Today’s post during Orange Week was supposed to be about Orange ideas that didn’t work.

I had a hard time coming up with any really great “stand-out” examples.

It’s not because we don’t make mistakes, because that’s not true. It may be because we’ve not taken any big risks lately where we’ve given ourselves the opportunity to win big or fall flat on our faces. We’ve been playing it pretty safe lately, doing things that have been successful and I’m not completely satisfied with that. So, I hope that a year from now I can tell you about some really dumb ideas we tried (the focus being on the word “tried” not “dumb”).

Here are a few things that have been pretty unsuccessful:

  • Take home papers like Refrigerator Cards and God Time Cards. We do these even though we know that most don’t make it out of the parking lot. However, we’ve not come up with a good alternative as of yet. Maybe I’ll have someone on my team read Jonathan’s post and we’ll implement something similar to what he’s doing.
  • Seasonal outreaches. Last year we held two outreaches. One was durring halloween where the plan was to send bags home with kids to “trick or treat” with their parents the week of Halloween for canned food for our food pantry. I think that the problem revolved more about communication and implementation for us, but it was a pretty big flop. During the Christmas holidays we had an outreach for needy families where kids wore their crazy socks to church and picked sock ornaments off our Christmas tree (which had  a list of items to purchase or bring the following week). We we’re pretty successful in the sense that we got lots of stuff, but I’m not convinced it was much of a family experience. I think most moms went out and bought the stuff.
  • Integrated team. Don’t get the wrong idea about me. I fully believe in Orange and really do want to see it fully lived out at my church. However, we’ve still got a long way to go. Our student and children’s ministries marginally work together and is far from integrated. However, we’ve taken some pretty significant strides in the last month. I expect some big changes this year.