PDAS: two months

I had a phone call with Em recently about what we each did in PDAS, our church's after-school ministry during the day. In the midst of it, I thought, wow, we're getting to do all the things we hoped we'd get to do when we started this new model! It's hard to share this stuff on a blog since so much of what happens is about people who deserve to have their privacy preserved, but we've been hanging out with Boston teenagers, most of whom are not connected to any of the regular youth groups. Sure, we're making youngsters do homework and in a way you might say it's glorified babysitting. But we're also getting a lot of awesome opportunities. We're having one-on-one huddles about life with kids who probably would have never thought of attending church. We're meeting with parents about their hopes and worries. We're seeing a handful of kids experiment with attending regular youth group. I'm driving kids home and having conversations about God almost every night this week. We're filling up two-three rooms at church every day with kids who otherwise might not have a connection to our church. We're seeing young servant leaders develop in their capacity to care for kids and take advantage of opportunities to share the gospel. We're offering free enrichment opportunities that other programs might have to charge a lot for. And it's just the beginning of what we hope God will do through PDAS.

I'm thankful and really glad to have a chance to be a part of all this. If anybody ever gets really helped through PDAS, I hope they'll actually think this: "Wow, if there's a God, he must really love me if his church went through all this trouble to do stuff for me." And they'd be starting to understand the gospel a little better.