Elevate Community

• Kendra offers a very interesting view into the importance of Christian community. Of all the Christian disciplines, it’s the one discipline that translates easily to a new believer. It’s how God designed us, to have community.
• Matt McKee’s giving away ten Family Times Packs.
• Matt McKee pulls a story off of ornageleadders.com to illustrate this point, a story Reggie tells about his daughters need for affirmation as well as a description of what elevate community looks like at Matt’s church.
• Sam Luce writes about two components: The bigger you grow, the more intentional about being small you have to be and the world cannot compete with community.
• Jonathan Cliff shares personal thoughts about elevating community. He realizes that although he’s so much in the center of their lives today, it won’t always be that way and he must begin to seek out who those additional voices must be that will speak into his kid’s lives.
• JC shares his story about a Sunday School leaders had the kind of influence on him that we desire our small group leaders to have with our kids.
• Dan Scott shares about the strategy of his church in regard to small groups in every stage of a child’s life. I like it!
• Gina McClain writes about elevate community from her experience. I really like how she talks about equipping small group leaders to partner with parents… something that isn’t always central to the small group strategy.

Reactivate the Family

• Anthony has some great ideas about how his church is organizing some simple events that better connect families.
• Nick Blevins writes a great post about all the opportunities his church provides to activate the family. They seem to have a lot of really great ways to connect parents with their kids.

It helps when the commitment to community is a part of your church’s DNA. If it’s not, then you need to find a way to change that. Otherwise your effectiveness to reach kids, specifically in student ministry will be severely limited. Fortunately for me, my church has small groups as a core part of the DNA. However, when I arrived almost 2 years ago, there had never been small groups in the children’s ministry. Now I’ve known a lot of childrens ministries have have existed without small groups, but not when there are small groups in every other aspect of the church. Needless to say, the leadership was begging me to launch small groups.Two years later, our elementary kids are more connected than ever. Because small groups are valued the same way in middle school, the 5th graders will promote right into a 6th grade small group. It’s too easy.

However, what we’re working on right now is taking is getting this DNA for community all the way down the line. What do I mean? Let me ask this question. What would community look like for a 1 year old? How about a 3 year old? We’re currently working on opportunities to create community environments for those very kids. Sure, the value of community is most realized when they’re older, but every kid needs community and we’re exploring what would look like for the youngest of those in our church.

Reactivate the Family

• I start up this element of reactivating the family with the main though, the church has taken the parents God-given role and we’ve got to give it back. There’s a lot of “talk” about family ministry and incorporating the family, but unless we get parents motivated about actively engaging in their kids spiritual lives, we’re not getting anywhere.
• Kendra delivered an powerful post on Reactivating the Family from a very unique perspective of being a foster parents and working with the birth parents of the foster kids – a worthy read for sure!
• Matt McKee explore the definition of “reactivate the family” and shares his experience from his church. Like many others, he’s not satisfied with how they’ve engaged families (although he’s tried several methods) and he’s asked the question (specifically to other portable churches) how they’ve seen success in this aspect.
• Sam Luce is giving away a DVD resource called Exit Interview. You still have time to win, so do what he asks.
• Jonathan Cliff talks about his experience of reactivating the family through several changes he’s made at his church this year. My favorite part was where he talked about the inspiration for engaging families came from his role as a parent first.
• Sam writes a sobering post about what happens when we don’t reactivate the family. It’s one thing when the kids who walk away from faith is a statistic, but something entirely different when you can put names and faces to those stats.
• JC writes of several ways to put the responsibility the church has taken from parents back in their hands. Also, I must admit, I love the image that goes with this post. I don’t get it, but i love it.
• Dan Scott’s first post on reactivating family is about the various levels in which parents partner with our ministry. I so much appreciated his second post about doing a family experience (This is Dan’s specialty). What I loved so much is what he shared about the purpose beyond the family event. That is reactivating the family! Dan’s last post was a guest post from the middle school pastor at his church. Great post on engaging paretns of middle school kids!
• Gina writes a great post about reactivating the family, how it doesn’t have to be another event for you to administrate, but a way to encourage parents to do something different.

Elevate Community

• I started off this element describing what it means to elevate community. Essentially, community is the best thing church has going for it, better than anything the world and culture has to offer.
• Anthony Prince write about elevating community at his church. An interesting tactic he embraces is by recruiting parents as small group leaders (not their own kid’s groups) so they’ll see the value of connecting with their child’s small group leader.
• At first I didn’t see where Nick Blevins was going with his post on elevating community. What he was doing though was stating a case that building a community for kids isn’t easy. Neither are most of the best things in life. Thanks Nick!

Sheesh, these recaps are taking me longer and longer. Thanks for participating everyone! There should be another great give away tomorrow as well as a few more announcements I have. Oh, and I’ve got a funny little contest where you can win some stuff signed by Reggie. I’ll tell you about that tomorrow!

Something we say around my church all the time is, “Life-change happens best within the context of community.” The same is true in the lives of our kids and students. Creating this community isn’t easy. It takes a lot of volunteers who are heavily invested. However, when this is in place, the impact is huge!

Here’s one reason why community is so important. When it comes to programming, music and production, the church can barely compare to what the world and culture have to offer. However, the world and culture can’t even touch what the church can offer in the form of community. It’s the ace up our sleeve that far too often never gets played.

While kids are still in the children’s ministry, small group leaders can reinforce what parents are already teaching their kids. However, something drastically changes once a child enters middle school and beyond. Not that the parent isn’t important, all kids get to a point where they NEED validation from an adult who isn’t their parent. As a church, we have the ability to put adults in the lives of kids where they can communicate truth, have spiritual conversations and say the same things that parents would say (assuming the teenager is in a Christian home).

Parents who are leading their kids spiritually will need to lean heavily on the small group leader of their child.  If the child isn’t comfortable talking to his/her parent (which he/she wont) the parent needs to trust that he/she feels comfortable talking to a small group leader that will represent the values of the parents. This is where the church and family truly do partner in the task of leading the next generation. Elevate community, becasue without it the church will never gain traction in the lives of kids.

So in a nutshell, what is Orange?

Orange represents change. It’s the color of transition. What color do you think of in the Fall? Orange. Similarly, many feel some serious changes confront the church. Business as usual hasn’t been working. Children growing up in the church are leaving their faith once finishing High School in alarming numbers. Change is needed.

Orange represents partnership. It’s the merging of two colors to become a third. With Orange, this partnership is between the church and families. It’s when the church, heavy with resources combines with parents, who have significant influence, begin working together to make a bigger impact. Two combined influences will make a greater impact than two influences.

Simple, huh? Really it is. But there’s more. Central to the Orange “philosophy” are five core elements:

• Integrated Strategy
• Refine the Message
• Elevate Community
• Reactivate the Family
• Leverage Influence

Over the next five days we’re going to look closely at these five elements to see how we can be agents of change that will impact THIS generation.

During Orange week others are blogging on the same topic each day and links to their posts will show up in the comments. Be sure to visit their posts to see how the elements of the Orange strategy are being carried out in real-live scenarios. If you want to share your thoughts surrounding this topic you can either by replying in the comments or writing a post on your own blog and linking back to this specific blog post (so the link to your post will show up in the comments.