How to Get God's Kids Back (Student Leader Course): Spread the Gospel, Make Disciples, and Reach Friends in Your School and Community

By Nate Landis

God and public schools sound like mutually exclusive ideas to most Americans. Many assume the so-called "separation of church and state" creates an impassable divide that pastors and principals dare not cross. 

Meanwhile, Generation Z, our nation's elementary, middle and high school students, has grown into the larges

• Language: English
• Publisher: Urban Youth Collaborative
• Release date: Apr 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986119533

Nate Landis

Rev. Nate Landis, Ph.D., is a graduate of Claremont Graduate University, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and Eastern University. Nate is founder and President of Urban Youth Collaborative, a non-profit organization that equips churches to support student leaders at over 100 public schools in the US and Mexico, where thousands of kids attend student-led faith clubs each week. As an evangelistic preacher and pastor, Nate loves sharing God's word with a wide variety of audiences. He lives with his wife, Angela, and their children in urban San Diego.

Book preview

module one

Be Fearless

Hello and welcome to my life changing course on campus ministry! I mean that literally. If you wholeheartedly devote yourself to God and what we cover in here, your life, and the lives of your friends, will never be the same.

This course is geared specifically for middle and high school students who want their lives to count. It’s for young leaders – no matter how little or much you know about Jesus – who will give up their lives and follow after the one who loves them more than anyone else in the universe.

This love is real, and we can count on it. It’s what we’ve been looking for our entire lives. Your school, your friends, your enemies, even your teachers and your principal are looking for the same thing. They just may not know that this quest is what drives them.

Never underestimate what one young person – fully devoted to Jesus – can do at a middle or high school in America.

I live and minister in San Diego. As a local pastor and ministry leader, I’ve dedicated the last decade of my life to finding and working with student leaders just like you. Now we are expanding our search to a national level.

In this book, I am going to teach you all I can about campus ministry. That way, you can go and be a hero of the faith on your own campus in St. Louis, Philadelphia, Miami, Chicago, Seattle, or wherever you happen to be.

My dream for your generation is that you will realize the power of Christ in you. You can live a fearless and unstoppable life. I want to help you get there! What if I told you that the only thing stopping you from the campus movement you want to start is you? After doing this for over eleven years, I promise you that the law and the LORD are clearly on your side.

God’s divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness (2 Peter 1: 3-4). He’s with you and ready to show off who he is through your life. We just need to reach out and take hold of what he has already laid out for us.

What I am about to share has been tested over and over in the real world. We’re based in Southern California – a hotspot where some of the most difficult challenges have been leveled against student-led Bible clubs, but students continue to thrive here – not just survive. They are ordinary kids with pain, regrets, fears, and insecurities. Yet when they place all they have into the hands of an extraordinary God, they discover what he can do through them.

If what I’m teaching can work here, it can work anywhere in the United States! I believe God put us out here to survive and thrive so that we can embolden students all over the country to represent Christ at their schools.

My prayer is that what I say sinks deep into your heart and that it gets out to both infect and affect a core group of your friends who, in turn, spread the love and message of Christ throughout your entire campus, church, and neighborhood.

As we begin our adventure together, I want to encourage you with a few time-tested truths that apply no matter what city you happen to be reading this book in:

Be fearless. The Law and the LORD are clearly on your side.

You are unstoppable! With Jesus inside you, the only thing that can stop you is you!

Don’t go it alone. Build a team (students, adults, faculty advisor, church partner). As the body of Christ, we need each other. Teamwork makes the kingdom dream work. We’ll discuss team building in detail later on.

PRAY, PRAY, PRAY. Walk your school, (re)claim the territory and people who walk there in the name of Jesus. Nothing we talk about in this course can be accomplished without bathing everything in prayer before, during, and after each step we take.

Follow the Holy Spirit. Dream big with Jesus about what your school could look like if God’s kingdom came and his will was done on earth as it is in heaven. Sometimes it’s helpful to pray for God’s will to be done at this specific place on earth just as it is in heaven. Sometimes I like to pray with my eyes open, not just because my Philadelphia street instincts kick in, but because I like to pray for God’s kingdom to come into specific lives and situations: For the kid who’s lonely and eating all by himself; for the kid who’s failing math; for the kid who’s afraid because she doesn’t know how her grandma will make rent this month; for the popular football star who doesn’t think he needs a god other than himself; for that inappropriately affectionate couple that is looking for the love of another human to satisfy their souls . . . I ask for God to bring his kingdom.

Dedicate yourself fully. Go all out like this club is your sport, your AP class, or your artistic masterpiece. That’s