You're listening to the Family Discipleship podcast, a podcast of training the church.

It's much more powerful when the church and parents kind of combine and work together,

we still a lot more fruit than we do if it's, frankly,

just the church doing it.

I think you get the chance to teach them

that you can love and care as Jesus did

with prostitutes and tax collectors and everybody else

and still hold to your biblical value.

Parents would say, well, my kids understand what my expectations are, and then I would ask the

kids, and they would go, I have no idea what my parents' expectations are.

So I think we have to express expectations and be really clear with our kids, because mostly,

not all, but mostly our kids want to please us.

Hey, this is Adam Griffin. I'm here with my co-host, Mrs. Cassie Bryant. How you doing today, Cassie?

I'm doing great. So glad to be here. Oh, great. You're like hero.

Well, yeah, we'll get into that here in a second, but also my hero, Chelsea Griffin, is here today. Chelsea, how you doing? I'm also one of your heroes. It's true. Super glad to be here. excited to talk with Jim. Yeah, me too. Hey, guys, guess who's in the studio with us today? It's author, father, parent, extraordinary, Mr. Jim Burns of Homeward.com. Hey, Jim,

welcome. So glad you're here. How you doing? I'm doing great and I'm so glad to be with you. I thought it was just going to be you and me, Adam. I didn't know we had your other heroes here. Oh, yeah. We like to surround you. This is kind of like the surprise, surprise party in the podcasting world. There's a ton of us.

Speaking of surprises, Jim, they already alluded to this. You will not know this because you will not remember any time we've ever met, but we've met a handful of times because I used to go to the youth worker convention every year. And your book, which when it originally came out called Youth Builder, which now I think is called Uncommon Youth Ministry. The Lord used that book when I

was in college to give me a vision for, a dream for what it could look like to be in youth ministry. And really, I was studying education at the time, read that book in one of my classes at the Christian school I was going to, and it changed the trajectory of my life going, I love what this man's describing I want to be be for teenagers. And really had a powerful impact on my life. So really, I wanted to bring you on here just to say that and say, I love you, I appreciate you. I'm grateful for Jim Burns. Wow. You know, I kind of have like chills. We call them in Guatemala chicken fingers. I don't know why they call them that. Anyway, thank you. I mean, that really, that honestly means a great deal. Youth ministry is wonderful. And even today, I got a text this early this morning from two people who had been in my youth group. They're now in ministry. They were in the Holy Land together. And it was to me and Doug Fields because it would have been, he was in middle school when I was his youth pastor. Yeah. And they, they wrote us and said,

we're in the Holy Land and, you know, thank you so much. You know, and we're friends. We're the same. I'm just a little older than them. I think I was a youth pastor to them like when I was 20. So, you know, they were 18. What can I say? I had that experience this last week where I saw some of my old kids for my student ministry and their kids are older than my kids. I'm like, this doesn't even

make sense. I know. I have that too.

That's weird. I wrote a book called Doing Life with your adult children and these people from my youth group are going, hey, thank you. You know, my adult child is, you know, 30. And I'm like, wow. that's the beauty of being in ministry for a long time I feel like you finally start to see the fruit

you know especially next-gen ministry it's Wow. That's the beauty of being in ministry for a long time, I feel. No, it is.

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