Reverend Mel Kawakami said the path followed by a college student who is currently serving as the new youth leader for Newtown United Methodist Church was an act of faith.

The senior pastor of NUMC, Rev Kawakami has had a new leader for his church’s younger members since last summer.

Brendan Fox, 24, is not ordained, but does have the blessing of NUMC’s trustees, who interviewed and then hired the Bethel resident late last year after a serendipitous series of events brought him to the Sandy Hook church.

“It’s actually kind of a funny story,” Mr Fox said. “I had, maybe in March, a discussion with my pastor at Bethel United Methodist Church, Karen Cook, about my future. I knew I wanted to go back to school, but I had no idea what I wanted to do for a career.”

Somewhere in the conversation the idea of youth ministry came up.

“I had never really considered it before, but for some reason I had been thinking about it,” he said. “So we had a decent discussion about it, and she even made the joke that there aren’t that many opportunities that usually arise in that field.”

Karen Cook, the senior pastor at Bethel UMC, also recalls the conversation.

“I laughed,” she admitted last week. “So few churches have money to spend on youth ministry, and I told him that. But that’s what we need right now.”

About a week later Rev Cook and Rev Kawakami met for brunch.

“At that lunch,” Rev Kawakami said, “I told her, ‘We’re looking for a youth leader, so if there’s anybody you know of …’ And her jaw literally dropped,” he said, laughing. 

“She told me about a conversation she had just had with Brandon,” he said. The two church leaders quickly arranged for Rev Kawakami and Mr Fox to meet, which was followed in short order by the start of conversations between Mr Fox and NUMC’s Staff Parish Relations Committee. That committee, said Rev Kawakami, serves as the church’s personnel committee.

“We went through the entire interview process, and then I came in to meet the trustees, and the council,” said Mr Fox. Interviews were conducted in late June and July.

“It seemed like it was a good fit, and they asked me to come back,” he said with a laugh.

He started his part-time position with NUMC on August 1, and has been there “every Sunday since,” said Mr Fox. He is beginning to develop a new youth group program, where the church’s younger members are invited to meet with him on Sunday afternoons for various activities “and different things either around the community or here at the church,” he said.

Most of Mr Fox’s energies so far have been focused on group activities and fundraising.

“We have a boy in our congregation who is suffering from lymphoma, so one of the first things we did was participate in The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Light The Night event last summer,” he said. “We had an opportunity to be part of his team. It was a cool moment for me to be able to see the congregation come together to support someone who I had barely met. That was the very, very beginning of my time here.”

Mr Fox has also participated with NUMC on its CROP Walk team, which joined groups from other houses of worship during the annual autumn event. His continued work has been to publicize his new role within the church, and to get the younger members to become involved in the youth program. He admits there is a challenge.

“It can be difficult sometimes to start something new, and especially at the stages of middle school and high school life, where kids already have their minds set on the things they want to be involved in,” said Mr Fox. “Sometimes to come in and start something new can be challenging, but it takes persistence and it takes being open and being honest with people, telling them that you are here to help them, and to be there for them.”

Mr Fox has been co-teaching this year’s Confirmation class. It is, he said, “a fantastic opportunity to grow as a leader, but also to get to know some of the kids.

“It’s the perfect environment to learn about them, and for them to learn about me,” he added.

His position also calls for Mr Fox to be involved in NUMC’s Church School classroom, which includes discussion and activities with eighth grade and high school-age students on Sunday mornings. The youth group was planning an overnight lock-in for the end of December when Mr Fox spoke with The Bee for this story and had already begun planning for Souper Bowl of Caring, an event on February 1 that will benefit a local food bank on Super Bowl Sunday.

“We haven’t had a lot of events like this since I’ve been here,” he said, “so this is really exciting for me, to see the community of youth come together just to do some fun stuff, to create memories together.”

He will often look at the sermon being planned by Rev Kawakami for ideas on what he will be speaking with the youth group about each weekend, said Mr Fox.

“That goes back to the idea that we all should be learning at the same time, but maybe approaching a topic in a different way,” he said.

Rediscovering Faith

A 2008 graduate of Bethel High School, Mr Fox is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in music at Western Connecticut State University, with a voice concentration.

“You gotta hear him sing,” said Rev Cook. “He’s an awesome musician. He writes music, plays guitar, and boy does he sing. He’s just an amazing singer.”

Mr Fox had been thinking about teaching in a public school setting, but began recently seeing that that setting would have “so many hoops to jump through,” he said. It would not allow as much one-on-one interaction as a private or church setting.

“I feel like the position where I am now, I have the opportunity to develop a relationship with people, and that is going to be what really teaches a lesson, as opposed to teaching from a curriculum,” he said.

He has been asked to put in 20 hours of time each week at Newtown UMC which, as Rev Cook pointed out, allows Mr Fox “to still finish school. It’s perfect.”

Before he can become ordained, Mr Fox will need to earn a master’s degree. 

“Step one is finishing that degree,” said Rev Cook. “And he’s right there.”

Rev Kawakami said his congregation is very happy with Mr Fox and what he brings to the Church Hill Road house of worship.

“They see the light of faith shine through him. They have supported what he has done so far, and they are truly looking forward to the development of this ministry in their midst,” he said.

Meanwhile, Mr Fox is hoping to see an increased involvement in the church’s youth in the full congregation.

“Youth can be easily segregated into a smaller microcosm of a church, but we are one church, we are one congregation. We are one community,” he said. “The youth should be part of that.

“Obviously you can’t have everybody doing everything together, all the time,” he added. “And I think it’s appropriate to have youth-appropriate and youth-specific events, but eventually my hope is that the youth of this congregation will be just a very vital, and well incorporated part of this congregation as a whole.”

The serendipity that brought Mr Fox to Newtown United Methodist Church last year may have started much earlier than the conversation between Pastor Kawakami and Pastor Cook. Mr Fox was raised in the Catholic Church, and attended St Mary’s in Bethel until he was about ten years ago. He was “not part of any church,” he said, during his middle and high school years.

It wasn’t until he began attending classes at WestConn that he met people involved in the university’s youth ministry program. He went to a few different churches — “I went ‘church shopping,’” he said — having been invited by friends to join them on Sundays. He found himself falling in love with the Methodist faith about six years ago.

“I walked into Bethel United Methodist Church and saw a number of my friends there,” he recalled. “I walked in one morning while they were doing a fundraiser and saw literally about 30 people I already knew and never looked beyond it.”

He loves, he said, “the Methodist tradition of being open and available to everyone, as they are, where they are, when they are is a reason why I am a part of this church today,” he said. Mr Fox officially joined the Methodist Church on Easter 2010, shortly before his 20th birthday.

Although he has taken the position at Newtown’s Methodist church, he is still a member of BUMC, which Rev Cook appreciates.

“He came to our 9 o’clock Christmas Eve service, in between the two Newtown UMC services, and sang with our choir,” she said. “It was awesome.”

Looking back, Pastor Cook says the idea of serving others may have grown out of an annual project Mr Fox had participated in with Bethel UMC, the Appalachian Service Project (ASP).

“Brendan has been part of our ASP, which we do over Fourth of July weekend, every summer for a few years,” Pastor Cook continued. “I think through that he may have learned that service to others is the way to go.”

Rev Kawakami could not be happier, he said, with the newest addition to his church staff.

“It was an act of God that he came to us,” Rev Kawakami said last month. “He is perfect.”

Brendan Fox sits in a meeting room at Newtown United Methodist Church, where he has been hired to serve as the church’s new youth leader. Mr Fox is continuing his studies at Western Connecticut State University while working to create a more active program for the younger members of the congregation.