Video Transcript: Introduction
Ted - Hello, I'm Ted Travis, and I'm a part of the Center for transformational discipleship. Our mission is to equip leaders to transform at risk youth into the emerging leaders that God created them to be. Our youth are in trouble. Youth ages 12 to 24 suffer more violent crime than any other age group in the United States. Homicide is the leading cause of death among African American youth ages 15 to 24 and in a recent study of inner city seven year old kids, 75% have heard gunshots. 60% have seen drug deals. 18% have seen a dead body outside, and 10% have seen a shooting or stabbing at home. But not only this, this is a global concern as the largest ever generation of young people enters adulthood. Armed Conflict is having a profound effect on their future. People under the age of 24 comprise nearly half the world's population, and are the primary participants in conflict today. I’ll tell you a little bit about my story. I've been working with youth for 30 plus years started off with a small group of young people and led to working working with youth from elementary, middle school and high school. But one thing happened early on in our ministry, I met a man who became a dear friend and mentor, Dr John Perkins, and he asked a question that became a defining quest for my life. He asked the question, how do we build incentive in our youth? And incentive, he used the word incentive. How do we cause something to happen within our young people so that they are motivated to do that which is good and right? This idea of internal motivation became a defining quest for me, and over the years, as I worked with young people, I began to find clues as to what might be the answer. One of them was Montessori. There was a school in my neighborhood that became a magnet school, and it became a Montessori school, and so my children were in that school, and I would walk the hallways, and I would observe these, these children in a classroom and how they were most nobody was telling them what to do. They were going from station to station, and they seemed just motivated and excited about going to these different these different stations on their own. I remember looking at that and thinking, I wonder if there's a clue here. Another one was Jimmy met a young man who lived in the neighborhood, and he started attending our Youth Club program. Now, Jimmy was an interesting person because his family and another family helped bring gangs to Denver back then, he had his own gang. He was called J dog and but he lives in the same neighborhood as the kids that we were working with, so he would, at times, come to our club meeting. Well, then later on, he came to a summer camp. Well, at that camp, he gave his life to Christ, and then he drifted off for a while, and then came back and said, Ted, I want to do what you're doing. And I thought to myself, Well, if he really wants to do what I'm doing, I better bring him in. So I brought him on staff. I had another colleague on staff. We would talk about Jimmy, and he would say he was part time. He was also a carpenter. And he would say, you know, Ted, he's a. He's a carpenter. Let him be a carpenter. And I said, Well, I don't mind that, but he seems to be interested in ministry. And if that
is the case, if this is something that is happening because of God's movement within him, then I need to go with that. And so that's why I worked with him that way and taught him everything that I knew. But that's when I began to think about the the difference between the code of the street and the divine imprint. The code of the street is a it's the code of the street, are the unwritten rules for survival in a community that's marked by dysfunction and particularly violence. And Jimmy was a product of the code of the street, and yet something was happening in him. The Divine imprint is reflects the fact that we're created in the image of God, and we're each uniquely created in the image of God. And so I began to struggle between these two things. I thought, wait a minute, if God is at work in this young man's life, then it's my responsibility to respond to this. Again, it was a clue. A third person was Raquel. Raquel was another young person in our neighborhood that got involved in our in our ministry. She had dropped out of school, and at 16, got involved in our organization, and slowly she grew. She began to grow, and she ultimately helped us create the Emerging Leaders Initiative, and that was taking some high school youth and bringing them into a a particular role, where they would be involved in learning while leading, they helped run the elementary program, and then they would design the summer, the summer Day Camp, and again, with Raquel, it was just another clue of watching how bringing her into this environment seemed to make a dramatic change in her life. And so these were clues that were leading me to something, two truths and a response. The first is that God has created mankind in his image. And the second is that God has so designed human development that there is one issue that dominates the adolescent stage of life, and that is the search for identity. Youth are seeking answers to the question, Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose? And so if points one and two are true, then what is the purpose of youth ministry? What is the church's primary response to young people during this formative time of their lives? And the answer came that we should create an environment in which youth can discover who they are in Christ. And so I had to come up with a name for this, as I wrestled with this and realized that that, what do you call this? And I remember thinking, Ah, I came up with an idea transformational discipleship. That's a great name, and I was excited about I thought it was original, until I googled the phrase. And once I did that, I discovered the phrase have been around for at least 10 years. There's all kinds of things called transformational discipleship. But I decided to keep the name. I thought the name really captures the essence of what I believe youth ministry really should be about, and so I defined it transformational discipleship. It's an approach to urban youth ministry that is centered on maximizing the adolescent leadership experience in ways that mold youth for future service and motivate the future leaders or the children that they influence and so later on we're going to unpack that definition and what that what is it was in that that definition, but the end result is a youth ministry that creates what I call a
discipleship rich environment, and when we watch how young people responded to leadership and influencing younger people in their community, we came up with a phrase, potential and hope ignite when children see modeled by youth from their neighborhood, possibilities for their own lives. In 2010 I received my doctorate, Doctorate of ministry, and the My sister did that for me, I still have that on my, on my on my shelf, but my doctorate was focused on urban youth leadership development, animating leadership capacity among youth native to higher risk communities. And the end result of that was this book, building cathedrals, urban youth discipleship that works. There are distinctives within the Center for transformational discipleship and transformational discipleship that are significant. Most youth leaders are trained to lead, and we don't really think about what that is. Well, whatever we do in terms of leadership, it tends to happen because of what's what's been modeled for us. So most youth leaders are trained to lead, but they're not necessarily trained to develop leaders. So we train leaders to animate leadership capacity. By animate, I mean bring leadership to life. Bring what God has created in terms of what young people are capable of doing bring that to life. Another is that youth leaders lean heavily on a transactional approach, give and take. I tell you to do something, and then you do it. If you do it, you do it right, you do it with a smile. Then that's okay. Well, we equip youth leaders with transformational tools. There are ways in which we can lead others that can lead to them being internally motivated to be excited about leadership and growth and development. Youth leaders focus on telling kids about Jesus, and that is important. We must tell them about Jesus, but we focus leaders on bringing Jesus to the point of youth felt need. If you study the life and ministry of our Lord, you see that he he he was adept. He knew what the needs of people were, and he brought his message to a to directly to the needs he was speaking to. Just compare his conversation with the woman at the well to his engagement with Nicodemus on John 3-4, we focus leaders on bringing Jesus to the point of felt need, and we'll unpack that as well, and that most youth leaders concentrate on running a youth program. And yeah, if you're a youth minister, you're going to run some kind of program. But we take it a step further. We help leaders create an environment in which youth can discover who they are in Christ. And so this young man, Johnell is someone I had the privilege him him and Hannah had the privilege of working with over the course of a year, and he took the the transformational discipleship model and and infused that into his work with young people. And the result was absolutely amazing. There's a video I'd like you to see. Where you will get a quick snapshot of what a transformational discipleship youth ministry can produce.
Johnell - transformation in the heart of the city where youth grow in faith and confidence to serve, starting with the children in our neighborhood, reaching as far as God's purpose for their lives taken. Switch up exists to mold youth in
northeast Denver and the transformational leaders of their generation, our vision is seeing a community of young, transformational leaders who are impacting their friends, family and community.
Hannah - Johnell and I have been working with Ted Travis to create from Ted's transformational discipleship model.
Johnell - transformational discipleship developed by Ted Travis cultivated four emerging leaders that were impacting about 25 kids in the neighborhood. We have actually taken the model and expanded it in partnership with the Denver Red Shield, where we have seven emerging leaders who are impacting up to 60
kids per day in a five week summer day camp.
Jessica - So taking on a leadership role and leading possibly 20 kids at a time, pretty much on your own, it's a pretty intense experience.
Kiara - like when they first introduced it to us, they're like, Well, you got you're gonna run lead kids and, like, inspired.
Kennise - and so I just thought leadership was more about being dominant, speaking over everyone.
Johnell - So we have this word called adultism and transformational discipleship, and it's a danger that takes place inside the context of youth leadership. And it's a part where inside of the summer game camp in which our emerging leaders are leading, if things begin to go chaotic, then adults have the tendency to take over. However, as youth become more comfortable in their leadership, they begin to push back on the leadership and simply say, we got
Champ - and when we started realizing, like, wow, these are kids, you know, these are lives that are growing and we're working with and we have a chance to pour into them so much.
A. D. - Speaker That was like the challenge for me.
Alysha - If you see a bunch of kids smiling, having fun and like, they're looking up to like, be her one day, this actually made me feel really great.
Kenisha - Like, made me feel like, capable of doing more than
Jamesetta - I have stopped kids. I didn't know that like teenagers can compete like this.
Josh - They've definitely shown up.
Hannah - This has become a safe place for them to grow. They would say, you know, I'm different here than I am other places. I'm more outgoing here. I believe in myself more here. And so I'm glad that we could create that foundation.
Isaiah - Slow job has actually made a really big impact on my life.
Lee - There's always been a teacher, or my parents always tell me, like, you're a leader, and you just don't see it.
Isaiah - I switched my whole like leadership role and made me step out my comfort zone.
Josh - And I think there's a lot of different types of leadership, and everybody has their own strength.
Unknown Speakers - Whatever type of leader you are, like you're gonna you can make it from here, like you can inspire kids, it's really helping me out to be a better person. I stepped in this opportunity and was like, I'm going to be a leader, because everybody said I was big.
Johnell - Thank you to the Salvation Army, demon race shield, for allowing our emerging leaders to design and lead their summer day camp. Thank you to all of our supporters who have journeyed alongside of us for the last seven months as we began to develop transformational discipleship model, and we would like to invite more people to support
Ted - and so this is what happens when transformational discipleship becomes embedded within your ministry engagement. And so it's about equipping leaders to transform at risk youth, equipping you to transform youth at risk into the emerging leaders that God created them to be. And so we're going to go on a youth discipleship journey. And first, the first part is going to be talking about the transformational youth ministry. We're going to unpack that. What does that look like? What's involved in a transformational youth ministry. And the second part, we're going to focus on leadership. What does it mean to lead, to be a leader and to be a leader that actually transforms? What role do we play in God's transforming agenda? And then part three, we're going to look at building cathedrals. We're going to look at, how do you do that? How? Let me explain. There is a the title building cathedrals comes from a illustration that I once heard, and it's about a foreman who visits a work site, and he goes to he
approaches one of his workers and says, What are you doing? And he responds, well, I'm breaking rocks. So he goes along and he finds another worker. He says, Well, what are you doing? And he says, Well, I'm earning a living for my family. Then he goes to a third one says, What are you doing? And with a twinkle in his eye, he looks at him and says, I am building a cathedral. I've been around a long time, and I've met a lot of youth workers, and many times when I ask them the question, when you look at the Youth you serve, what do you see? Most of them talk primarily about rocks, how hard it is, how hard they are, how how difficult the circumstances are. That's how they describe it. And so then I share with them the story, and then I ask them again, when you look at the Youth you serve, what do you see? Do you see rocks? Do you see employment, or do you see cathedrals in the making? And then I follow it up with this question, which do you suppose God wants you to see? There are things that God has done in creation, in the valuing of people, that all of the hardships, all of the difficulties in the urban setting, they do not erase the fact that in the beginning, God created heaven and earth, and He created mankind in his image, and that becomes the place to begin to see that perhaps there are some things that we have not seen about how to work with young people. Maybe we have allowed the difficulties to so cloud our thinking or define our thinking, that we we haven't really seen what God has already done and has already paved the way for us to make a transformative difference in the lives of some of the most at risk youth in our in our world, and so we're going to explore that. That's what this course will be about, the youth discipleship journey, urban youth discipleship