To The Garden
Fifteen years ago I turned a youth room into a garden because I was learning something that I still believe about teenagers: sometimes they need to experience the message before they fully understand it.
What happens when the room itself becomes part of the sermon?
I turned our youth room into an actual garden.
For about a month, I had been teaching a series called To The Garden.
And when I say garden, I mean garden.
We brought real plants into the youth room. We added fountains.
We even built a makeshift waterfall out of stacked television sets.
The room wasn't just where the lesson happened. The room became part of the lesson.
We began the series in the obvious place: Genesis.
But the students quickly discovered that the biblical story of the garden didn't end when Adam and Eve left Eden.
We moved from Genesis into Ezekiel and eventually into the New Testament.
In different ways, we kept finding ourselves back in the garden.
Then we gave the students seeds.
During the first week, every student had an opportunity to plant seeds inside the youth room.
On one level, it was simple.
Put a seed into the soil. Add water. Wait.
But the physical act represented something bigger.
We talked about the seeds we plant in the lives of the people around us.
Every time students came back into the youth room, they watered what they had planted.
And then something happened.
The seeds began to grow.
The students weren't just hearing about growth. They were watching it happen.
Then we went somewhere dry.
In the second week, we moved into Ezekiel.
There the students encountered this picture of devastated land being restored.
“The desolate land will be cultivated instead of lying desolate... They will say, ‘This land that was laid waste has become like the garden of Eden.’”
EZEKIEL 36:34-35
The message was hope.
Dry things can live again.
Broken things can be restored.
God had not abandoned the world simply because the world was no longer Eden.
And that meant our students weren't simply waiting around for God to fix everything someday.
They could participate in what He was doing now.
We are invited to participate with God in bringing life into the places around us.
One way teenagers could begin doing that was by loving the people God had already placed in front of them.
Their schools. Their homes. Their friendships. Their ordinary lives.
The garden became a picture of what God could do in all of those places.
Eventually, the flowers bloomed.
The project was a lot of work.
But by the end of the series, the plants that had begun as seeds in a package were blooming inside our youth room.
And in 2011, I wrote that I felt like our students had bloomed with them.
Their minds were opening. Their hearts were reaching toward God.
– Jon, September 2011
I still believe teenagers need more than a lesson.
Reading this again fifteen years later makes me smile.
Partly because apparently younger me thought the obvious solution to teaching Genesis was hauling fountains and a pile of televisions into a youth room.
But underneath all of that, I recognize something that has remained pretty consistent in the way I think about ministry.
Teenagers don't just need to be told what is true. They need opportunities to experience what truth looks like lived out.
Tell a teenager that Christians serve people, and they may remember the sentence.
Put them beside someone who needs help, and they may remember the person.
Tell them that God brings growth, and they may understand the idea. Let them plant something, care for it, and watch it come alive, and suddenly the idea has a memory attached to it.
I don't think every sermon needs a waterfall made out of old televisions.
Actually, that's probably for the best.
But I do think there is something powerful about asking more than:
“What do I want them to hear?”
Sometimes the better question is:
What can I help them experience that will make this truth harder to forget?
Fifteen years later, I still believe some of the best ministry happens when Scripture moves out of our notes and becomes something teenagers can see, touch, practice and carry home with them.
Sometimes the thing they remember from the sermon is the thing they were invited to do.
JON ALLEN · UPDATED SEPTEMBER 2026