Member Spotlight 3: Glen Crouse, ‘Jesus, Your Very Best Friend’

Pastor Glen Crouse saw a need for a children’s book on the basics of faith in Christ, so he wrote one.

As the spiritual leader of Rantoul Christian Church in Rantoul, Illinois, he is often approached by parents saying their children wanted to be baptized. Could he talk to them?

The problem was, Glen says, that he was typically unable to discern whether these children understood the Christian faith and the symbolism of baptism. Parents, he says, are usually better at discerning the spiritual condition of their children.

Glen needed a resource to give to parents to work through with their children—something that could help children understand their need for faith in Christ and their need to be baptized.

“A few years ago, I had several parents come to me within days of each other,” he says. “I just decided it was time to get it done.”

“It” was the 33-page booklet Jesus, Your Very Best Friend, which takes children through an understanding of their need to repent and to obey Jesus. Glen says he wrote it in a way that allows a child’s level of interest to dictate the pace they proceed—and whether they proceed at all.

“If they’re really interested and obsessed by it, let them do it at their own pace,” Glen says. “If they find out that it’s requiring a little bit of work and study, that may indicate that their interest is not from pure motives. If they don’t want to learn about Jesus and what that means, maybe they’re not ready to make a life-changing decision.”

He urges parents to let a child’s “own inner thirst and hunger drive them in the right direction.”

“It’s another one of those things I as a preacher can’t really determine,” Glen says. “Their speed at moving through the book is indicative of how genuine their faith really is.”

The pastor gave the book the friendship spin to give it “a flavor that would be attractive to children and to their parents as well.”

“That was not necessarily a Biblical idea, and yet it’s not counter to Scripture either, to call Jesus our friend,” Glen says. “It was more for softening the approach rather than giving it a theological title, more of an approach to catch their eye and their interest.”

Glen developed this approach over 35 years in the ministry.

“I had referenced most of these Bible passages in discussions with adults and children, so it was really a matter of collating the material,” he says.

The booklet has been out in its original, home-produced form for a little more than a year, and in a publisher’s version since April. Besides members of his congregation, his main customers have been other “preacher friends” who have been ordering as many as 20 copies at a time. Glen says he received an immediate positive response when he first started sending review samples to churches and knew it “was something that was really needed out there.”

“I realized it needed to come out of my hands,” he says.

For Glen, the “bottom line” was “to see children make an informed decision for Christ.”

“Not an emotional one, not because their friends are doing it,” he says. “I want them to understand their commitment for doing it. If it’s not an informed decision, they’ll fall away.”