My name is Kaitlyn and I am the women’s director for St. Pete KLIFE. We also have a new Chapter Director, Fred Lalanne, who is out of town this weekend but you’ll probably see him around Gulf Coast. Before I tell you about KLIFE, I want you to think back to when you were a new believer. What did your time with the Lord look like? Did you know how to read your Bible? What did prayer look like for you? If you were anything like me, you didn’t have the slightest clue of how to read your Bible, your prayers were basically the same thing word for word every day because you had no idea what to say to God, and you thought that David was a book of the Bible. But if you look at your life now, hopefully, you can see where the Lord has grown you in maturity since that first day. And if I had to guess, I would think that several of you can probably think of someone that the Lord placed in your life who challenged you, who read through the Bible with you, who prayed with you, who spoke truth to you—someone who mentored or discipled you in the faith. And discipleship is what KLIFE is all about.

KLIFE is a non-profit youth ministry and we’ve been in St. Pete since about 2001. We’re actually a sister ministry to a summer camp in Branson, Missouri called Kanakuk Kamps. There are about 30 KLIFE chapters across the country, mostly in the Midwest. The heart of KLIFE is discipleship. We have weekly clubs for middle and high school students, which look really similar to a church youth group with games, worship, and a talk from the Bible, but the heart of our ministry is in small groups and one-on-one discipleship relationships. Every week after clubs we’ll break kids up into gender-specific small groups led by college students or young adults and that group will stay together for the entire school year. During small group time, students get to dig deeper into God’s word. And really that small group becomes a family—they walk through the good times and the bad times with one another and they get to encourage and pray for one another. One of my greatest joys in small group is when it’s a day that I don’t have to say anything—when I can open with a question and the girls are the ones having the conversation, asking questions of one another, opening their Bibles and finding the answers, and creating new questions of their own.

However, we don’t want to just see kids on club nights. We want to “do life” with them and disciple them in their faith. We want to go to their basketball games, help them with homework, get ice cream while we talk about the Bible, have small group sleepovers where we stay up all night eating hot Cheetos and playing board games. Basically we want to build relationships with our students, constantly pointing students to the Bible, so that they would be presented complete in Christ—all of that while having tons of fun. KLIFE’s theme verse says it well—1st Thessalonians 2:8—“Having so fond an affection for you, we were well-pleased to impart to you not only the gospel of God but also our own lives because you had become very dear to us.”

We also have a ministry for 3rd-5th graders called Super K that happens twice a month at Great Explorations. In Super K the kids get to play in the museum for a while and then we’ll pull them in for some group games and a bible lesson. We try to do things with these kids that are more interactive. Last year we taught them hand motions that tell the entire story of the Old Testament and it was incredible to see them be able to do the hand motions and explain them. That opened up some really cool conversations about how the entire Old Testament points to Jesus.

There are a few ways you can be praying for KLIFE. First, the Lord has brought in a lot of new students already this semester, especially in middle school, and we need to multiply ourselves with more young adult or college leaders. Second, pray for Fred and I to continue doing faithful ministry no matter what obstacles we face this year. Third, and most important, that the gospel would reach new students and that it would saturate the hearts of students that are already involved in KLIFE.

Klub Times:

Super K (3rd-5th)—1st and 3rd Thursday of the month from 6-7:15pm at Great Explorations

Middle School (6th-8th grade)—Mondays from 6:30-8:30pm at St. Pete Christian

High School (9th-12th grade)—Tuesdays from 7-9pm at St. Pete Christian

Learn more about KLIFE here: www.stpete.klife.com