Month: October 2013

Offer more for parents at your church

I feel the dilemma that you feel. Children’s Ministry is what you do, but in recent years your heart has been pricked for family ministry. You want to offer more for your parents. You’ve been sold on the idea that if we do more for parents, we leverage their influence on kids (which is far greater than ours) and we all win. There’s only one problem. You’re a children’s pastor and Sunday comes each and every weekend. There’s more work to be done than hours in the week to do it. What you do on Sunday is so important, but it just crowds out the time you want to devote to parents. Yeah, you’re not alone.

Here’s an idea though. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The class you want to offer parents doesn’t have to be written from scratch by you. The weekly email you want to send doesn’t have to be penned completely by you. Even the topics you’d like to cover doesn’t have to be dreamed up by you. I honestly believe that we’re doing ministry in one of the greatest times because there are so many content providers emerging every day to help us do what we do better… including family ministry.

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Using audio to enhance environments

Earlier this week I wrote about using TV’s in lobby spaces to communicate and to create a better environment… because environments matter. I got a couple of good ideas to run with, I’m still seeking some more solutions though.

However, I need to move on to the next topic. Audio in your environment. We do have a CD player in our main lobby that we use to play music of speakers in the ceiling which is great. However, it’s old tech. When the CD ends, the music stops and someone has to remember to start it over or change disks. How long have mp3 players been out? Trust me, I know it wouldn’t be hard or cost much to swap out the CD player with an mp3 player, but I’m thinking bigger than that. Here’s what I mean.

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Video displays in lobby space

Environments matter. Anyone who tells you otherwise… probably has a crappy environment. Ha! I couldn’t resist.

I’m actually doing what I can to improve our current environments. Last year we were hoping to do a 1-1.5 million dollar remodel, but things didn’t play out the way we wanted to. I had a little extra money I didn’t use on some staff positions, so I’m doing some work on our environments because they are in need of attention. Our building is 8 years old and it’s starting to look a little tired. I’ll write more about some of the things we’ve done later, but I had to throw a question out to the audience. I’m in need of some help from those who have some experience in this area.

I had a good friend come visit last may and I asked him for an honest evaluation. Standing in the middle of my ministry lobby he spread his arms around indicating his surroundings and said, “You live in a high tech digital city, yet you’re doing ministry in an analog building.” Wow, so true. So many at our church work at Dell, Apple, Google and about every other tech start-up you can imagine. It seems that if that is a part of our audience, a somewhat digital environment would appeal to this part of our community.

So, I’m 5-6 months out from this project, but I’m trying to do the research now.

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