KIDS LIFE ... MONDAY NIGHTS

"It's all about the relationships"

A few months ago, Odulia Soto nearly died in a terrible car wreck. When Helen Leonard got the news of Odulia’s accident, she dropped everything and raced over to St. Joseph’s Hospital. It was the natural thing to do. Odulia was, after all, one of the girls in Helen’s small group at Neighborhood Ministries’ “Kids’ Life” program, better known simply as “Monday Nights.”

Except that that had been, oh, 16 years ago. Now Odulia is 21. She had long since graduated from the Monday Night kids’ program. But for Helen, Odulia is still one of “her girls.” The relationships forged on Monday Nights last—a long, long time.

“When we ask the kids what their favorite things about Monday Nights are,” says program coordinator Emily Fankhauser, “almost without exception the answer is ‘My leader.’”

After the first year of Kids’ Club in 1988, ministry team members wanted to be able to continue the relationships they’d begun at University Park. So they worked hard to keep track of those children, and invited them to come to Open Door Fellowship on Wednesday nights, when the church’s AWANA program occurred. (AWANA is a worldwide Christian children’s education/discipleship program.) About 40 kids did. Many of them, now adults in their 20s and 30s, still recall those old days with fondness. Claudia Sanchez loved wearing her AWANA vest, which proudly displayed the pins and patches she earned for memorizing Bible verses and completing other assignments. “AWANA was just fun,” Kit Danley remembers. “Most of our kids had culturally appropriate small group leaders who were absolutely in love with their kids. Many are in relationship with those ‘kids’ to this day.” Mixing the neighborhood kids and the church kids, though, proved very difficult. “Once that first Kids’ Club was over,” Kit explains, “we thought in our very naïve way that we already had a church outreach program that could absorb these children. We thought church kids and outreach kids could co-exist.” They found out—like many ministries nationwide have since—that this typically doesn’t work. The cultural differences loom large, the unchurched/churched gap is significant, and many church parents don’t want their kids exposed to the bad language or destructive behaviors some of the unchurched kids bring. So, after trying the experiment for a couple years, everyone agreed that moving the neighborhood kids to their own night would be best. And so, in 1991, Kids’ Life began on Monday Nights.

Now, 16 years later, the typical look of the evening hasn’t changed that much. There’s group singing and worship at the beginning, then kids break down into their small groups. Leaders are assigned an average of five kids. The children listen to a Bible lesson and then participate in some recreational activity. Over the years, the fun activities have grown more creative and elaborate: today a kid might be in a cooking class or woodworking in shop, learning folk dancing, playing basketball, making ceramics at the potter’s wheel, or break dancing.

The first generation kids who are now adults remember the fun. But they remember the people and the environment even more. “I always felt loved there,” says Marcos Marquez, now 28. “I always felt security there.” Many of these “oldtimers” now serve as leaders themselves on Monday Nights. As Luis Lemus puts it: “I want kids to look up to me just the way that I looked up to my leaders. That’s why I’m still here, man, because I looked up to some leaders when I was growing up.”

As participation in Mondays Nights has grown to some 500 kids, volunteer recruitment is a major focus for program leaders. Everyone agrees it’s important to keep the child-to-leader ratio low. That’s the only way to preserve the precious bonding between kids and leaders. The massive effort that is Monday Nights requires over 120 volunteers every week, between van and bus drivers, small group leaders, teachers, and kitchen helpers. What’s really remarkable, though, is not how many volunteers are engaged, but how high their retention rate is. “It’s not unheard of to have a small group leader who’s been with their kids since they were kindergartners,” Sarah Leon, former Monday Nights Director, reports. Many leaders “move up” with their kids — meaning that when their small group hits 7th grade, they make the switch to attending the Tuesday Night program for Junior High students. Other leaders work with the same group for several years, and then when those kids reach 7th grade, they start over again with a new batch of youngsters. “Typically any kid who’s been with us growing up can tell you almost every small group leader they ever had,” Sarah says.

Because relationships are what Monday Nights (and all of Neighborhood Ministries) are about, staff and volunteers tenaciously pursue the kids through their chaotic living situations. Some youth move 4, 5, or even more times in a single school year. A lot of Emily’s work “is tracking them, finding them when they’re lost, and bringing them back because they’re ‘family.’”

Pat McCormick, a pilot with Delta Airlines, has volunteered with Monday Nights since the early 1990s. He reports that his role has mostly been as a sort-of Vice Principal, the “heavy” who handles the troublemakers. Although he doesn’t like seeing youth act out, Pat relishes the opportunity to take a kid aside and have a heart-to-heart talk about what is really going on with him or her that is underlying the bad behavior. “Usually it was not the infraction that was the immediate thing,” Pat explains. “Usually it was something kind of boiling underneath—somebody hurting in their family or them having a bad experience—and this gave us a chance to bring God into the picture. We could encourage them to take their needs and their hurts to God and explain to them what an everpresent, all-powerful, all-knowing God He is and that He wants to be part of the solution for them.”

For a number of years, Pat had his own defacto small group—three guys, Cruz, Elias, and Shorty—who got into trouble weekly. “They were my pet project,” he chuckles. “Often my job was to intercept them and take them off campus. I don’t know if I did it right or not—because usually we’d just go eat pizza and talk, and probably the other kids were wondering, ‘maybe if I get out of control, I can go eat pizza too!’” Pat also laughs at the practical lessons he’s learned over the years, especially about keeping to a “one on one” defense as often as possible. He admits one embarrassing time of taking his trio of troublemakers to the local Y to shoot hoops—only to realize at one point that only Shorty was with him. The other two were checking out the ladies locker room.

Involvement in Neighborhood Ministries has been eye opening for Pat and his family. They’ve come to see the painful realities of the brokenness in many kids’ lives. “Some of these kids are really just on their own,” he muses. “When Elias came on Monday Nights, we were kind of his family.” Knowing that has made volunteers like the McCormicks get involved beyond the interactions on Monday Nights. Pat tells of his family throwing a 15th birthday party for one boy who’d never had a party. He had another kid out one spring mowing lawns in his suburban neighborhood to earn money for summer camp. Last year, Pat and his wife Meegan took three neighborhood kids with them to San Diego for a week. And he’s still in touch with Cruz, some 13 years later. “My wife and I started out as strangers, and now we are ‘Tias’ and ‘Tios’—aunts and uncles—to those kids who grew up at Neighborhood Ministries,” Pat says.

(Excerpt from The Relentless Pursuit by Amy Sherman, 2007)