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.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this element of Orange. It seems like this is the element that has the potential to change everything… yet it’s the hardest to be successful in. Why? Because it’s something we can’t really control. Once we attempt to reactivate families, it’s up to them to lead their own kids. Us control freak pastors don’t like this so much… since we’re so good at it, right?

I’m pretty passionate about finding ways to engage parents. I’m a big believer that we’re not really successful until we see parents living this out in their homes, using our resources or their own without us begging them to. The problem I’m facing at my church is that I’m trying to reactivate families that have never been activated in the first place. What am I saying? We’ve got parents who know little more than their kids. This is where integrated comes in and expands beyond just student and children’s ministry. I need to work together and trust that our group life and spiritual formation teams are helping adults grow so that they can be a step or two ahead of helping their child grow. So, we’re looking to provide some materials that might teach the parents just before they turn around and teach the kids. Unfortunately, many of these parents are taking spiritual steps at a slower pace than their kids which means they’ll find it harder to equip their kids if they feel behind.

So, I’m currently working on developing some kind of process that will engage parents regardless of where they are in their faith or parenting process. I’m sure as it develops, I’ll share.

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!

For two long the church has been in the wrong business. I’m not particularly sure when this happened, but the church has stepped into the role of primary spiritual leader in the life of children and students. Search the scriptures and you’ll find no support for the role the church has been playing. So why do we wonder why such a huge majority of kids walk away from their faith as they enter adulthood? The church must reactivate the family.

Reactivate the family means to help parents actively participate in the spiritual formation of their children. We have to see ourselves as the catalyst to help parents to do their job better. If we don’t, then we’ll continue to loose the youngest generation to apathy, cynicism and resentment. This is going to take a lot of undoing. So many children’s pastors are hypocrites when it comes to parental involvement. We complain the parents aren’t involved or doing their job yet we don’t offer any opportunities for parents to step up in the home. Many parents don’t take the reigns simply because they don’t know how to do what we know so well.

We have to believe in parents. Our attitude toward parents will determine our entire approach toward ministry to the family. If you believe in the potential of parents, it will cause you to change the way you program.

Why does this have to happen? Remember the “refine the message” element? On the best case scenario we know we only have 40 weekends a year with a child. In most of our churches, that’s a little more than 40 hours. Parents on the other hand have over 3000 hours a year to invest in their kids. Do the math. Who has the most influence? Wouldn’t it serve the mission and strategy of our church to leverage this great influence in the lives of our kids? What if only 10% of our parents truly wanted to know how to lead their kids spiritually? Our impact would increase at an exponential rate. So doesn’t it makes sense for us to invest more people, time and resources toward equipping the greatest influence in the lives of the 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.