practical without getting shallow. They discuss what it looks like to model prayer for kids rather than just perform it, the difference between contending prayer and rote request-taking, the “God spotting” practice for helping children notice divine activity in their lives, and a striking story from Appleton Alliance Church where praying over popsicle sticks with children’s first names on them preceded unchurched kids actually showing up. They also discuss the book Lead with Prayer and close with the honest admission that no leader — no matter how gifted — is going to strategize their way to lasting faith in today’s children.

Episode Title: Prayer First, Central, and Last — Making Prayer the Foundation of Your Children’s Ministry

Hosts: Matt Markins & Mike Handler

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Despite decades of effort since George Barna popularized the “parents as primary spiritual influence” framework in 2003, children’s ministry leaders still report that parents aren’t consistently discipling their kids at home. Awana’s 2022 research reveals why: it’s not a motivation problem on either side — it’s a structural one. Kids pastors spend the overwhelming majority of their time on administrative and logistical tasks, while parents consistently say no one has ever relationallyshown them how to disciple their children. The result is a stalemate: both parties want the same outcome but the ministry operating system isn’t built to produce it.

The practical solution isn’t an overhaul — it’s a calendar shift. Matt Markins argues that children’s ministry leaders should block two to four hours per week for relational parent engagement, but do it six to twelve months in advance, before the calendar fills with urgent tasks. Start with two or three families already doing it well, build from there iteratively, and eventually integrate parent-equipping as a standing program — like a new members class, but for discipling your own kids. The goal isn’t perfection or scale from day one; it’s moving from zero relational investment to something consistent and repeatable.

Transforming Children into Spiritual Champions — George Barna (2003)

Quotable: “Parents aren’t saying they don’t want to do this. They’re saying no one has ever shown them how.”

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On this special Father’s Day episode, co-hosts Matt Markins and Mike Handler explore the complicated emotions the holiday can stir up and the redemptive opportunity it presents for dads. Matt shares the origin story of his new children’s book, Daddy, How Much Do You Love Me? (New Growth Press) — a journey that began with processing his own painful relationship with his father in his mid-thirties, and a Josh McDowell story from a Focus on the Family broadcast in which Josh told his young son Sean, at a packed college football stadium, that he loved him more than all those people put together. That moment of fatherly expression stayed with Matt for over a decade before sparking the idea for a book that helps dads connect relationally with their kids.

The conversation digs into the book’s intentionally singular purpose: not a parenting seminar, but a beautifully illustrated story that follows a father and son through ordinary and epic moments alike — playing ball, visiting dad’s workplace, camping under the stars — all answering the question every child is silently asking: “Am I lovable?” Matt closes by drawing on the parable of the prodigal son, identifying three marks of the father in Jesus’ story that earthly dads can embody: being present (accessible, phones down, there in the mundane), patient (letting kids fall and welcoming them back without anger), and pursuing (going out to our children, whether they’re the rebellious son or the self-righteous one). Ultimately, the book points both child and parent toward the love of the heavenly Father.

In This Episode:

Resources Mentioned:

Daddy, How Much Do You Love Me? by Matt Markins (New Growth Press) — available wherever books are sold 

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In this episode of the Child Discipleship Podcast, host Mike Handler sits down with Sam Luce, director of ChildDiscipleship.com, to discuss a provocative question at the heart of children’s ministry: have we traded authentic discipleship for polished production? Sam unpacks a chapter he contributed to Forming Faith, arguing that many churches have fallen into what he calls the “Disney ditch” — prioritizing engaging environments, theming, and performance to the point that kids have a great experience but never actually encounter Jesus. He’s quick to clarify he’s not calling for a joyless, overly serious ministry, but rather for leaders to examine the motivation beneath the methods, asking whether excellence is serving discipleship or quietly replacing it.

“Excellence is a by-product of relational accountability over time.”

The conversation moves into deeply practical territory, exploring how an obsession with polished production can actually rob kids of formative opportunities. Sam and Mike discuss how welcoming children into imperfect, real acts of service — running a soundboard, setting up chairs, even preaching a rough first message — is itself a discipleship pathway. Drawing on the example of Peter and the parable of the talents, both speakers make the case that failure, when held within a relational and gospel-centered environment, is not a liability but a feature. The goal, Sam insists, is not a factory producing excellent widgets, but a family forming disciples — which is slower, messier, and ultimately far more faithful.

Guest: Sam Luce, Director of ChildDiscipleship.com and veteran children’s ministry leader with nearly 30 years at one church

Forming Faith (chapter by Sam Luce)

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In this episode of the Child Discipleship Podcast, Matt Markins and Mike Handler explore the tension between relevance and relationship in children’s ministry. They argue that while relevance — being culturally connected and contextually appropriate — has its place, the church has often over-invested in making ministry “cool” or Disney-like, chasing a shifting target that yields little evidence of producing lasting faith. Drawing on Brett McCracken’s Hipster Christianityand insights from Mark Sayers, they make the case that cool Christianity is ultimately an exercise in futility — sowing the seeds of its own obsolescence when it becomes the primary driver of ministry methodology.

The real accelerant for child discipleship, they contend, is relationship. Citing Barna Group research from Children’s Ministry in a New Reality, they highlight that only about 40% of children in U.S. churches have a meaningful relationship with a caring adult outside their parents — yet those who do show dramatically higher rates of Bible engagement, gospel understanding, and church belonging. Supported further by Harvard research on resilience in children who experienced trauma, Matt and Mike conclude that loving, consistent adult relationships are the core conduit to thriving faith — and that the church’s future map of child discipleship must weight relationship far above relevance.

Forming Faith: Discipling the Next Generation in a Post-Christian Culture — Matt Markins & Mike Handler

Relevance is a tool in the ministry toolbelt — not the foundation. There is no substitute for authentic relationship. When a child is seen, known, and connected to a loving adult, they are connected to the Jesus who sees, knows, and loves them too.

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