All In The Family

Tim, the servant leader at SSM who works with me in family ministries, has been receiving training through Youth and Family Certification School. He is developing a long range plan to help us strengthen our efforts to make youth ministry into family ministry, to make the home church too for passing on the faith. Here's what we are hearing God calling us to do:

~ Restructure our monthly cross-generational event called 2.B.1. This event worked well last year as a way to get people thinking and talking about discipleship. But this year we included time in 2.B.1 for mentors and young disciples to do their monthly discipleship coaching if they so choose. The good news is that they have been meeting on their own time (for the most part), so they don't need the time in 2.B.1 for their coaching. The downside is that they usually don't come to 2.B.1 now if they've already done their coaching for the month, so (1) our attendance of youth has fallen off and (2) parents aren't participating in 2.B.1 like they did last year. So we're going to move 2.B.1 to Sunday evening once a month opposite our monthly REVOLUTION! We'll hold the event in people's homes, rotating hosts monthly to encourage parents to participate. The first hour will be split time for youth to hang out and parents to mingle, learn about making the home church, and other adult specific topics. Then the second hour we'll come together for cross-generational Bible study and interactive games.

~ Meet families one on one in their homes this spring and summer to cut Family Covenants. The idea here is that parents are the primary bishops and apostles to their children, as Luther put it. We'll meet to discuss what the parents hopes are for their child(ren)'s faith. The conversation will be based around two questions: (1) Imagine your child is now 21, how do you hope s/he is living her/his faith? (2) What can we be doing together to help her/him to get there? We'll do this for two reasons. (1) Discipleship coaching works only for those who want to do it. It's not a "program" that's one size fits all. So if the child isn't interested and the parents aren't supportive, we don't want to do discipleship coaching with them at this time. (2) Families are so over scheduled that we don't want to play that game and twist peoples' arms to squeeze all of our events into their schedules. We'd rather have families commit to the ministries that they see are most helpful in nurturing the child(ren)'s faith so s/he grows to be an adult engaged in a life of discipleship. Some may want to commit to worshiping together regularly and not do any family ministry events. Some may want to do only 2.B.1, or only REVOLUTION!, or only discipleship coaching, or any combination thereof. Based on this conversation, we will then cut a covenant for parents and family ministry leaders to work together. We'll only expect them to participate in the ministries they commit to for that year, and parents will expect us to support them in their vocation rather than us being the "primary care-giver" for their child(ren)'s faith.

~ This summer we will do a cross-generational, congregational mission trip. People of all ages are encouraged to participate: retirees, single adults, couples without children, teens, and children 0 to 12 with their parent(s). We explored several options for doing a cross-generational mission trip rather than the prepackaged youth mission trips. (There aren't many options out there other than doing all the planning and leg work yourself.) We are happy that Imago Dei Village of Camp Crossways is excited to work with us. Together, we're forging a vision for a Family Camp -- Service Week. We'll all go up and stay at the Village for Family Camp. In the mornings we'll have worship, Bible study, an hour of free time, then we'll travel to our work site for our service ministry between lunch and dinner each day, returning for the all-camp game and camp fire. I can't imagine a better way to help families and various generations share their faith together, not only in words but in action! We're still working on what exactly our service ministry will be that week. One idea I had is to work with a nearby congregation who would like to start a faithchest ministry but needs help with resources. We could make faithchests, art, sewing, and other mementos for the faithchests. Hopefully, then, our people will become excited about faithchest ministry and we can return home eager to start our own.

So that's our plan this year, summed up by "parent partnership, mentor relationship, and student leadership." How we'll implement the first two is clear from what I've mentioned above. Later I'll tell you about how we're working toward our goal of student leadership.

Please leave a comment by clicking on the link below to share your feedback on our plan (pros/cons, have you thought of . . .) and share how your congregation is working to raise disciples.