Women in the Trenches – RISE Kids’ Church

The Beginnings – Emily Yutzy:

“I really like people,” Emily says. “It’s interesting to me how you can learn something new from everyone you meet.” Emily works as a receptionist at a health and wellness center in Hutchinson, Kansas, where she has many opportunities to meet people. She also enjoys running outdoors, Pinterest, trying new recipes, and sampling new and ethnic foods. “I love my family,” she says. “I have eight nieces and nephews.”

How she got involved: “I guess I was one of the people that helped start RISE. There was a group of us friends, all teenagers, and one of my friends brought up the idea of starting a kids’ church.

“Somehow I used to have this weird idea that the only people who needed Jesus were overseas in poor countries. But through some friends I had made in town, I started to realize there were people right in my very own town who needed to be shown the love of Jesus.”

Emily and her five friends talked and prayed and held meetings, and one Tuesday evening they held their first kids’ church in a rental building in Hutchinson that one of their dads owned.

“We didn’t know how it was gonna go. We had a couple kids that said they wanted to come, and that’s how we started. We were in a super tiny little building, basically two rooms. We had worship in one room, and then we played kickball and had snack in there. It will be four years this fall since we started, and I’m pretty sure none of us imagined it would ever get this big.”

Nowadays, RISE is held Tuesday evenings in the spacious Word of Life church, with 45 staff and an average attendance of 110 kids.

Staff meet at six o’clock for prep time, then begin their planned pick-up routes at six thirty. Worship time starts at seven and is led by two worship teams, one for the teens and one for the other children.  After worship, the children split into age groups, or tracks, for a Bible message and Bible memory, then come together again for games and snack. Teen activities are kept completely separate.

When kids’ church ends, staff drop off children and meet back at headquarters for hash time, where they spend time in prayer and discussing the evening. Hash time ends at ten, the close of an action-packed and energy-expending four hours.

A favorite story: “One of the things I really like about RISE, other than working with the children, is interacting with their parents. I’ve become pretty good friends with some parents on my pick-up route. There was one family where I hardly ever saw the parents. I know they were drinking a lot. The mom might come to the door occasionally, and once I could tell she was crying. It seemed really dark.

“One day the kids came to church all excited saying, ‘Hey, our parents got saved the other day.’

“I have to admit I was skeptical, but I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s cool. I wanna talk to them.’

“So I went in and talked to the parents, and they were different. They had definitely had a conversion experience. I don’t know all the details, but I know the dad had a dream he feels was straight from God.

“There was a huge difference in the home after that. I would pick up the kids, and the parents would be having Bible study. They would ask, ‘How are our kids doing, and what can we do to help?’ They became the friendliest parents on my route.

“That experience was a major faith strengthener. God has to exist because there is no way they could have changed that drastically otherwise.”

How she sees God at work: “One way I see God working in RISE is in the small things you don’t think about. The things you look back on and see, Yeah, this is how God was preparing us, and this is how he provided. He was faithful then, so we know we can trust in the future.

“When we first started, we were so dependent on God. We spent a lot of time crying out to Him, praying for direction. We told Him, ‘If this is gonna work, You’re gonna have to show up.'”

Mentoring to Maturity – Angela Yoder

Angela is a massage therapist and owner of Oasis Massage for Women. “I’ve been doing massage for four years,” she says, “and I recently took on another massage therapist. I honestly feel like I have the world’s best job.”

How she got involved: “I started with RISE in August 2012, and it had been running for probably a year before that. It was started by a core group of teenagers, and God just exploded the growth. They couldn’t do it by themselves.

“I’ve always felt convicted about trying to follow the great commission and go and tell. And kids are more accepting and a lot less scary than a college professor. I was thrilled to be able to come in and join.”

A special journey: The stated vision of RISE is to lead kids to spiritual maturity. “We would love to see our kids turn into spiritual leaders in our community,” Angela says. “We’ve heard from others involved in kids’ ministries that the kids who grow up and actually stick around as Christians are those who have had someone take a personal interest in them. Discipleship happens one on one or in small groups, and that’s hard to accomplish in kids’ church.”

To try to fill that need, RISE has more recently begun a mentoring program. “For a person who is willing to mentor, we pick out a child who has a need for more attention, or a child who shows extra spiritual hunger. Some children just open their hearts up to God, and there is so much potential there. We ask a mentor to commit to meeting with the child twice a month, at least two hours per time.”

“When I first got to know Yazmin, the girl I mentor, she was eight, one of the most challenging kids at kids’ church. Her mom left her dad when she was three. He was an angry person, hot-tempered, and had addiction problems. He was here illegally and was deported back to Mexico, so Yazmin hadn’t seen him since she was four or five. She really hated him. I think she felt significant rejection from him.

“She was a controlling child, and also very articulate. She would monopolize staff’s time talking about her daddy pain, and we would tell her, ‘The answer to this is forgiveness,’ but she resisted. Then I believe a neighbor or cousin had their dad get murdered in prison, and they told her, ‘You know, your dad could die, too, and you’re cheating yourself.’

“It was after that she came to me and said, ‘I decided to forgive my dad.’ After that she was more open to spiritual things. When she got a letter from him, she read it and put his picture up on her wall. It’s been an amazing journey watching her change.

“Looking back, it’s hard to believe an eight year old was that bitter and angry, but she was.

“Another little story with a lot of significance happened this past summer when she found out I had been sponsoring a Compassion child for over a year. She was upset and acted as though it was a big deal that I had not told her, like I had been hiding information from her.

“I kept asking questions to try to understand why this bothered her so much, and finally she said, ‘I’m afraid you’re gonna like her better than you like me.’

“I looked at her and said, ‘Yazmin, do you remember the time you rubbed mud all over my car?’ And I named some other hard stuff we had gone through. ‘What did I do?’

“She said, ‘You waited and were patient and prayed for me.’

“‘I didn’t leave you, did I? I’m committed to you. You’re not gonna do something so bad that I would give up on you.’

“And just thinking about all the hard times we’ve been through helped her to realize that yeah, whatever happens, I’m committed to her. Our relationship went to another level after that.”

An answer to prayer: “I’m on the committee in charge of the 8-12 year olds,” Angela told me, “and with the  12 and under age group we came to have so much chaos, it was difficult for the speakers to be heard. The children just would not be quiet or stay in their chairs.

“One of the committee members suggested we really crack down. He said the staff was not being consistent in handing out strikes–our method of discipline–and that we would need to stand together and get hard on kids, with extra drivers to take the kids with three strikes home early.

“I didn’t feel good about cracking down. I didn’t want the kids to feel like they weren’t good enough for the Christians, and some others felt the same way. We decided to pray and think about it, and after our month-long summer break, we would make a decision.

“I shared that need with my Sunday school class, and they all prayed. One of the ladies, Betty, is a real prayer warrior, and the next time we had kids’ church, Betty was praying. It was the difference of night and day. The kids were quiet and respectful. It was the most peaceful kids’ church we’ve ever had. God clearly showed us what decision to make.

“It really made me realize that this work is God’s, not ours. We thought we needed to crack down with strikes, and what we really needed to do was cry out to the Lord for help.”

This article was written for Daughters of Promise magazine, the March/April issue. This is the first of a two-part series on RISE, to be completed in the next issue.