Quotes from Matt Markins

As we move into the future, I am increasingly passionate about the need for biblical child discipleship. Awana has always been and will always be about the Gospel.

Our main goal is that children know, love and serve Jesus, so the win is the family grows closer together and that family grows closer to God.

Forming faith in the next generation should be a top priority in our churches.

Children need a place to belong, an invitation to believe the gospel, and a pathway to become disciples of Christ.

Entertainment, relevance, and moralism have proven insufficient to form lasting faith in our children.

Shaping a child’s faith is the most important work on the planet.

Parents are the primary spiritual influence on kids. True, but the needle is not moving. Why?

Awana is not just a local club any more. It has grown into a global ministry.

Children's ministry can mean a lot of things…But disciple-making is a specific target. It's a specific mission designed to help make disciples, so that's important because we're now living in a very different world than we were 20, 30, 40 years ago.

The rallying cry of our day is justice, love, freedom, happiness, redemption. These are the things that the broader dominant culture wants so badly, but in a way that's cut off from Christ.

When kids have loving, caring adults in their lives, their lives are much more fruitful.

Moralism, relevance, and entertainment are not the future of children’s ministry… community is. When kids have community, they have access to belonging to and becoming like Jesus.

Child Discipleship is designed to form lasting faith by helping kids belong to God and his Kingdom, believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and to become like Jesus and walk in His ways through the power of the Holy Spirit.

A person’s worldview is primarily shaped and is firmly in place by the time someone reaches the age of 13.

The church has got to shift hard toward child disciple-making.

Let's be faithful in doing the most proven areas of disciple-making, which again, we would say belong with relationships, scripture, engagement, and experiences and how those work together at shaping identity in Christ.

When kids have community, they have access to belonging to and becoming like Jesus.