Rooted Conference Workshops

As children’s ministry teachers, we have an incredible responsibility: God has entrusted the next generation into our care. But what will the kids in our classrooms remember after we’ve finished teaching? What characters in the story will they most want to identify with and be like? How will they grow in their understanding of God and the gospel? In this presentation, Jared will walk through some different ways you could teach a Bible story. Understanding these three basic approaches will help us not to miss the main point of a Bible passage. These ways of telling a story will help you encourage the kids in your class to grow in their understanding of the good news. We’ll begin with  a familiar Old Testament story as an example: the story of David and Goliath.

Adolescents and their parents increasingly indicate how stressed and busy they are. The pressures to excel, succeed, stand out, and fit in can be a crushing weight on their shoulders. In this workshop, discover and recover methods youth workers can use to usher in peace while helping cultivate the faith of teens.

Acts is a powerful book of the Bible. Full of sermons, it highlights the importance of preaching to the life of a church.In this workshop, we will discuss the process of moving from careful understanding to faithful proclamation of the Word.

A youth ministry that takes discipleship seriously leans heavily on adult leaders. But how do you find and recruit great leaders? Once you’ve found them, how do you encourage, mobilize, lead, and keep them until their students graduate? This workshop will help you make or improve your plan to find and keep great leaders.

How do you make truth from Scripture feel true to life? By speaking to a person, not a caricature. Scripture addresses the whole person, but often, our students can feel like we miss the complexity of their lives in our Bible teaching. In this workshop, Clayton Keenon will help you understand your audience at a deeper level, so that you can speak to them in a way that rings true to their experience.

The differences between an adult Sunday school class and one for kids are quite striking. A class for toddlers and preschoolers is rarely organized around the logic of a Bible passage, or even a lesson outline. Instead, lessons are structured by the classroom schedule and environment—by a basic routine and activity centers that are designed for play, music, the Bible story, and other games or crafts. How do we prepare children’s lessons that are Christ-centered, biblically faithful, engaging for kids, and oriented towards the distinct ways that kids learn? This workshop will help you learn how to do just that.

In an age in which many young people drift from the church after high school, the call to intentional church membership is not optional—it’s a gospel imperative. This workshop will explore how the good news of Jesus not only saves but also plants youth deeply in the life of the local church for a lifetime of growth and mission. We’ll unpack biblical foundations for membership, confront common cultural and generational obstacles, and equip leaders to guide students toward committed, covenantal belonging. By rooting our next generation in the gospel and the local body, we shape a trajectory of perseverance, maturity, and kingdom impact that extends far beyond their teenage years.

From Miriam to Priscilla, the story of Scripture calls women into leadership and encourages them to endure as “oaks of righteousness” alongside men. The uniqueness of a woman’s position in the world carries with it a different weight than our brothers have. In this workshop, we’ll see what God has to say to his daughters and to his sons who work alongside them.

*We welcome men to participate in this workshop!

Body image struggles are a powerful discipleship opportunity. But it’s hard to connect this struggle with God’s Word. How do we give hope and comfort when we hear teenagers‘ cries of despair, anger, anxiety or self-hatred about their bodies? This workshop will explore how the Bible’s storyline of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration speaks to body image concerns. We will look at one insight from each area, connecting teenagers to why God made them, what happened to our relationship to our bodies in the Fall, how Christ redeems our thoughts about our bodies, and what restoration looks like. While body image struggles are complicated and painful, their weightiness provides an opportunity to display the power of God’s Word and the beauty of the gospel.

Cultural waves are constantly changing — now more rapidly than ever. The messages teenagers hear and absorb from every screen and relationship in their lives shapes them at a fundamental level. They learn what to laugh at, who and how to love, and what’s worth weeping over and celebrating from messages both subtle and overt. Ministering in this context requires youth ministers and parents to carefully critique and connect these messages to their fulfillment in Jesus—in other words, we need to do cultural apologetics. In this workshop, we will explore the need for cultural apologetics and how it can be practiced in big and small ways in your ministry today.

Modern teenagers often experience a disconnect between their faith and their everyday lives. This gap is largely the result of growing up in a secular society, where most aspects of public life are no longer shaped by God or spiritual truth. As a result, faith is increasingly pushed into the private sphere, subtly forming students more in the image of the surrounding culture than in the likeness of Jesus Christ. In this workshop, we’ll explore key questions such as: What are the effects of secularism on young Christians today? What unique discipleship challenges do students face in a post-Christian context? How can parents and youth ministers cultivate a biblical vision for spiritual formation that helps teenagers wholeheartedly follow Jesus?

Ministering to teenagers today feels more daunting than ever. It can seem nearly impossible to reach young people who grew up in the first post-Christian generation in America, where culture preaches a gospel of the “Self.” Because of the reality of our society and religious statistics, youth need the gospel more than ever, and youth ministries need to be willing to step into the void of evangelism more than ever before. What models of evangelism have preceded our times, and which model(s) are best suited to reach this generation? More importantly, what role do youth ministries play in the future evangelistic strategy of the American Church? This workshop will seek to address these questions by presenting a model of evangelism that is relevant and realistic, and discussing the urgent and important role youth ministries play on mission in America.

One of the greatest honors of working in youth ministry is walking through pain and suffering with the people God has entrusted to your care. Though it can be scary, and even awkward at first, joy replaces fear when you embrace God-given opportunities.  In this workshop, we will share some strategies for walking with and caring for your people in the midst of their pain and suffering.

 No one can do children’s ministry alone. How does a children’s ministry staff shoulder the weight of discipling the people under their care? There is an art to recruiting, placing, supporting, and developing serving partners to care well for our children and families. We also want them to become an integral part of a discipleship ministry team and find a place of belonging themselves. In this workshop, we will examine practical ways to collectively share both the burden and privilege of ministry in the local church.