Write down one teenager’s first name before you read any further. Choose someone God has already put within your reach: your own child, a niece or nephew, a player you coach, a student you teach, the young person whose family sits near yours at church. Pick someone you will actually see or hear from in the coming month. The next four weeks are about that one person. You will do one small, specific thing with them each week, with the goal of starting a real discipling relationship rather than a program.
You can work through this alone. It also works for a few adults who each bring a different teenager and meet weekly to compare notes. The practices draw on a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields and Dr. Natasha Sistrunk Robinson, who leads a nonprofit that mentors small groups of Black girls and young women from sixth grade through twelfth. Her approach is slow and relational. Robinson starts with a plain fact about how teenagers come to faith: “youth don’t take themselves to church. Like somebody takes them to church or someone introduces them to the faith or someone encourages them in the faith.” This month you are choosing to be one of those somebodies on purpose.
Before week one: what do you actually know?
Under the name, write what you know about this person’s life right now. Note what they do after school, who their friends are, what they are good at, and what is hard for them this year. Then mark each item with a K if you know it because they told you or you saw it, and an A if you are assuming it. That list is your starting point. You will come back to it at the end.
A word about the plan itself
A fair objection: a four-week script can make a relationship feel staged. Teenagers can tell when an adult is working through a checklist, and a real fifteen-year-old will be tired, busy, moody or simply not in the mood on the day you planned. When the plan collides with the person, choose the person. Shorten the activity, move it to next week, or skip it and just spend the time together. The weekly practices are prompts for you, not a curriculum to announce. Your teenager never needs to know there is a guide.
A second objection is that one adult with one teenager is either too little or too risky. On the first point, Robinson never pictures a lone mentor. She describes a village, and the posture behind it: “I want for other people’s children, what I want for my child.” You are one adult among the several this young person needs, not their only one. On the second, keep your time together in public or visible places, keep parents or guardians informed, and follow any child-safety policy your church or school has.
Week one: use the door you already have
Read John 1:35-46 and then John 4:28-30. Watch only one thing: how each person first hears about Jesus.
Andrew goes to his own brother: “He first findeth his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, We have found the Messias, which is, being interpreted, the Christ” (John 1:41). When Nathanael scoffs at Nazareth, Philip does not argue. “Philip saith unto him, Come and see” (John 1:46). The Samaritan woman goes back to people who know her and says, “Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?” (John 4:29).
These are narratives. They describe how particular people came to Jesus rather than command a method. What they show is a pattern, and Robinson draws it out: “the entry point is normally just because of relationships we have with people. So we start there.” She also names the habit that keeps many adults from starting. Some believers, she says, are waiting for someone else to do it. “They’re waiting to send them to your podcast or to send them to their pastor or whatever.”
The practice this week: spend one stretch of unhurried time with your teenager in a setting that belongs to their life. Go to their game or recital. Drive them somewhere and leave the radio off. Get food. Robinson’s phrase for this is simple: “we meet people where they are.” Ask one question about something they care about, and listen to the whole answer without correcting, advising or steering it toward church. Afterward, add at least two K’s to your page.
If this is not your own child, talk with a parent or guardian before you begin. Robinson describes mentors as partners to parents. In her words, “We’re not trying to replace parents.”
To think about or discuss
- Who first carried faith to you, and was it through an event or through a person? What does your own story suggest about how this teenager might come to lasting faith?
- Where in your week does this teenager’s life already cross yours, and where would you have to make room?
Week two: bring one true thing about Jesus
Keep showing up the way you did in week one. This week, you also bring one real truth about Jesus into a conversation, and you prepare for it in two short sittings rather than waiting until you feel like an expert.
Robinson grants that Christians debate many secondary questions, but she draws a line here: “We cannot be disagreeing about who Jesus is.” She wrote a Bible study on the Nicene Creed for young people for that reason, and she insists that “the adults need to go through the study first for themselves” before teaching it. She knows why adults avoid it: “nobody wants to feel incompetent or like they’re failing at something.” Lisa Fields offers some reassurance from the other direction, arguing that “young people have the ability to learn this stuff probably better than older people because they’re in school.” You can test that claim this week against the teenager you know.
Read 1 Peter 3:15: “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” The verse assumes someone is asking, so the answer responds to a real question. The manner also matters. “Meekness and fear” means something close to gentleness and reverence. An impatient answer fails the verse even when its content is correct.
The practice this week: choose one question. Who is Jesus? Why does it matter that he rose from the dead? Why do Christians call him God? Learn a clear, accurate answer you could give in a few minutes without notes. Then find a natural moment to raise it, and let it become a back-and-forth. End with the two questions Robinson builds into her teaching: “What are the questions I’m asking? And why does this matter at all?” Let your teenager answer them about their own life. That step is what she means by connecting the dots, which she calls “the difference between a Bible study and discipleship.”
To think about or discuss
- Which essential truth about Jesus would you have the hardest time explaining plainly to a fourteen-year-old? What would it take to change that?
- When your teenager answered the two questions, what did their answer tell you that you would not have guessed?
Week three: catch them getting it right
This week turns partly toward your teenager and partly toward you.
First, your teenager. Robinson’s group turns memorization into jingles and small competitions and gives what she calls wisdom awards. Her reasoning is a correction aimed at adults: “I think sometimes we are focusing too much on, sometimes on what kids get wrong and not rewarding them for what they do.” Watch this week for something your teenager does that is honest, kind or faithful. Name it to them specifically and soon. Say what they did, not just “good job.”
Second, you. Robinson reports that the 10 by 10 initiative, a youth discipleship effort she partners with, found the number one reason people give for turning away from Christ is what they perceive to be hypocrisy. That is one initiative’s finding as she relays it, not the last word, and you can weigh it against what you have seen. Her conclusion from it is that “you gotta have credible witnesses of the gospel, not just in your local church.” Robinson also warns that adults can take unhealed disappointment and unforgiveness out on young people or project it onto them. That is not a call to share your wounds with a teenager. It is a call to notice them and bring them to God, to trusted friends and, where it fits, to a counselor.
The practice this week: take ten quiet minutes and write one honest answer to this question: where would a teenager who watched my ordinary week notice a gap between what I say I believe and how I live? No one needs to see it. If you owe your teenager an apology for something specific, make it this week, briefly and without explaining yourself away.
To think about or discuss
- Think of teenagers you know who have stepped back from faith. What reasons have you actually heard from them or seen, and how do those compare with the hypocrisy finding Robinson cites?
- What did your teenager do this week that you might have missed if you had not been looking for it?
Week four: hand something back
Read Mark 3:14: “And he ordained twelve, that they should be with him, and that he might send them forth to preach.” Being with him comes first. Then read Hebrews 5:12: “For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat.” The writer is frustrated with believers who stayed beginners too long. The aim is a person who can eventually help someone else.
Robinson’s group builds that in early through peer-to-peer mentoring, where students share how a passage is showing up in their lives. “So it’s not just the expert in the room. Like they all become teachers.”
The practice this week: ask your teenager to teach you something. It could be the topic from week two, a verse they have been thinking about, or how they would explain Jesus to a younger sibling or friend. Listen as a student and ask one follow-up question that shows you took them seriously. If they decline, that is fine. Offer again another time.
Then decide what comes next. “Our work is really that slow,” Robinson says of her ministry, and of the way her program stretches a short study across a school year, “We’re thinking about mastery.” Write down what you will keep doing with this teenager after these four weeks, how often, and for how long. A monthly meal through the end of the school year is a commitment. A vague promise to stay in touch is not. If you are not the parent, check in again and ask what they are teaching at home and how you can reinforce it.
To think about or discuss
- What would make you hesitate to keep meeting after the month ends, and is the hesitation about the teenager, yourself, or the situation?
Go back to your first page
Return to the list you made before week one. Count the K’s and A’s now. Cross out any assumption that turned out to be wrong and write what is actually true. Then answer one more question in writing: what did I believe about discipling a teenager at the start of this month that I no longer believe? Write down what happened, not what you hoped would happen.
If you are meeting as a group
Keep the group small, three to six adults, each with their own named teenager. Spend most of each meeting on what people tried and what happened, less on the reading. Use first names only, and share nothing a teenager said in confidence unless their safety is at stake. No one should be pressed to report on week three’s self-examination, though whoever leads can go first. Let a month that went poorly be discussed as plainly as a good one.
If the month ends quietly
It may. Your teenager may have shrugged at week two and declined to teach you anything in week four. That is not a verdict on the relationship. Robinson describes a former student, now in college, who had recently rededicated her life to the Lord and wrote to thank the program for their years together. She says “the Lord keeps encouraging us that the children come back,” and she is just as honest that many people labor for years without seeing fruit. “Sometimes the Lord’s just looking for you to be faithful in that thing, period.”
So look again at the name at the top of your page. Next month, will this young person still be able to count on you?