In today’s episode, guests Robert and Lori Crosby talk with Catherine Boyle about their book and ministry, Reach Hurting Kids Institute. The Crosbys are presenting a ministry intensive on creating a trauma-Informed children’s or youth ministry at DATC2023.
Listen now in your favorite podcast app!
Quick Links:
Reach Hurting Kids Workshop - DATC2023
If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like:
042: Simple Strategies for the Biggest Challenges: an Interview with Kim Botto with Catherine Boyle
036: Acceptable and Accessible Churches with Chris Hulshof and Sandra Peoples
Catherine Boyle: Well, welcome to the Key Ministry podcast. I'm your host, Catherine Boyle, and today I'm joined by a couple of special guests, Robert and Lori Crosby, who have been in and around the kind of work we do for a long time, and we're delighted to introduce them both to our audience. So welcome, Robert and Lori Crosby!
Robert Crosby: Thank you so much.
Lori Crosby: Thank you. It's good to be here.
Boyle: And you guys are joining us from California?
Robert Crosby: We're in Southern California.
Boyle: Well, I’m sure your weather is a little better than ours today! But I love having technology and the ability to meet folks who are doing important work no matter where they are, whether it's across the country or across the world.
Boyle: You and your work—it's a fairly recent connection to Key Ministry; I've been really excited to see the great stuff that you all are doing through the Reach Hurting Kids Institute. So if you would, just spend a few minutes talking a little bit about who you guys are, what's your family like? What's your background? And what brings you to this conversation today?
Lori Crosby: Well, like you said, I'm Lori Crosby. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and a registered play therapist supervisor. So I have a private practice and I have been working with children who have experienced trauma for about 15 years now.
Robert Crosby: And right now, I'm working as a professor of psychology at California Baptist University here in Riverside, CA. I've been passionate about children's and youth ministry basically my a whole life, started working in kids’ ministry, basically when I was a kid! I have had an interesting journey that's included a lot of different careers in education and ministry in and then in research.
Robert Crosby: Quite recently…
Boyle: I think that's a really interesting combination there, I mean it! You know, we work with a lot of people who are pastors and they've always been pastors. They jumped right into ministry, in college and then beyond or even earlier than college. But how did you, Robert, how did you go [to] university level teaching and research after being a pastor, because that seems to me to a very interesting career path that is telling a cool story!
Robert Crosby: It's been a really interesting journey. Like I said, I was really passionate about ministry as a young person and as a young man felt called into the ministry. Or at least that was that was really on my heart. So I had the opportunity to serve as a youth pastor or pastoral intern at my church, and did that for a period of time, and just always found myself really drawn to kids who are struggling and maybe struggling emotionally, struggling with if you're just kind of hurting in some way. Around that same time, I was working my way through school, I was getting a bachelor's degree in psychology at the time, and was also working in a special education context with children who were diagnosed as severely emotionally disturbed. And kind of through that journey, I was really drawn into that and, you know part of me thought, ‘Well, maybe I'll be in special education. Maybe I'll be a child therapist.’ And we really were trying to walk that line between education and psychology. I had an advisor at school who said, ‘Well, why don't you go into educational psychology?’
Robert Crosby: So I thought, ‘Well, that sounds like the perfect blend of both of these!’
Boyle: Right!
Robert Crosby: And then in actuality, it's well, it's actually neither.
Boyle: Okay…
Robert Crosby: It’s completely removed from both. But God was opening these doors and in really clear ways of providing resources and funding and opportunities. So I ended up at the University of California, Riverside in their PhD program in educational psychology, which is basically a four year research and statistics degree. I took probably a good dozen doctoral research classes and maybe half a dozen statistics courses and really didn't know why. It was kind of an accident, but I really feel now that, you know, God was guiding me through this journey and throughout this.
Boyle: Right. Yes, absolutely!
Robert Crosby: So it was still involved in ministry in different ways throughout this journey, no longer as a job, but in other capacities and, as God had closed that door, as I was moving into some of these other areas, I was—actually Lori and I both had done missions work, short term missions work in Romania with an organization called Every Generation Ministries. We got to work a couple times at a Hungarian children's camp out in that area, but hadn't been super connected.
Robert Crosby: The president and vice president of the organization, they said that they had felt led to have lunch with me and we need to get together and have a meeting. So they reached out sort of completely out of the blue and said, ‘God put us this on our heart we need to do this, and we don't know why.’ They were about an hour away, so we met up, kind of halfway in between and…
Boyle: Now, is this in Romania when this happens?
Robert Crosby: No, this is in the US, in California. The organization’s based here, but they work internationally.
Boyle: Okay, got it.
Robert Crosby: And they do children's ministry leadership development. So we met up, and they had a job posting for short term missions director; they thought, well this must be why. And so they pitched this job and I couldn't have been less interested. It wasn't one of those ‘staying out of the will of God,’ no, it was just completely off the mark!
Boyle: Okay...
Robert Crosby: So we kind of stared at each other for a few minutes awkwardly, like, well, none of us know why we're here! And so they just started chatting, and a lot of their funding came from foundation support. And so Daniel [EGM staff] had been presenting to a foundation to get funding for the organization, and they said, ‘Well, how do you evaluate your mission statement? If we're going to give resources, we want to know that you're accomplishing what you're setting out to accomplish.’
Robert Crosby: And their mission statement was ‘transforming children in Christ through His church.’ [And EGM said to the foundation] ‘our mission statement is about spiritual transformation of children in the church; you can't evaluate that!’
Robert Crosby: [The foundation said] then come back when you can! And that was, at the time…
Boyle: Well, that's a charge!
Robert Crosby: So at the time, I was taking a psychometrics class. So basically, measurement of psychological constructs you can't see. I thought ‘Well, hold on! That's an interesting challenge!’ And that moment really launched what's now been over a decade of research in the field of children's ministry. So it really is sort of a ministry of statistics, if you will, applying that and merging all these pieces together so that we can learn more about ministry, learn more about the way God can use us in those contexts, and let you know in a really unique way, data driven what we do well and…
Boyle: I'm just being totally upfront here: I can't tell you how excited Dr. Grcevich was after we had our initial conversation. I mean, after we got off the phone or off the Zoom, he messaged me and was so excited because—you know his background, and the people that he works with in his secular job; it’s so driven by the data and the measurement and all that. And then you come over to the church world; there's just so little of that for what we do, but it is really important to be able to figure out if you're making any progress. It’s just important with so many things in our lives, you know, as individuals and then you know, in any kind of work that we do. And this this even goes back to my early days with Key Ministry, trying to try to figure out some measures of our success, or how to talk to churches about what could be seen as measures of success, in the different disability or mental health ministries that they were implementing. So I am so excited to learn more about the kind of research that you guys have done, because I think churches ought to be excited about it if they know about it, and if they don't know about it [data driven measures of ministry], they ought to know about it!
Boyle: I'm so glad that you're coming to DATC to talk about that. So, all right, fast forward. You guys have this organization now that you guys work on together, right? The Reach Hurting Kids Institute (RHK).
Robert Crosby: Right.
Boyle: Tell us a little bit about—I assume, what kind of emerged out of all of this work that you were doing and that God led you directly into. Boy, doesn't He just equip us for things, sometimes in such a specific way? I'd love to hear more about what you're doing in and through the Reach Hurting Kids Institute.
Lori Crosby: Yes, it's a wild story, how the Lord just brought this all together, but Robert was—in 2019—flying around the country and even South America, doing this big research study and collecting data and all these stories, and we came back and just shared all of these stories of churches who served hurting kids and families. And he wrote up all the research; it's published in academic articles. And we talked about it, and you know, as his wife, I really couldn't even bring myself to read the academic articles! Because they're dry, right? I'll start reading them at night and be asleep in like 5 seconds.
Boyle: Yeah, no offense, honey!
Lori Crosby: Love him! But it was like—he was like—in the research, in these articles that are getting published, there's no room for the stories that actually matter…
Boyle: Right.
Lori Crosby: …the people that participated in the work God was doing in these stories, and so I really felt—the Lord pressed upon my heart, ‘We need to write a book. We these stories need to be out there. We need it something tangible, that pastors and children's ministry volunteers can actually read and understand and feel empowered and equipped to come alongside and better serve these families.’
Lori Crosby: I was personally in my practice. I was having a lot of my kids who have experienced trauma for many, many reasons. They're getting kicked out of VBS; they're getting kicked out of churches. That's not the father heart of God. And I know that's not; that wasn't the intentionality of the volunteers and the pastors. They weren't equipped. I really felt, 'Okay, we’ve got to team up. We need to do something. The Lord has brought all these pieces together and so we had the book, and then basically from the book…
Robert Crosby: So, well, it really did—the book was something very unique. It was a completely different writing style. So all the academic stuff, all the academic language is gone.
Lori Crosby: You're welcome!
Boyle: Yes, it may be freeing, but challenging in a completely different way. It's a completely different approach to what you're trying to accomplish. So go ahead.
Robert Crosby: So it was using—all the research is there. We talk about different neurological concepts and different psychological theories, but it's in very plain language. It's written in 7th grade reading level, very accessible, very story-based. We’re gradually getting that out there; it's hard to get a book on the radar. There's so many books, but those who have engaged with it have given us tremendously positive feedback, but even then we kind of hit a little bit of a wall.
Robert Crosby: A lot of people don't read books. For one thing, we're still working on the audiobook version. But also this is written for leadership, so the attention of someone who, you know, maybe it's a lay leader who is very invested, but typically it's written for leadership folks who have the ability to make significant changes to the ministry, and who are invested enough to read a book and put that time in. It's very difficult for them to then translate that into their team. So they may know what they're trying to do; they may have the vision and leadership now, but how do we get this to the team in a way that they can use, that they can put into practice, so we have a common language, common vision?
Robert Crosby: And from there was the idea of creating these workshops. So we call it the Reach Hurting Kids Workshop, and we have various modules and they are designed to now equip the team. So we're putting these together. Lori and I were speaking at different churches. We've been at conferences and finding a lot of success and then we realize, well now we've hit another wall, and that is there's only two of us. Now there's other folks talking on this topic; Kim Botto comes to mind. She's just an incredible person, so gifted, so passionate. She does amazing work, but there's only so many people doing this and most churches can't bring in a speaker. They can't send their people to a conference. Most are small and under resourced, but still really in need of it [the training].
Robert Crosby: So the next thought was, ‘Okay, can we do this in a way that they could take their own team through it?’ So we said, well, let's create a self-guided version. It's manualized, so you got a manual; you have workbooks, you have videos and things, so they can actually bring their own team through the process, in order to equip them without having to bring in an expert.
Robert Crosby: So we were able to get grant funding for this. We've actually gotten several grants through the CCCU, the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, gave us some funding. We got some through our school, from the Louisville Institute, funding the most recent part of our research.
Robert Crosby: So we're able to develop these things, test them out and then okay, well, now we see that this is working. How do we get this out to the Christian community? And that's where that umbrella came from. We needed sort of an organizational face, rather than, ‘It's Robert!’
Boyle: Right, right.
Lori Crosby: And Lori!
Robert Crosby: Right. And I'll mention, there's a lot of us working together.
Lori Crosby: Yes, we are an amazing team.
Robert Crosby: It's a team. We have an amazing team. So we’re here speaking today; we’ll be at the Key Ministry conference, but there are others speaking to other conferences. Kayla Smith is someone who's been huge; she's actually one of the pastors in our study. And she joined the organization and is doing amazing work. But we needed sort of a an umbrella or a face to kind of get out there into the community.
Robert Crosby: So when we were at CPC [Children’s Pastors Conference], we have our booth and we're doing things like this. We use that [RHK Institute] so people can recognize the name and kind of know, for lack of a better word, the brand…
Boyle: Yes, exactly.
Robert Crosby: …so they know, this is the [RHK] workshop, this is quality materials that we can take advantage of.
Boyle: Exactly. You guys have these modules, these workshops, and what you're going to be presenting at DATC 2023 is a pre-ministry intensive. For the listener who may not know what that is, basically we are offering some things that we think are really important, for people who are interested in coming to a conference like DATC. We're offering three of those the afternoon before the conference gets started. Lori and Robert are going to be leading one on creating trauma informed children's or youth ministry; Dr. Grcevich and I are going to lead one on mental health ministry, and then we're going to also have Disability Ministry 101 with Doc Hunsley.
Boyle: So without giving away all the good stuff, just tell the readers or the listeners a little bit about what this intensive is about and who would you like to see attend this? We know not every church is going to be able to send somebody. But if there's a ministry leader out there listening, who from their church should be thinking about coming to this intensive?
Robert Crosby: Well, that's a that's a great question. We'll be pulling from multiple of our workshops or our modules and pulling that together to create the intensive. So it's something that's engaging, it's interactive, it's very, very practical. And the purpose is to help folks develop a trauma-informed children's or youth ministry. So what that means is there's a recognition, a realization of the widespread impact of trauma that’s out there. Here's how it's affecting kids; learning to recognize the signs and symptoms, which is something a lot of people struggle with. They misinterpret behavior, and that leads to a lot of the problems we're talking about [children being excluded from ministries] and then learning to respond to those behaviors in a way that helps the kids heal and succeed. So this is going to really, I think, speak to any ministry that's working deliberately with—maybe a challenge, maybe an at-risk community. Maybe there's children from the community, from a low income area who are coming in, and maybe there's an abusive background. Foster/adoption ministries, anything like that.
Robert Crosby: There could be ministries that have behavior issues. Maybe they're not aware necessarily of a trauma situation, but they're struggling with maybe particular kids or even groups as a whole who aren't doing well. So those are things that are going to resonate, but honestly, I mean—not to be cliche, but it really is for everyone.
Whether we realize it or not, we're all working with kids who've experienced trauma or we're working with kids who are hurting in some capacity. If you look at—the data are shocking. If you look at suicide in kids. Over the past few years, suicide attempts by kids aged 10 to 12 have increased 450%. So now suicide is the second leading cause of death for kids between 10 and 14.
Boyle: They're barely even getting into life! They shouldn't be thinking about ending their lives. It’s heartbreaking.
Robert Crosby: But that's exactly where they're at, and we add to the situation the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that came along with that; [they were] really universally traumatizing, for pretty much the entire generation and…
Boyle: For everybody.
Robert Crosby: And so the data from across the world, there's been meta, meta analysis of this, looking at studies from different countries. And fairly universally, looking at children and adolescents, clinical levels of anxiety and depression in kids have doubled. So now, globally speaking, one in five kids have clinical levels of anxiety and one in four have clinical levels of depression. So if you're in a ministry with ten kids, you can be all but guaranteed that you've got someone there who's hurting. There's probably a trauma component, but there's definitely something they're struggling with, even if you don't necessarily see it or they haven't shared something.
Lori Crosby: Yes, absolutely.
Boyle: Yes, and one thing that we talk about a lot is that behavior is communication. So maybe the kid doesn't come from a hard place, as you were describing, but maybe there is something else going on, what we call hidden disabilities or brain-based—whether it's a mental health kind of issue or it's more neurological, like on the high end of the autism spectrum. It really goes a long way for ministry leaders to get some information and equipping about how to recognize what's going on. You don't need a diagnosis; you don't need to be a diagnostician. But just having some awareness can really help you have a much better response and approach to working with the kid who maybe doesn't respond quite the same way that the larger group does.
Boyle: The research and the statistics that you have focused on for so much of your work, that’s a big part of what's going to be talked about in your intensive, that's a huge part of the work that you are doing. It is so important in terms of informing children's ministry and really student and even adult ministry. I say this all the time: kids grow up, and sadly, our challenges often grow up with us.
Boyle: It really is helpful for leaders of really any age group to have some awareness of these kinds of issues. But why do you think that these kinds of statistics and this kind of information is just now becoming noticed, as to how important it is in children's ministry? We hear, of course, a lot about mental health and and those kinds of impacts, just because of the nature of what we do. But it just seems like there is a church-wide awareness that has risen, thanks to COVID, of the mental health challenges that so many kids have, and trauma impacts. I mean, did it have to take a dang pandemic for us to get to the point where we pay attention to these things? But why do you think—just in your opinion—that the Church has been able to kind of not pay attention to this until recently?
Lori Crosby: Hmm, that's a really good question.
Boyle: Is it just a matter of—that it’s easier for us to deal with the majority, than just for the minority?
Lori Crosby: There's probably truth in that, and I think—like we were talking about earlier too, just the Church not having like a full understanding or awareness just even mental health struggles. I mean, there was mental health struggles before the pandemic, for sure, it's just been super heightened. I think sometimes it is overlooked or possibly can be over-spiritualized, brushed off, like ‘just pray harder.’ Just not understanding the neurobiology of the brain, how it works and how trauma and anxiety and depression really does impact a person.
Lori Crosby: You said, serving the majority. Because again, the Church is made-up of people and we’re fallible, and there's only so much bandwidth.
Boyle: Yes, but Jesus went after that one. So, you know, we're not about beating up anybody just because [they didn’t reach an individual]…
Lori Crosby: For sure for sure.
Boyle: Again, we know that, as you said, people only have so much bandwidth. But at the same time, I don't think God wants any child or any person to be a throw-away. I mean, in my head that's kind of what I think about, with that label.
Lori Crosby: Yes, I mean, that's what I heard, just hearing the stories of my clients. It was just like, ‘Oh, that’s not the father heart of God, because He goes after.’ It was just this powerful, ‘Okay, we need to help equip the church.’
Boyle: That's right.
Robert Crosby: And that's really—as we've looked at the data—because everything we do is data-driven—so as we've piloted the workshop; we survey the volunteers; we survey the pastors; we collect data longitudinally over several months. That's really been the most consistent theme: now they have the tools to keep the kids there. I'll hear the same story repeatedly: here's a situation that happened to a little boy; a little boy is crying. ‘This other kid hit me in the face!’ And they said, ‘Normally what it would have been is “okay, let's find the kid that did the hitting and let's call Mom and Dad. Let's get him out of here. We’ll try again next year.”
Robert Crosby: [After going through the RHK training]…they had a new approach, they said, ‘Okay, well, why don't we calm down the situation? Why don't we have a conversation? Let's just sit down and talk to a child—which wasn’t a new approach, but in a way it was—and they find out that the boys were playing ninja and it was not on purpose. They were playing, and they [ministry leaders] could explain why this might not be the best game to play in the church. And they apologize. They go through the process, and the kid’s just back in the ministry, participating.
Robert Crosby: They hear stories like this repeatedly. One pastor said, said, Normally about twice a week—each week, each weekend at least once during each service, we'd have to send someone back to their parents, but it’s maybe once or twice a month now. So it [RHK training] didn't solve everything, but it dropped about 90% of those situations.
Boyle: Yes, and it helps the kids start to develop their own problem solving skills, is what I'm hearing, too.
Robert Crosby: Well, it absolutely does, right? This is a whole process of learning to coach the kids and respond differently. And so this—the pattern we see is now, they're able to keep the kids in the service and use those behavior issues as a ministry opportunity rather than a trigger to send them away.
Boyle: Well, in addition to the ministry intensive that's on Thursday afternoon, April 27th, Robert, you're also going to be speaking on Saturday the 29th, talking in a Quick Take on ministry evaluation, including sharing some ways that ministry leaders can learn how to actually measure spiritual and relational growth. And as I said at the beginning, I'm very interested in hearing about this because several years ago we were really trying to figure out how to quantify some of these things. So again, without giving away your whole presentation, can you share just maybe one example where an evidence-based kind of evaluation really helped impact an individual? Or maybe it was a family, or an entire church?
Robert Crosby: Well, absolutely. One of my favorite examples comes out of Santiago. So when I was doing research with Every Generation Ministries, we were evaluating their ministry model. And they're doing team development. It's very relational-oriented and a lot of times we're working in places that are not relational. We spent time with this ministry, and they were in outreach. It's called the ‘Happy Hour Ministry’—and it's not with drinks—but their model is kind of a model of church planting; it’s what they would do on Saturday afternoons. There would be ‘Happy Hour,’ and they would go into communities, maybe a public park or a public square in the city, and they would do children's ministry there, blocks away from the church.
Robert Crosby: So kids would gradually come and they would do ministry with them. And over time, often in these situations, parents would come and eventually that would become a church plant. But they were in the early stages of this, and it was hard work. I mean, they had kids coming in from rival gang territories. They had behaviors that were just phenomenally challenging. They had a lot of discouragement, and they were really working hard. And so we took surveys; we did assessments. We went through this process like we're talking about, and then they went through their development, through the training development and they made a lot of structural changes to the ministry—a lot more relational focus, as I was talking about. It wasn't deliberately trauma-informed, but there were a lot of components that really were trauma-informed, even though they didn’t use that language. On Wednesday nights, they would pair up and go into the city and visit each child at home, knock on the door and bring food by or something like that.
Robert Crosby: So it's very hard, and they would wonder, if I'm even making a difference. So as we began to look at the data—and you know, I'm a statistics guy—so we start to quantify things and look at numbers. And what they saw was that there were incredible changes in how the kids felt connected, how they felt loved by adults, how they felt connected to the peers in the group and how they were saying that this is a safe place where I can share feelings. I can share thoughts. So people will help me with what I'm going through. And there are kids that normally—and I could even kind of quantify well, this is what you would expect with, you know quote-unquote ‘this type of kid,’ and usually a child from that background can be very slow to share their feelings. You know, a tough kid from a gang area is not going to show up and tell you how sad I feel! And yet, they saw these breakthroughs that were really unusual.
Robert Crosby: When they saw this, I get to meet with them and sit down face to face, and their faces lit up, and Wow! [They] could actually see, you know, quantifiable, measurable impacts of the work we're doing.
Boyle: Wow, that's amazing!
Robert Crosby: And the analogy I like to use, because I think a lot of people have experienced this is, you know, maybe it's New Year's and you decide to get back on that diet and get healthy again. You're working at it, sacrificing, and you're on the scale. You don't see anything. And then one day you step on the scale and you've lost 3 pounds!
Robert Crosby: Oh, it's working! Yes, I can, I can do this! And you're sort of motivated to double down on your efforts. That's exactly what would happen with these ministries. It's like, ‘Oh!’ I could actually physically see the impact over time and now we can double down. We can figure out what's working, what's not working!’ So it really gave them I think the enthusiasm, the passion, the vigor to chase that vision, and continue to bless that community.
Boyle: Well, that excitement and that impact, I think that is a huge part of why people need to come to DATC, because I'm sitting here thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, how can how can this be implemented in my church community? We have this big vision. We have a fairly recent new pastor. I'm just hearing so much good stuff that I want to apply in my own life!
Boyle: But anybody who's listening, you have the opportunity to come meet face-to-face with Robert and Lori, and learn from them, whether it's going to the ministry intensive, or just signing up for the conference. There is so much rich content that's going to be available at DATC 2023 this year. So I just really encourage you to check this out on the Key Ministry website.
Boyle: Robert and Lori, thank you so much for your time today! I'm so looking forward to hearing more about your presentation. I know I'm going to be tied up while you guys are doing your intensive, but I really look forward to kind of picking your brains and just learning from some of your experiences, because I just think it's so incredibly valuable what you're bringing to the ministry table at this time, when people are so aware of these needs. I just feel like we're in at a time of incredible momentum shift forward, and I think that God has uniquely equipped you guys to do something that's really important, to help propel the ministry work that we all do.
Robert Crosby: We really appreciate the opportunity. For folks that are interested, in the meantime, we do have a website up which is reachhurtingkids.com.
Lori Crosby: Thank you. Thank you.
Boyle: Thank you! Yes, thank you so much.
Robert Crosby: The book is on Amazon, “Trauma informed Children's Ministry: A Practical Guide to Reach Hurting Kids,” and the workshop materials and other information is on the website as well. So we'd encourage anyone who's interested to check it out.They can contact us in the meantime, and we'd be thrilled to talk to them at the conference.
Boyle: Yes, and we'll put all those links in the show notes. So if you're listening, it will be in our transcript. Again, thank you so much for joining us today. If you're listening, go to the Key Ministry website, check out DATC2023 on the top banner, and you'll find all the information about the conference and where you can register. So for the Key Ministry team, I'm Catherine Boyle. Thanks so much for listening to the Key Ministry podcast!
