ResLife Church

This afternoon I led a training at a local mega-church here in Grand Rapids. Resurrection Life Church is one of the larger congregations in the area, and one of their interns contacted Wedgwood recently to see what we have to offer them in the way of instructing their youth ministry staff on how to work with teenagers. After some negotiations, we decided that I would visit them and provide a condensed version of my "Behavior Management" training that I normally provide as an orientation session for our new employees.

Even though I normally provide this material for professional caregivers in an institutional and residential setting, it translated fairly easily to the needs of the people I spoke with today. This church has over 1000 kids in its program - I don't know if that's all the church's children, or if that's just their adolescent population. Either way, that's a lot of kids. Bigger than many high schools in this country, to say the least. The group I spoke to consisted of sixteen interns - all volunteers, I take it, who come from the community and Bible colleges in this region to watch over the teens who no doubt come streaming through the door in waves at various times during the week.

The setting was a room called "The Zone," which was just beyond the large "oneighty" hall and a bit further away from the cavernous "Ground Floor." These last two regions of the building each featured full service espresso and snack bars, and the Ground Floor also featured a fully functioning pool hall as well as state-of-the-art lighting and multimedia rigs. The church is hosting a concert featuring the Christian rock band Superchick later this month. I figure that this would be a pretty fun church for a teenager to attend, relatively speaking. I'm sure that ResLife has its share of sullen malcontent adolescents who think that it sucks to be there and to be them, but that's the human condition, ain't it? Or at least, the American teen condition...

The Zone had a smallish stage with several instruments on it - an electric synthetic drum kit, conga drums, a huge stack of pillows for sitting and laying on (though we used tables and chairs for the training event) and a wall of TVs at the back, each one connected to individual GameCubes. The walls were decorated with mounted trampolines, each one illustrated with a different outdoor athletic scene, such as soccer players, hang-gliders, surfers, skateboarders, etc. The grooviness just did not stop!

I really enjoyed the chance to get to know these young people - most of them were probaby between, say 19 and 25 years old. All of them feel some kind of calling to work with teenagers, and they seemed pretty receptive to hear my stories from the clinical residential perspective. I think I gave them some good material to think about and keep in mind when working with their kids - ideas that will help them understand why kids misbehave and not get so frustrated when they fail to adhere to the script. We only had two hours, so it went by pretty quick, a mixture of lecture, role playing and ample Q & A to give everyone a chance to air their opinions and get some feedback on their youth ministry efforts.

But I still have to marvel a bit at the sheer hugeness of this church. I know there are bigger ones out there - even in this county. But other than some occasional attendance at a large Assembly of God church back in the early days of my life as a Christian, I've never been much of a mega-church kind of guy. After the class had concluded and I wrapped up a couple of short after-chats with some of the interns, I wandered around a bit just to soak up the atmosphere. It amuses me to see how effectively the church targets its various demographics - the teens get zapped with radical, intense, edgy graphics and straight-up entertainment, while the womens conference coming up later this month is all tulips and tranquility as far as atmospherics are concerned. As I strolled the corridors, I saw all kinds of people going about their business - other church staff, guys playing basketball in the large gym across the hall from where I led my class, women in aprons coming out of the Central Kitchen/Food Service, facility maintenance guys wheeling their toolcarts around attending to an unending list of fix-ups that a building of this size must need, and I never even got near what I imagine must be a bustling hub of clerical support services that are required to keep this enterprise organized and effective. It made me seriously wonder just what the essential ingredients are that made this congregation launch into the stratosphere, attendance-wise (and financially too, I suppose.) I remember ResLife when it was a lot smaller, just one of several "full gospel" (charismatic) churches that I was aware of back in the early 1980's. Something remarkable must have taken place here, and now it has its own center of gravity, one might say, that draws people like the interns I met today (and me, I guess I have to acknowledge) into its orbit.

The training went well enough that I think we'll be asked back to do some more. I hope so - I enjoyed the group, appreciated the reception they gave me, and I'm curious to learn more about their ministry. With a group as large as the one they host, they deal with pretty much the full range of issues and concerns besetting teens these days, and I think there is a reason that God has brought Wedgwood and ResLife together. I expect to have more opportunities to explore ResLife from the inside out...