- We’re practitioner-led.
We have two steering committees of practicing youth ministry workers and parents in all seasons of raising kids who guide the creation of all our new content, keep us faithful to the mission, and invest many volunteer hours to make sure all of our content and programs are ultimately helpful to the people we serve. These steering committees are the backbone of our organization, and they rotate year to year to include new voices.
- We have dozens of different denominations represented in our Rooted community.
We’re made of thousands of people all over the U.S., and several internationally, who represent many different denominations within Christianity. Given that our focus is on discipling teenagers, we tend not to take positions on secondary and tertiary issues. We’re committed to unity on the essentials of the faith: the Trinity, the Gospel of grace, and the inerrancy of Scripture, among other things, but we allow for diversity and charity on matters like who should be baptized and when, what the ideal church government structure should look like, etc. We love that we get to work with people from so many backgrounds to help equip and empower them for gospel-centered youth ministry work.
- We strive to provide resources for different cultural contexts.
Our steering committees are not only denominationally diverse, but also represent different cultures and contexts. These volunteers help us translate our resources, so they can be used in a variety of contexts, and host events like our recent Asian American webinar. Just last week, we welcomed Danny Kwon to the Rooted team full time, serving as our new Senior Director of Youth Ministry Content and Cross Cultural Initiatives.
- We’re a 501c3 non-profit.
We are so thankful to be supported by incredible donors that include individuals, church partners, ministry sponsors, grants, and foundations. This incredible generosity allows us to do unexpected things, like #4 and #5. As we always say, we are a ministry first organization meaning if we can give our resources away for free, we do.
- We actually budget to lose money on each year’s conference!
That’s right! We actually budget for a loss at each year’s conference, because it is so important to us to make our conference affordable and accessible to anyone who wants to come. Additionally, when attendees arrive at our conference, we do our best to take care of them! We offer a hot meal for dinner and a boxed lunch during conference hours as well as snacks and drinks. Hospitality is part of our culture, and we like to take care of the folks who take care of the next generation the other 363 days of the year. We’ve also been able to offer scholarships for churches with low or no budget for youth ministry professional development.
- We can price our curriculum so affordably because of our amazing donors.
Have you noticed the low prices on our curriculum plans? Gaining access to all our training courses, a full year of inductive Bible study curriculum, over 200 teaching illustrations, and our online community might make you think our pricing would be around $800-$1000, but we’re able to price it at about a quarter of other options out there because of the generosity of our donors.
- We start each meeting with Scripture and prayer..
Each meeting, we recite six different passages of Scripture to remind us of the gospel, our mission, and our call to work hard and trust the Lord with the results. And, then we pray for each other, youth pastors, parents and the ministry.
- 90% of our resources are free!
Through our blog articles, five podcast channels, weekly youtube videos– we always have NEW and FREE content to help equip youth pastors and parents to disciple their kids to lifelong faith in Jesus.
- We estimate 320,000 students in America have heard the Gospel, prayed, and read the Word of God in response to our curriculum.
We’re working toward our vision, where every child will experience gospel-centered, grace-filled, Bible-saturated discipleship at church and in the home.
- We love to support other organizations who advance gospel-centered youth ministry!
We love to partner with churches and other ministries including Youth Pastor Theologian, Your Youth Ministry Curriculum, Worldview Academy, SOS Memphis, 10ofThose, The Sola Network, RYM, Center for Parent /Youth Understanding … just to name a few.
