It’s 8:55 AM on a Sunday morning, and in walks Mason.
He’s a 4th grader, wearing a slightly oversized hoodie, carrying a water bottle covered in stickers, and before he even sits down in your circle, he’s already poked the kid next to him and announced that he doesn’t want to be here.
If you have lived around the Front Range for more than a month, you probably know Mason’s family. They spend their Saturdays hiking near the Flatirons, they go skiing in the winter, and from the outside, his life looks pretty picturesque.
But underneath that hoodie, Mason is navigating a world that you and I didn’t have to grow up in. He is ten years old, which means he is part of a generation that has never known a world without a constant, unfiltered stream of digital noise. He’s carrying this low-level hum of anxiety that he simply doesn’t have the vocabulary to explain. And relationally? He is desperately trying to figure out if he actually fits in anywhere.
So when he sits in your circle and acts out, or tells you a wildly inappropriate story about his brother, or brings up a random YouTube video right in the middle of your lesson… it’s easy to see him as a distraction. It’s easy to get frustrated.
But what if he isn’t trying to derail your group? What if he is just testing the waters?
Without even knowing it, Mason is asking a question: If I show you the real, messy, distracted version of me… is it still safe for me to be here? Over the last month, we’ve talked about what it means to Be Present. Showing up predictably and mentally is how you earn a seat in their lives. But what happens next? How do you take a circle of hyper-distracted, wonderful, chaotic elementary kids and turn it into a community?
You do it by stepping into our second Lead Small principle: Create a Safe Place. When you choose to create a safe place, you are proving to kids that Flatirons Kids isn’t just a place where they have to sit still and pretend to have the right answers. It’s a shelter. It’s an environment where they are fully known, fully accepted, and deeply loved.
But here is the catch: a safe place doesn’t just happen by accident. You have to build it. Over the next three weeks, we are going to unpack exactly how you build that kind of culture in your circle by focusing on three things:
- Lead the Group: How to actually set a culture of acceptance and honesty when kids are bouncing off the walls.
- Respect the Process: How to handle their toughest, most awkward questions about faith without freaking out.
- Guard the Heart: Knowing what to do when a kid shares something heavy that is above your pay grade.
If we get this right, everything changes. Because here is the truth: An elementary kid will never care what you have to say about God until they know they are safe with you. So, before I see you this weekend, I want you to think about this:
Think back to when you were in elementary or middle school. Who was the first adult, outside of your parents, who made you feel completely safe to just be yourself? What was it about their reaction, or the way they listened to you, that made you let your guard down?
Think about that person. Because this weekend, you get to be that person for someone else.