Articles by
Steve Dennie

Travel Articles

The Well

Hang Out, Grab a Burger, Play Some Pool, Demolish a CD
with a Sledgehammer. A glimpse inside the exciting Friday
night youth outreach at our church in Holly Hill, Fla.

Steve Dennie

March 2000

Walk into the Daytona UB church on a Friday night, and you might be surprised. Music is blaring loud loud LOUD. Black lights and strobe lights, and sometimes a smoke machine, add to the atmosphere. And there are teens, scores of them, 150 on a typical night. Clean-cut teens and gang teens, and everything in between. They're playing pool, and ping pong, and foosball, and furiously fingering Nintendo and PlayStation controllers at the ten TVs lining one wall. Some might even be dancing.

Huh? In a denomination where a few churches still can't stomach the idea of playing drums in the sanctuary, and think pool tables are of the devil?

What is GOING ON in this church?

They're reaching kids for Christ, that's what.

You've come to The Well. Like the well where Jesus met the Samaritan woman, it's a place for refreshment and witnessing.

Every Friday night (unless it's a holiday), volunteers transform the church's four fellowship halls into game rooms, a concert room, and a café. From 7:00 to 10:00, the place is open to junior highers. Of the 150 teens who come weekly, 75-100 are in that age group. After they head home, high schoolers come in and own the place until 11:30.

"The Lord gave me the idea that we needed a fun place to minister one-on-one, where we wouldn't be shoving the gospel down their throat," says Tammy Cranston. "So many teens just need somewhere to hang out. "

Tammy and her husband, Sam, presented a proposal to the church board, somebody donated $275 for startup costs, and they took off. This June, they'll start Year Four.

So they adapted. "Now, we don't have any structure--that's what's neat about it." Teens drop in and do whatever they want. They appreciate a place where they can just hang out.

Another change was opening it to junior high. The original focus was high schoolers, but they're just way too busy. They realized they would have better luck attracting junior high teens. But, Tammy cautions, "With middle schoolers, you need more staff, because they have more energy and like to tear stuff up. "

They've tried elements of the coffeehouse concept, bringing groups for a full-blast concert in the sanctuary. But the teens weren't all that interested. "They didn't want to leave their pool game," Tammy says.

On a typical night, Tammy rushes home from work, changes quickly, and heads for the church, arriving around 5:30 or 6:00. Soon, other adult and teen volunteers arrive. There is a lot of setup to do. Already Matt McKeown, who came aboard as the church's youth pastor a year and a half ago, will have been preparing The Well for duty, with the help of another batch of volunteers.

The doors open at 7:00. Music is blaring, lights are going. Let the fun begin.

A core of ten volunteers serve nearly every Friday, and another 5-10 help occasionally. One person stays in the game room constantly. Bill Hull or Ernie Grossholz, guys who are friendly but don't take any guff, can be found at the door, signing in teens as they arrive. If a parent calls and asks if a son or daughter is there, they can check the list. "Some get in too fast, but we get most of them," Tammy says.

New teens come every week. Most don't attend church. They've posted some rules: no horseplaying, swearing, fighting, smoking, drugs. If they leave the building, they can't come back in. They had teens coming and going, and realized some parents probably figured they were there the whole time. Since the church had some liability, they made the rule.

The church hires, at $18 an hour, an off-duty policeman to spend three hours at The Well. "We do have some troubled teens who come," Tammy says. "Four gang kids come regularly. They check it out and play some games, but don't stay long. We've had a couple fights, but those weren't with gang members. "

The Well spans four rooms which flow into each other (the church once ran a retirement center here, so there's plenty of space). They started with one pool table, an air hockey table, a ping pong table, a CD player, a dart board, and some tables and chairs. Now they've got three more pool tables, a new ping pong table, ten TVs in a row for playing video games, lots of videogames ( very popular), couches, benches--all of it donated. A bunch of TVs mounted high on walls are wired into a VCR so they can show Christian videos.

They perform music in a room called King David's Chat. A high school group called Silver Chickens pretends to play instruments, but actually just sings the words of some other group's recorded song. A fun Ska band called Frontslide aka Ducktape, from New Smyrna Beach, has been with them almost from the beginning; they're a big hit when they come. "But most of the time it's Matt and his brothers, Joshua and David," Tammy says. "Once in awhile, they'll play some oldies, and the teens don't mind a little of that. "

All of the music, whether CDs or videos, is Christian music. You won't hear Gaither stuff here--banish the thought. Nor Amy Grant--still too tame. Rather, it's the Newsboys, AudioAdrenaline, the Insyderz, DCTalk, The Supertones, and other groups you haven't heard of, but which speak the language of this generation. "A lot of these teens listen to groups like Marilyn Manson and Korn," Tammy explains. "We're giving them an alternative. "

Tammy says the teens even do swing dancing to Christian music. "It's really a blast to see them having a good time. "

And there's the café, which opens at 7:30 with its fun little menu. Pat Sullivan, one of the Well originals and a longtime youthworker at Daytona, cooks a mean hamburger. A few dollars will get you the Super Sullivan Special--double burger, fries, and drink. Or try the Heavenly Hotdog Combo, or a chicken sandwich, or something else. They sell all kinds of sodas, juice drinks, teas, and piles of candy. And with 50 orders for their fabulous milkshakes each night, the blenders blend fulltime. Sometimes, parents who drop off their children catch a meal in the café before leaving. And all the volunteers get a free meal.

The café also provides what little funding The Well requires. If they need to buy something--for instance, they go through a ping pong paddle and three or four balls every week--they raid the profits from the café. But mostly, the café just covers the next week's food. They also donate part of each week's profits to a local radio ministry called The Sword.

The only structure is Matt's 9:00 object lesson. He uses Scripture, but mostly discusses something teens deal with regularly. Time's sparse, just 15-30 minutes, so he makes it practical, lively, and fast-paced. Teens aren't always crazy about putting down their pool cues or joysticks to hear someone talk, but they've learned that Matt won't bore them silly.

"If you don't keep them too long, teens will sit there and listen," Tammy says. "Matt also leads them in prayer, which is cool, since a lot of these teens aren't around much prayer. "

Then Matt leads them in doing other fun things. Like sledgehammering CDs with questionable messages, whether it's a satanic group of a seemingly tame group like TLC or Mariah Carey. "Music doesn't have to be satanic to have a negative influence on your life," Matt says.

A sign on the fireplace mantle says "Kill Your Idols." Teens bring things to contribute to the wall, things that have been idols in their lives and have kept them from doing what God wants them to do. They'll bring trashy CDs, Tarot cards, posters of music groups, shirts with whatever printed on them. Some have brought computer keyboards, admitting that the internet has kept them from doing God's will.

The volunteers, along with teens from the church, use The Well to build relationships with unchurched teens. They can do that while playing pool or while drinking a shake. At least five persons have prayed to receive Christ at The Well, and others have been shepherded to church groups.

"When we started," Tammy says, "most of the teens in my high school class attended a Christian high school. That made it hard to grow the youth group. But because of The Well, the classes have had an influx of teens.

Strategically, Tammy says, "More and more we realized The Well would be like a hub, a place to influence teens and feed them into the other church groups, like the Wednesday night Bible class and the FLOK. "

FLOK? That is Matt's Sunday night youth church--a radical, students-only worship service. Freely Letting Others Know. It is high energy, fast-paced, and averages 50-60 teens. The Well is a great bridge for unchurched teens to come to The FLOK, where the Gospel can be heard a little more clearly.

Or, at least, clearly to them.