Aaron Lee speaks with Izzy Koo, junior at Pepperdine University, about her second published book, Finding You: 8- Week Teen Bible Study Guide. They share their mutual love for youth and the importance of mentorship and discipleship.
You can watch the interview below, on our YouTube page, or listen to it on podcasts.
Aaron Lee: Hi everyone. This is Aaron for SOLA Network, and I am here today with Izzy Koo. Izzy, I’m so happy to be talking to you. I think it’s kind of interesting how we got connected. It was Pastor Steve that connected us, actually. And I knew about you from your interview with Soojin over on SOLA. I’m really happy to be looking at your new Eight Week Teen Bible Study Guide. I’m sure that there’s a lot of differences between you and me, but one thing that we do have in common is a love for youth, and that’s what I want to talk about today. I’m really excited to be talking to you about this. Can you introduce yourself a little bit more and your study guide and your book to us as well?
Izzy Koo: Yeah, thank you for the introduction. It’s great to be back. My name is Izzy Koo. I’m a current Junior right now at Pepperdine University, studying English and religion. And I hope to go into youth ministry in the future. And yeah, a little bit about me. I guess I wrote my first book Finding God, Finding Me a little while ago, when I was 16 years old, just because of just a radical encounter I had with Jesus that absolutely changed my life.
And from there, I’ve just been so invested in the youth and the next generation. So I’ve been speaking at a lot of different events, different churches, but also working on this Bible study guide that just got released this summer, which is really exciting. And it’s just an eight week experience for teenagers to go on a journey with God and really find their identity in Christ. And it’s kind of a spin off and supplement in my first book. And it uses some of the similar ideas, but it’s a workbook style so teams can gather together in groups and really go on a journey to get to know God better and get to know themselves better as well.
Aaron Lee: It’s super ambitious, and I think you did a great job of putting it out there. Your study guide mentioned a lack of youth pastors and counselors. I think that was part of the reason why you wanted to put this out there. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you meant by that? Tell me what your experience was.
Izzy Koo: Yeah, it’s a good question. In my experience, just growing up in Washington, there hasn’t been an abundance, right? just of youth pastors, but not only youth pastors, but also youth leaders, youth mentors. And I was privileged enough, when I was in high school, to have just a brilliant youth pastor who also doubled as my mentor at the time, and her mentorship in my life changed everything for me. Because her mentorship included just her encouragement in my life. She saw me, she heard me, but she also just believed in me. And she called me to not only who I thought I could be, but who God really called me to be. And she helped me to step into that. And that’s kind of how that first book was written through her guidance. And so I just had a lot of mentorship in my life. I feel like that was really crucial for me in my just walk with God.
And what I’m seeing now with kind of, you know, the younger generation, including my two sisters, who are 15 and 11, just a lack of mentorship in their lives. They don’t have youth leaders, let alone just college students and just young adults who are invested in their lives. And I think I just really see a need for that, just because of the way it impacted me. And I know that these young people, they’re so gifted and they have all these capabilities and talents. They just need somebody to call them into who they can be. And so, yeah, that’s kind of what I mean by a lack of youth pastors and leaders that I see.
Aaron Lee: I hear you. I want us to go deeper into that. Let’s say that some other person recognizes that and is like, yeah, there’s a lack of youth pastors, youth counselors – but not a lot of teens will go and write a study guide to solve that problem. What was it that made you do that? What was it where you were like, Okay, this is a good solution for it or maybe not a solution, but this is something that you could do?
Izzy Koo: Yeah, I remember I was talking to my mom one day, and I was just like, you know, Mom, I’m just so discouraged. There’s no youth leaders. Like, where are all the mentors? Like, I want my sisters, I want the youth to be invested in. And I remember my mom just looked at me, and she was like, if you don’t see youth leaders or mentors around you, you be that mentor, right? And if you don’t see curriculum and if you don’t see resources that you want to use, make your own right? And she kind of just said it plainly like that. And I remember thinking, Oh, kind of that’s not what I was expecting to hear. But I really took my mom’s advice to heart. And I realized, yeah, this is like my church, my youth, and then my sisters that we’re talking about. If I don’t see, you know what I want to see available for them, I guess I’ll have to take on the task of creating it. And I really felt God was leading me towards that direction.
And so what I did was I took my book and I took my own experience with God, and I just literally wrote in a notebook, just a bunch of ideas, a bunch of questions, discussion things, and basically wrote a mini version of a curriculum. And I got my sister together with her friends. I was like, Olivia, who are two of your friends that really want to get to know God better? And she had two girls. We met at a coffee shop, and for the whole summer, we just met together. Every single week, I bought them treats and drinks, and we just went through these questions, right? And just had discussions with each other. And it was transformational, not only for me, but for them, and just for them to have a mentor figure in their lives, an older sister, right? Somebody who really wanted to care for them and also wanted to read Scripture with them, and all these things.
And because it went so well, there was a couple other youth at my church who were asking, Hey, can we do the study with you? Right? And I was like, oh, you know, maybe I can turn this into an actual curriculum that, you know, churches and youth groups can use. So that’s kind of how the study guide came about. It was just that notebook, those scribbles that turned into kind of what you’re holding in your hands now, yeah,
Aaron Lee: I think that’s awesome. I think it’s so inspiring to hear that you took action. You weren’t just complaining or venting. But you were wanting to help. And not only were you talking about big picture stuff, but you looked in your home and you’re like, hey, you actually cared enough for your own sisters to have that type of mentorship, discipleship even.
And I think that’s something that I can sense just from reading it – is that you care deeply about the upcoming generation. Yes, it’s your sisters, for sure. But it’s bigger than that. And what I appreciate is that it’s not like…I didn’t get the sense that you were looking down on them. And that’s what I want to ask you on here – about your study guide. I feel like it does tackle some mature topics. I think you start kind of easy, you know, easing them into it. But there’s one that stood out to me… you started talking about patience. And you said that the way we perceive people, or just our perspective on different things, that affects us in how we are patient towards people, or patient towards situations. And to me, as an old guy, I was like, Man, that’s good. That’s good. I need that in my life.
And so I want to ask you, how do you see youth handling what I consider to be these more mature topics? Are they mature topics to you, or are they just normal topics for you? How do you see them wrestling with these things and working this out in their lives?
Izzy Koo: Yeah, I think I really took experience from my own experience, right? Of encountering God. One of the first things that I found when I found God was patience, right? I used to be a really impatient person, and struggled a lot with that, especially in my relationship with my sisters, for example. And so what I found in my relationship with God was God really changed my perspective on that, because he gave me his perspective on people, right? How do you see people in the lens of God? How do you see people in the lens of love?
And so when you I guess when you say like that, it could sound like a mature topic, but I think at the end of the day, every teen struggles with patience at some level, right? And the question is, how do we become more patient in our lives and kind of switching our perspective? That’s the answer that I found for my life and my story, and I don’t know.
After I did my study guide with my middle sister and her friends, I also did it with my youngest sister, who was only in fifth grade at the time, and with couple of her fifth grade friends. And they absorbed it all, even the patience one, right? I remember one of the girls in my group really struggled to show patients to her older sister, right? And she was able to vocalize that to me, and I was like, Okay, let’s try changing your perspective. And it’s it kind of radically altered the way that she thought, even as a fifth grader, right? And so I think topics are mature, but youth are more capable than we know, and they’re ready to absorb these difficult topics and really apply them to their lives.
Aaron Lee: Yeah, so as as as young as fifth grade! I didn’t even catch that. That’s incredible. When you were writing this, you said that your study guide is best used in a small group. I think that’s what you meant. Now you said that you can do it individually, just on your own, but I want to ask you why you felt the need to emphasize this small group aspect of it.
Izzy Koo: Yeah, yeah. It’s a good question. I think everything is better in community, but especially as a youth. And especially the youth that I know in the area that I live, I think they just need to know that there are other youth that are also seeking God. The journey can often feel very lonely for me. I felt that way when I was going through my relationship with God and kind of seeking him at school. I didn’t have any Christian friends, right? I had some at church. But, you know, I felt very lonely in my walk. And an important part of a youth’s walk with God is the accountability of knowing that there’s other people, not only to just keep them accountable, but to encourage them in their own journey.
And so I find the group settings very, very beneficial. There’s great discussion that happens, lots of vulnerability, but also a lot of accountability as well. And those girls that did this study together. They’re going to stay with each other. We still talk in our group chat, right? And there’s a lot of power in just small groups. So, yeah, I encourage anybody to do the study, to do it in a group of your friends, right? People, community.
Aaron Lee: That’s awesome. The way I see it is that I feel like you’re pushing more for discipleship, because the way you structure it is that there is supposed to be a leader in the group working through the study. I think the point was that as I’m holding the study, I’m leading a group of people. And I felt that that was more of a discipleship aspect, which I think is great. At the end you say, now after you’ve done this study, you need to go and do it with other people. I think that’s awesome. It’s great that you’re kind of pushing people a little bit more out of their comfort zones, maybe something that you actually like feels driven to.
Izzy Koo: Yeah. I think discipleship part is really important, though, having a leader to lead right? And I think when we think of leader, it’s easy to think of youth pastor, right, ministry leader, older adult. But I want to emphasize that a leader is anyone who has a testimony of Jesus and who loves God, right? So that can be an older youth student, right? That’s, you know, high schoolers, college students, young adults. These are the people that I also see leading the study. And a lot of you know college and young adults have a lot of apprehension going into these things. Oh, I’m not ready. I’m not qualified. I don’t know enough about God. But I believe that you just need your testimony of Jesus and you need to know God. And if you have those two things, you are equipped to lead this study, because God will equip you to what he’s called you to do. And so. I love what you said about the discipleship part, because that is a huge part, I think, of why I created this guide as well.
Aaron Lee: Izzy, I want to go off script for a second. What have been some of the biggest joys of this coming out? Have you been encouraged with it at all?
Izzy Koo: Yeah, I think it’s been so encouraging. First of all, just this coming out in general, right? I didn’t, I didn’t have any experience writing curriculum or anything like that. This is really a God given dream, I feel like last summer, when I went through this study with my sisters and their friends. And now to see it come to fruition.
And now those girls that I went with this through the study with now they’re older, and there’s so much more grown in their faith. And what I envision for them is for them to take this study and now lead other youth with it, and so I’m just seeing so much growth. And those girls who’ve been asking, you know, can we do this study with you? I’m now, this summer, going to lead some of those groups, right? And it’s really exciting being able to have a physical copy of something like this, and being able to lead more groups through just this transformational experience that I believe that they can have through this Bible study guide so, so many ways.
Aaron Lee: Yeah, and it is based off of God’s word. I love it. Izzy. I want to end with one more question, and I think that you’re in a special position to be able to answer this, just because of your work and your passion here. What do you see God doing? Or how is he working in this upcoming generation? Really, the generation that you’re aiming, you’re ministering towards.
Izzy Koo: Yeah, it’s such a great question. I think God is doing so much. And the one thing I want to say is that these youth, this next generation is so extraordinary in so many ways, right? They’re so gifted, they’re so kind, they’re so talented, and they’re just great people. You know? They’re beyond just great youth. They’re great people.
And I think what I want to see now going forward, is people like like us, right? Leaders and people who are older really investing in this next generation, because they have everything they need. They have the talents, the gifts God has equipped them with, all of those things. Now they just need someone to call them right to who they can be and have them step into their God given identity. And these are the leaders that are going to change the world. And so I’m excited just witnessing and seeing and being, you know, a champion of youth, seeing all that they’re capable of, and I hope that the world is able to see it too.
Aaron Lee: That’s awesome, Izzy. This is Finding You: An Eight Week Teen Bible Study Guide. Izzy, thanks so much for your time. I’m happy that we got to talk, and I’m very… honestly, I’m blessed by the work and seeing what you’re doing. It’s inspiring, and I’m excited to see what else God does with you and your ministry. Thank you.