Stuff You Can Use

We've been doing youth ministry for over twenty combined years and love every second of it. We got our start at a church called The Chapel in Buffalo, NY, where we started as volunteers, but eventually joined The Chapel's Middle School Ministry staff full-time. Kenny was the Middle School Pastor and Elle was the Middle School Small Groups Coordinator. We were really lucky to serve at a church where our pastor, a guy named Jerry Gillis, taught us to think about the Church as something way bigger than just our church. He inspired us to do a better job of serving and partnering with other local churches, and he helped us see that working together is way more fun than comparing or competing. So in 2010, we launched with just the two of us, a handful of resources, and a Twitter account. Our goal was simply to share some of the things we had created with the rest of the youth ministry community, and to make those resources as high-quality and easy-to-use as possible. Word spread pretty quickly (a little more quickly than we were anticipating), so we brought some more people on board to help us keep up with all the requests we were receiving. We added more resources from more creators and contributors. Before we knew it we had an email list of 80,000+ youth workers, the #1 ranked youth ministry podcast on iTunes, and over 1 million page views a year on our websites. While Stuff You Can Use looks a little different today than it did when it first launched, there are a few important things that have stayed the same...