Tyler Lane is the NextGen Pastor at Valley Real Life Church in Spokane, Washington. With over 13 years of youth ministry experience, he has a lot of great things to say about the world of youth ministry. In this episode we will dive into the daunting, but so important task of equipping students to live a life of Kingdom Work!

 on Instagram: you can find all of our individual program accounts in the bio

As always, be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. It also helps us out if you rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and send this episode to a friend!

BTE3.14: Tyler Lane on Equipping Students for Kingdom Work

Equipping Students for Kingdom Work with Tyler Lane

Hello, this is Brad Warren and you are listening to Beyond the Event, a youth ministry podcast presented by Christ in Youth, where we help you maintain momentum between the mountaintops Getting real close to summer. Guys, I want you to know we can still get you plugged in at Move. We can still get you plugged in at Mix, so if you're not already registered, let me know how we can help make that happen. Engage if you want to start having conversations about going on Engage trips in 2025 yes, that is a real year in 2025 we can start having those conversations right now too. We love the church. We love serving you guys. So if there are any obstacles that we can help you overcome when it comes to getting you to our events and on our trips, please just let us know. We really relish and look forward to the chance to serve you. Can't wait for that to happen this summer as well.

Well, on today's episode, we have a great conversation planned for you. We're going to be talking to Tyler Lane. Tyler is the next generation team lead at Valley Real Life Church, which is in Spokane, washington. It is pronounced Spokane I did learn that today. Washington it is pronounced Spokane. I did learn that today. So Tyler's been at it for a long time. He's been at Valley Real Life for about seven years, been in youth ministry for about 15. So he's got a lot of great wisdom and I'm really looking forward to you hearing what he has to say. So let's head over to my conversation with Tyler. Tyler, thank you so much for coming and being on Beyond the Event. Glad you're here.

I would imagine that um I always I people have yelled at me for how I say the word for so long. Say the city that you're in Spokane, spokane. So I'm not allowed to say Spokane is the thing.

No, the E is unnecessary. Okay, spokane, all right, tell me about Spokane, washington, today never mad when we have winters or we don't have a ton of snow, yeah, um, so it's, it's gonna get up to the 50s today. Well, sunny, okay.

Um, it's like the first time we've seen sun in a few weeks, but so we're gonna let that set the tone for this, this podcast, and not okay, not joplin world, okay, which? So you're not from there. Where are you from?

So I was born and raised in Oklahoma yeah, um, still water Oklahoma and then went to Ozark and then went uh, was a pastor at a church in the Bay area of California for about five years before moving up here to Spokane seven years ago.

So tell me about Spokane, especially coming from, you know, oklahoma, oklahoma, joplin, I feel like pretty similar in line like culture wise. Um yeah, What'd you have to get used to moving out, moving out there?

Yeah, so, um, probably the most important part of that journey, though, uh, for me was my five-year stop, uh, in the Bay area of California. Um, because there's there's very few worlds that are as different between, like, the Joplin Oklahoma world and the Bay area, um, and so incredibly diverse, incredibly fast paced, incredibly expensive. All of these things, some of the things we really like, some of the things we prefer not to have, yeah, and so when we moved up to spokane, we really didn't know. I didn't know anything about it. I knew gonzaga was here and that was it. You know, like, um, I like you didn't know how to pronounce it. You know all those things and so, um, but what we've, what we found, is it feels like this mesh of kind of the West Coast influence, but still heavily family-centric, and so most people, when they think of Spokane, I tell people I'm from Washington, they think of Seattle, or they think of Northwest, they think of Portland, you know that type of stuff, and so the East side of Washington is a completely different world than the West side of Washington, and so, uh, incredibly family centric, um, much more conservative, um, and uh, yeah, so, uh, you know, north Idaho is as conservative as they get.

We're our church is 10 miles from the Washington Idaho border and Seattle's as liberal as it gets and we're kind of like right in the middle there, and so it's kind of the things we've loved about growing up my wife and I both grew up in Oklahoma, the things we loved about Oklahoma and the things that we loved about living in California. But they kind of mesh into kind of this nice little cozy town. I describe Spokane as like the largest small town. There's 250,000 people that live in this area but man, it feels like everybody knows everybody and they have weird customs and stuff like that. So yeah, that's how I describe it.

So a lot of people who do ministry on the West Coast describe like this like in the Midwest we're very much starting to deal with like a post-Christian kind of thing, you know what I mean, where a lot of parents and grandparents that grew up in the church but are no longer involved in the church or having kids that really have no memories of the church but those older generations kind of do, and I feel like a lot of people that I talk to out in the West Coast very much more unchurched is how they would describe it. So which of those worlds are you living in?

Or is it kind of both? It's kind of both, I mean, I think. I think at the core, both of them are de-churched in a lot of ways, like it's just a dependent on like how many generations removed from the church experience, right. Like most of the people that we like Spokane one is like ethnically the least diverse place I've ever lived. It's like 98% white, including Missouri.

Yeah, including shopping, and so um, yeah, so um. But the diversity comes in. There's a huge, uh like Slavic Russian population, uh, in Spokane, because the climate is apparently the same, and so they kind of come over and they don't like Seattle, so they just keep going, uh. And so what I've learned in seven years is like Russian people, ukrainian people, they have a deep religious heritage and so that there are several Slavic churches here, and so I think that kind of allows for that. But then so you've got that heritage, you've got the de-churched, you know, just like I'm just living kind of my own life, I just want to do my own thing. Church is maybe a part of my family's history, but not necessarily mine, and then the Mormon church is huge here, huge here, yeah.

I guess you're not that far from like the Salt Lake area.

Yeah, you just go, like Utah, straight up to Boise Boise is huge in the Mormon population and just kind of come straight up there and so um. So I would say honestly that that's one of the things like every week at our youth group. We have a handful of Mormon kids that'll come with their friends or whatever, and so kind of informing like, hey man, what are these differences, how are they, how are we similar but how are we different in very key ways and what do those relationships look like? Seems to be kind of a hot issue, but I would say most of the people we're seeing their family history has some type of church background.

Yeah, it's just like how far back do you have to go in order to get?

Yeah. So where has Valley Real Life found its kind of niche within all of that Like, who are you seeing that you're having success kind of reaching and resonating with there?

Yeah. So our kind of our big thing right now is just like if we left the community, like if our church shut down, would the community even know we were here and um, as we went into covid uh, you know, several years ago I guess, like four years ago um, that was kind of this sentiment that we were like starting to really have this conversation about and it kind of led us through covid, it's led us out of covid, um about like how can we be intentional in the community? And so at the youth ministry side, for me it's like how do I invest in my leaders to go be in the community? One of the things we found success with is we just like rearranged some of our budget and said, okay, man, schools here, schools here were hit really hard because of COVID, and so and so, and can I interrupt you really quick, in what way do you mean like, yeah, so we didn't.

When we shut down in march of 2020, our students at like the high school level and middle school level did not go back in person until April of 2021.

Okay, yeah, so they did some varying levels of like online whatever, but like Right.

But, the social consequences of that are just like unreal.

Huge and like that's. That's been one of our biggest challenges coming out of COVID is man. A lot of these age groups lost an entire year of that social development, that educational development. I talk with teachers a lot, talk with parents a lot of just like man. The classroom management is the hardest aspect coming out of that, because for a year they could just turn their camera off and just say they were listening, and as long as they're turning their stuff in, that was fine. And so now to come back and try to manage, manage them. We see that at our midweek program um, like our middle schoolers are just like wild right now, like just wild and um, but you're starting to learn man, like at a very key part of their development, uh, developmental stages, it was like interrupted and for an entire year press pause for a year.

Sports didn't happen, yeah, like our football season got moved to May, like of 2021, you know, because that was the first time they could gather. And you know, my daughter was in kindergarten when we went into COVID and for her first two years of school so kindergarten, which she did half online, which is not ideal and then all the way through first grade she was masked up in a class, right, and so I think that just like definitely informs kind of now what ministry looks like now. And so we kind of came coming out of that in 2022. We have a high school that's like a mile and a half from our building and we were like, how can we just love the teachers, love the faculty, show them that we're here, show them we care, with no strings attached. And so we just brought them breakfast one day and to one of their staff meetings and just said, hey, thank you, you know, thank you for all you're doing. We see you, god sees you keep going. And then we have three, two other high schools kind of in the same, what we call the Valley bigger high schools, and so we were like, let's do it for them too, let's figure it out. And we've got teachers that work at a Montgomery church, and so we did it.

So then the next year we went from three high schools. We added three middle schools to that that are closest to us, and then last year we added three more schools, three more high schools, to that, and so we're just starting the process of doing that again. We're going to add three more schools again this year, so one of doing 12 schools kind of in our area of just like, hey, here's some Panera bagels and some coffee. We love you guys, we're so thankful for the investment you guys are making and we're here for you and and so it's been cool just to see I get texts from our teachers that go to these schools and they're like man, thank you so much. I got to have a conversation with my coworkers about where I go and how proud I am. That's cool.

So it starts to start some of those conversations and so just trying to make it a presence and um, and being around and trying to get um, uh, creative with how we're kind of partnering with the schools, even though you know it's definitely challenging, I actually think it's easier to get into schools out here than it was when I was, uh, when I was at college heights in joplin or you, you know, working in Oklahoma, and I think part of it is like the, the.

I think the idea is that it's less open to to church, which may be true, but it's more open to just everything, and so because of that, it's like everybody gets a seat at the table, yeah and um, and so it's. It's kind of interesting. So we spend a lot of time like working with students on how can we start like Christian clubs at their school. Yeah, and you know, it feels like we have teachers in almost every school. So it's like how do we leverage that, how do we reinforce them and encourage them? And that's been, honestly, one of the funnest parts over the last couple of years, and just like what's been going on in our ministry, is how do we kind of show up in these places that people aren't expecting us to show up in?

Yeah, no, that's incredible that you guys are just serving in that way. I mean, if someone brought me a cinnamon crunch bagel from Panera, it's like I would feel loved so.

So how you kind of started to get into it. But I want to peel back layers. How has that like culture at uh, at Valley bled down into the student ministry and and and how does that kind of impact the way that you program and the way that you minister to students and that kind of thing?

Yeah, so, um, I should probably explain kind of the structure of our ministry a little bit, because I think that that affects it, so we have a.

We don't have any student programming in our weekend services. We have four weekend services every weekend. We have a Thursday night service, um, and then we have three Sunday morning services and we don't have any student programming at that. We push all of our students to serve on the weekend service and attend church, right and so, um, which I love, it's, it's awesome. And then we have we have what we call midweek, like most churches.

CIY

PROGRAMS

STORIES

Resources

We call youth to Christ
and into a life of Kingdom Work through His Church.

Beyond the Event

A youth ministry podcast presented by Christ In Youth Where we help you maintain momentum between the mountaintops

LISTEN HERE OR ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST PLATFORM!

Listen, Watch, or subscribe

If you liked this episode, you may also like:

CIY