Leverage Influence

My team spends a lot of time talking about exactly what pieces to put in each one-hour experience. What's going to be the most effective? What will make it sticky? What will really grab their attention? But in the last several months I think we've finally started to shift our discussion to the better Orange questions.

What can we incorporate into this hour that will draw them into action during the week? How can we make their stories from home a part of what we share with others? Is this message immediately actionable? What outcomes will we see in kids and students who are jumping into this and putting it into practice in their lives?

With all the effort I've put into curriculum development and other aspects of creating the church experience over the years, I can truly say that when we hear amazing stories of life transformation from kids and students, it has always been things they've actually done outside of the church walls that made the difference. Sure, something in a message or discussion question or illustration may have been a catalyst to get that rolling, but the change in their hearts took place while they were serving.

My very favorite quote from this chapter in Think Orange is, "You don't begin to serve when you feel compassion, you feel compassion as you start to serve." Our role then is (this is probably an awful example!) is the drug dealer who passes out free samples to kids on the neighborhood playground. We do whatever it takes to get them hooked. :) I have found it to be true in my life, and it gets confirmed again every time a friend gets back from a mission trip, that little opportunities to serve and give are just a gateway drug to the really hard stuff. You get them to sponsor a needy child in Africa, and next thing you know, they're writing letters to them and pretty soon they're all strung out on spending their weekends ministering to the kids in shelters.

Today, at the Orange One Day in Dallas, I know the Compassion International people will be there too talking to us about how we can make a difference in Haiti. Don't think of stuff like that as an intermission the real show. This past weekend, my son gave more in our Haiti offering than I did. And that's cool with me. The outcome of a church full of compassion junkies is about the best you could hope for. :)

Elevate Community

Recently I was in a meeting where we were reviewing video scripts for a series of shorts for new believers. One about baptism, the Bible, prayer, and community. I realized that the unique thing about community was that people entered the church with that one thing not being foreign. I mean if this is day one of your new walk with Christ look at the hurdles. Baptism? Weird. Prayer? Awkward. The Bible? Iffy. But community? Oh yeah! I know what that is! We all have a picture of community, even outside the context of Christian faith. We were born into one, even if it was fractured and unfulfilling. So we got talking about what they could expect to be unique about our brand of community. It was a great discussion that I won't rehash here, but you get the picture. We were made for community. You literally cannot practice Christianity and fulfill the commands of Christ without getting into relationships with others.

But I believe community is even more important for kids and students than even adults. Here's the reason: No matter how much I'd like to, I can never play the role in my daughter's life of modeling how a young teenage Christian lady should behave, relate to friends, deal with boys, navigate serious relationships and handle school. I am Mom. I am old. She cannot see the me that I was. My husband cannot model those things for our boys either. As a mom, as an emcee/teacher at our church, or in my staff role, I am still ultimately dependent upon some leader far younger and cooler than me to speak into my kids' lives in this way. There is already stuff we can't get out of my 7th grader. But I know who is hearing it. His SWITCHgroup leader on Wednesday nights. And you know who that is? Someone I picked years ago. Oh yes, it's not beneath me to rig the bunking assignments at LifeKIDS summer camps. :) And now he's actually on our staff but still serving as a small group leader for middle school boys. (And to give credit where credit is due, I'm not near slick enough to pick this good of a guy, God set this whole thing up because He loves me son more than I do.)

I know if you read Think Orange by Reggie Joiner (which you totally should) or attend the Orange conference in Georgia (which you would really love) or even will be at the Dallas Orange Tour event with me on Thursday that Elevate Community means a lot more than just this one point. But if this was all that Elevate Community meant (take something that is hard-wired into us all and use it to grab kids from another angle) then it would still be a tremendous ministry approach to try.

What does it mean to you? Don't forget to track the other bloggers hitting Orange Week because they are doing a much better job of really explaining the concepts as a whole. Just track #orangeweek on Twitter. :)

Reactivate the Family

In 2009, my husband and I began a journey that ended up with us bringing two little foster daughters into our home in December. We had wrestled with knowing that's where God was leading but it was that fanatical freak Francis Chan at Orange '09 (my fave) that finally brought us to the edge of the cliff and incited us to jump. And through the process we found out something incredibly intriguing: our state's Department of Human Services is turning a shade of Orange too. When I pictured being a foster family I thought mostly of showing a child the love of Christ while they were in our home. But the state is now training the next generation of what they call Bridge Resource Families. We are a resource for the birth parents, not just the kids. We are a part of the team that helps love and train and support their journey to be able to reunite with their kids.

So this element of Orange is something I need to learn from personally right now. When I flip through this chapter in Reggie Joiner's book Think Orange, I see just tremendous challenges to all of us involved in ministering to families, whether it's with the megaphone of my role in my church or the whisper of new relationship with my girls' birth mom one-on-one. Here are the headings that really punched me in the face. Just let them sink in.

Act like every parent is your partner.
Act like every parent can be a better parent.
Act like every parent will do something.
Act like every parent you meet is coming to your church on Sunday.

You know what? If you had been a fly on the wall in all of the planning meetings I've been in for the last six years, other than being completely exhausted, you would have overheard all kinds of closed door talk that didn't line up with these statement. And really, I'm not just saying I'm two-faced, I didn't honestly want to act like those statements were true because I didn't really believe them.

But after sitting in a Human Services Center conference room on Friday across the table from a case worker and a woman who had her kids taken from her home, I realized that I really do believe those statements now. Against all odds, this poor woman with the deck stacked against her, who was raised by a foster mother herself, asked if we would come get her and take her to church with us so she could, "Learn about God and stuff with her kids. That's what we really need."

There is always hope because there is always a Savior at work interceding for the hearts of every family. No matter what families God has brought through your doors, He is at work in them and through them. He chose them to be the most influential voice in the next generation. So we must believe in His plan. We can never give up hope for the family. And more than that, we need to act like we believe that every parent has the potential to raise a houseful of zealots.

Refine the Message

When my team transitioned from being the Central LifeKIDS Team to the Central Content Development team I started more than ever really looking at what we were teaching our students. But honestly, my personal interest had begun a year before. When my oldest entered the sixth grade. Then it really mattered! Not just as something to analyze or criticize but something to really delve into and become a change agent with whatever influence I could wield.

Before I start though, please know that I love our student ministry team. Their heart, their passion, their love for an age group I personally could live a lifetime and not hang out with. I didn't even like middle schoolers when I was one. :) I'm just using the following story as an example of how we've been making great strides in refining the message.

One of the first sort of common threads of criticism that emerged was "they always talk about the same thing." And at the time, this one thing was the list of what not to do. Don't have sex. Don't do drugs. Don't swear. Basically just don't sin. I don't really know how true that was, but the overall message of "just make better choices" was what was coming through, and honestly, I don't see how that message is much different from what they are already hearing from their school counselors.

So when I made my son start going to our Wednesday night student experience, I would ask him, "So what did you learn?" "Nothing." I knew that wasn't true. I now was even in a position to know what the message actually was. So I would then ask, "What was the video about?" He spit back the details and then said, "But that's what it's always about. I know it's different series and stuff, but that's still pretty much what it's always about."

Now if he had said, "All they ever talk about is God's great love for me and the fabulous riches of grace through Christ" then I probably wouldn't have cared. But the message that students were getting wasn't THE message. You know what I mean?

Now it's easier to pick this out when you're looking at something that's not, well, not you. As much as I was personally invested in it because I had a son in student ministry, the reality is, I'd been developing curriculum for kids for over six years. So what about those messages? I've already shared how many different separate strands of curriculum we had going. So what overall message were our preschoolers walking away with. What about our elementary kids who've been mentally juggling two messages a week since our weekend and mid-week stuff are on different tracks? And my word, what about our parents? What overall message was our ministry sending them?

Let's just say that pointing out the splinter in the student ministry was only the first step to really refining our message. There's still a log to haul off. And what is it they say in those 12 step programs? Admitting you have a problem is the first step.

What problems have you uncovered in your ministry's message? In your curriculum? In your parent communications? In each individual lesson? Let's unload our junk and get it hauled off.

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!)

Orange Week

A lot of kidmin guys I follow online are doing a week of posts about the whole Orange concept. So starting Sunday, I will post about each of the five areas of orangeness. I really hope that any of the LifeChurch.tv people that are involved in the Next Gen team will follow what these other guys will say. And that any people who just discover this blog through it will come back to weigh in on the curriculum development that our team is working on.