Integrated Strategy

I am not technically a children’s minister. I am what I like to think of as a ministry designer. But my actual title is LifeChurch.tv Central Curriculum Developer. So my thoughts about the first part of Orangeness, Integrated Strategy, will come from that perspective.

First for a confessional. At our church, as recently as a few months ago, check out this list of the lines of curriculum we had in play.

Under the Sea for 2s,

In the Jungle for 3s,

The Ark for 4s,

Crosstown for 5s,

LifeKIDS.tv (Toon Town) for 6 through 4th,

THE LOOP for 5th & 6th grade,

SWITCH for 6th-12th mid-week,

KONNECT for 6-4th mid-week,

konnect 5 for 5th graders mid-week,

and of course whatever series our senior pastor preached to adults with LifeGroup study guides to go with each week.

WHEW! Ten different whole curriculum areas with their own scope and sequence, their own terminology, not to mention smaller programs like parenting messages on diaper bag tags, baptism events, child dedications, and newborn packs. All of it was great individually, but where was it all going?

I mean, as a mom of a 4yo, a 3rd grader, and a 7th grader (and now two foster kids) I didn't really even have a fighting chance of "partnering" with our church. I honestly can barely remember to sign and return their Thursday folders from school, so with that much going on at church too, I couldn't keep up with what my kids were learning about. And I have a distinct advantage over all other parent because I helped develop a lot of the curriculum! Not good.

But for the last year or so, we've made breathtaking strides towards a more integrated strategy. So I'll go over some highlights of the steps we took, and are still taking, and are planning to take to move toward what I believe will end up being a shining example of an "integrated strategy" for our content. 

• First, while we were going through the final stages of getting our 4 pre-school experience’s curriculum in an “on the shelf” condition, I was able to sit down with our writer who developed it and narrow down a few of the units that were in it. This resulted in our 2s and 3s having the same curriculum, just themed to match each environment. We also did a better job of aligning our Easter and Christmas series in all four.
• In the middle of those conversations, I began to force myself to consider ways that those four could someday come back off the shelf and go through some kind of 2-year loop. The hardest thing to come to terms with though, is that to be really effective, what if our elementary curriculum followed the same loop? Oh my. Four years of KONNECT curriculum was already “on the shelf” and the whole wild and free LifeKIDS.tv series production process would have to be saddle-broken with some structure and scriptural grounding. Believe me, that was (is still) a hard sell.  
• We also opened cross-departmental conversations dreaming about the possibility of other areas of curriculum being more strategically aligned. Our elementary, 5th and 6th, and mid-week student curriculum, and our big church messages are all series based. Would it be possible for them to line up on occasion so we could blitz families with one big take-home message and influence those conversations at home?
• Those ideas began to make so much sense, that they top leadership that was a part of them put the conversation on hold until some staffing reorganization could take shape that might enable that kind of system.
• In June 2009, they basically shuffled the deck of our org chart in those departments and created two new teams. One, a ministry team that could continue to focus on leading and supporting the campuses with things like vision, budget, staffing, policies and procedures, communications, etc. This also included combining our kids and youth leaders under a Next Gen pastor. Then they created the Content Development Team to create curriculum for birth through adults (which I’m on) and put a process/systems type leader over it that could create a process/system to juggle all of that.
• Since then, we have focused our efforts on a strategy to align our weekend series for elementary and student ministry as often as possible (which is going pretty well actually) and we even have goals of hitting our senior pastor’s series when it’s something planned in advance enough that we can manage it (but that’s a bit like nailing jello to the wall, in a good way of course. J )
• In August, when our KONNECT ramps back up, we will launch an all-new curriculum that aligns with the weekend. So kids can have the same Bible story, same memory verse, same walk away point, and parents will too. These will basically align in overall topic still with student ministry.
• So that leads us back to the beginning. Because at some point in this plan, we’ll have to bite the bullet and redesign our preschool curriculum.

I hope we blow our parents away with the simplicity and ease of partnering with us. Actually, I hope it stops feeling like they are partnering with us at all and begins to feel like what we say it is, the church partnering with them. Our Next Gen team not only has opened communication between kids and youth, but they also work right in step with the strategies used to lead their parents with the adult ministry leaders. 

I created the blog actually to invite input into the process as we go. So if speaking into this excites you at all (even if it means telling us we’re morons and should try something different), then I would love you to check back sometime after Orange Week  and leave some comments on the updates I post. (And I promise my normal posts won't be the tome this one became!)