Kent Shaffer from over at Chruch Relevance posted this a few weeks ago. The post interacts with some data from a new book called, “Already Gone.” The data shows how children’s ministry and Sunday School is and has been failing. Kent asked some good questions about how these trends might be changed. However, Kent said one thing in a comment that I’ve been thinking about for the last several days.
Bottom line is most children’s ministries are aiming at bringing kids to Christ and discipling them. If they are significantly failing at producing long term disciples, I see nothing wrong in identifying that failure and exploring how to improve the results.
Long term disciples. I started thinking about long term strategy. Do I really have one? Where I’m at we’ve begun talking about doing more to equip parents which is part of it, but have we really developed a long-term strategy. Most CP’s I know feel good when the have their calendar planned out a year in advance.
What do you think? What “long term” strategies do you have in place?
One of our first moves toward a long term strategy was aligning our expectations and branding throughout our church’s programs and philosophy of ministry.
We’re becoming intentional about everyone in the church, regardless of age or stage of life, having a place where they are receiving large group community teaching and also small group relational application of scripture.
(We’ve probably had that alignment in mind for the last 5 years or so, but we’ve never aligned the way we talk about it.)
Now that we’re close to getting there, we’ll start talking through long-term strategies – I look forward to hearing what others are finding effective for their church communities!
.-= Anthony Prince´s last blog ..Sabbath, in 140 Characters or less =-.
I think this failure is often times because the Senior Leadership of the church doesn’t take the time to layout the long-term strategy for all the ministries within the church. I see this as a value that comes from the top…down.
.-= jonathan´s last blog ..Imagining vs. Real People =-.
First of all, amen to Jonathan and Anthony. This is a whole church issue. But Kenny, I’m sure you can imagine this post just made me drool a little on my keyboard. This is what keeps me up at night! Got a meeting scheduled next week to revisit this very issue. Pray that God speaks loud and clear to all of us and that we see the next steps to take.
.-= Kendra Golden´s last blog ..Isaiah 9 =-.
Yep: whole church strategy. What’s difficult is that unless you’re a truly “orange” church, very often children/student ministries get siloed off on their own, and work to their own devices. (Which may or may not be a good thing…)
We’ve done our best to work within our system of long-term strategy. We’re a multi-site church from here on out. This means that how we program children/student must fit within that paradigm. For students, we create “cell families” that create mid-size communities (60ish students each house) geographically on off weeks when kids are not at the main campus for large group gatherings (400 students)…
For kids, it means family productions in multiple or central locations off campus…
We also have a birth – 18 strategy that encompasses content and outcome with specific goals we hope to achieve at each stage of a child’s development with milestones in each stage as well.
.-= dan scott´s last blog ..Ethiopia | Coming Home =-.