Hanne and Scott Larson have spent nearly 35 years serving high-risk and incarcerated youth with Bible studies, re-entry, job readiness and other programs now operative in 40 states and 35 nations. To date, about 75,000 young people have been assisted.
But the couple, who launched Straight Ahead Ministries with one Bible study in one juvenile detention center in Massachusetts in 1987, say their calling is about relationships, not numbers.
“It’s about conversations we have with them and the relationships we build when they are in detention,” Hanne said. “They get to see God not as a concept, but as a part of their lives as we walk with them in practical ways as they come out of detention.”
Scott and Hanne Larson
And now the Larsons’ personal calling is widening. “We also have a heart to equip the church to minister to those on the fringes and to be a resource to parents, especially those with children who are struggling with gender and sexuality issues,” Hanne said. “I’ve recently started writing and processing being a mother of a son who is gay and realizing the pain I contributed to him during his growing up years.
Hanne and Scott are nothing if not all-in on the service they sense God directing them to pursue.
Earlier in the 1980s, Scott was a stockbroker living in Minnesota when he felt a tug to more boldly live his faith. “So, I started spending my vacations smuggling Bibles into China and Russia. I just needed to do something different with my life.”
Feeling called to work with youth, he traveled as youth evangelist, went on to study at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Boston and was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister in 1985. His journey took him to the American Baptist Churches USA and Converge, formerly known as the Swedish Baptist and Baptist General conferences. He has authored 13 books on working with high-risk youth.
Hanne was raised in the Evangelical Free Church in Denmark as the daughter of American missionaries. “I grew up in a home where my parents really modeled faith,” she said. “They really lived it. Growing up in a missionary family, I got to see at a very young age God coming through in supernatural ways. God was very real to me.”
An encounter at church with a missionary from Pakistan revealed an interest in what would become urban ministry, she recalled. “At the end of the service I was clear that I had to do something that put my life on the line for God. “
Her supervisor suggested she take a Bible study into a juvenile detention center.
She came to the U.S. to study social work and to minister in Minneapolis’ inner-city. There, her supervisor suggested she take a Bible study into a juvenile detention center.
“I was, literally, crying on the way there and telling God I was in way over my head and that this is not for me,” Hanne recalled.
But she left the session with a transformed perspective. “I felt God moving in that group that night, and driving home I said, ‘I’m doing this the rest of my life.’”
The couple launched Straight Ahead Ministries shortly after Hanne moved to Massachusetts to join Scott. The Bible study she founded in one facility grew to other locations and a residential home for newly released offenders. Now, a network of churches, ministries and volunteers is replicating the practice nationally.
“There are 1,200 juvenile detention facilities in the U.S., and two-thirds don’t have any ministry in them,” Scott said. “We are working to get people like us, who didn’t even know these places existed, to go in and do this kind of ministry.”
“There are 1,200 juvenile detention facilities in the U.S., and two-thirds don’t have any ministry in them.”
Churches may adopt an individual detention center or collaborate with other congregations to serve one or multiple facilities. Ministries often include providing Christmas gifts, monthly birthday clubs and weekly Bible studies for detained youth, Hanne explained. “We publish all kinds of materials for these populations. There is a lot churches can do.”
A website was launched to help connect individuals and churches who want to help incarcerated youth, Scott added. “We want to be a place where people can live out their callings.”
And at the moment, Hanne said she and Scott are venturing into what may be an additional ministry field for them — helping Christian parents lovingly guide their children who are discovering their sexual or gender identity.
The inspiration comes from the experience with their gay son, Hanne said. “We didn’t realize how much fear there was for him growing up in a Christian home and in church. What he was going through didn’t fit into my box, and I never considered how damaging this was to my son.”
It came to light for the Larsons when their son sat them down to share how painful it was growing up in their home.
“I almost can’t live with that, but I have to own that,” Hanne said. “In this Christian world we don’t set out to harm our children, but our fear of things not being the way we think they should be, that can be harmful to the ones we love most.”
She had to look at and accept her part in the situation, she said, just as she had to do all those years ago with her calling to lead Bible studies in juvenile detention centers.
“Praying to get everyone else to change wasn’t working so great. So, I prayed, ‘God, change me.’”
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