Chase The Light Vacation Bible School
Vacation Bible School Details
Pre-VBS Block Parties July 14th
6:30pm at Harrah Park, McLoud Park and in Choctaw
“CHASE THE LIGHT” VBS
The Incredible Adventures of
THE MISFIT BRIGADE
July 19-21st from 6:30-8:00pm
For 2 years to 5th Grade
Let your light shine this summer by joining us for a week of fun and excitement as we explore the tales of THE MISFIT BRIGADE. Hear their story, experience the adventure, everything will change and your will learn how to Chase The Light.
KidsCamp
We are just a few days away from KidsCamp at KBA. We are really excitied and looking forward to what is going to happen at camp this year. We will have a required parent/camper meeting this Sunday after the 2nd service in the Worship Center at 12:15pm. We will go over what to bring, rules, contact info, and answer any questions.
I will tell you that the bus trip is about 4.25 hours long and students will be allowed to bring an MP3 player and gaming system for the bus ride, but they will need to turn them into Jeremy upon arrival at camp and he will disperse them back for the ride home. Please send your child to camp with sunscreen and tell them to keep putting it on.
Reproduction and Development
Pastor Jimmy and I recently went to a church leadership conference that focused on creating reproducing movements. A want to share a few of our notes from the conference. Pastor Jimmy shared these with our small group leaders this past Wednesday night and challenged each leader to develop new leaders by Labor Day.
As a continuance of this effort I want to challenge each of our children’s small group leaders and Sunday School teachers to do the same. I know that many of our leaders are operating in classes that are beyond a capacity where we like to be. Ideally we like to operate in a 1:8 ratio, that is one leader for every 8 children.
Please read these notes below and begin praying about who you can bring under your wing and begin apprenticing. I would to see each of our Children’s Sunday School classes reproduce by Labor Day. I would love for our children to be able to receive more individual attention within their classes and have a deeper more meaningful relationship with their teachers.
Our mission: developing children in Christ
4 Reproducing principles
1. Reproducing requires everyone to have an apprentice
2. Reproducing is proactive not reactive
3. Reproducing is not about size it’s about leader readiness.
4. Reproducing is not about our kingdom it’s about God’s kingdom
You can do this!
The Five Steps of Leadership Development
Come follow me:
1. I do. You watch. We talk.
- Three simple ?’s:
- What worked?
- What didn’t work?
- How can we improve? (continue this throughout the process)
2. I do. You help. We talk.
3. You do. I help. We talk.
- Release responsibilities to the new leader
4. You do. I watch. We talk.
5. You do. Someone else watches.
Children’s Camp
Summer is just around the corner and we are gearing up for some awesome events. Kids camp will be June 14-18th at KBA and is for 2nd-5th graders. Cost is &75 before April 26th and $95 after April 26th. Sponsors and Pre-Campers (Children birth-K) are $50.
All students will need to have a HarrahChurch Family Medical Release Form, 2010 Camper Registration Form for KBA and a KBA Ropes Course Release on file. Adult sponsors will need to have completed the HarrahChurch Background check. These forms can be found at http://HarrahKids.org/forms.
Keith Coast will be the speaker for the week and worship will be lead by Ken Austin’s 150 Band.
For more details check out the KBA Kid’s webpage or contact Jeremy Davidson.
Eggstravaganza
Easter Egg Hunt for 30,000 eggs, inflatables, free food and drinks, cotton candy, sno cones, games and much more. Free to the public.
This is going to be one party that your children won’t want to miss. We are expecting more than 3,000 people this year and we plan on blowing this thing up HarrahChurch style.
Easter Egg Hunt Times:
11:00 am – Ages 0-2 and 3-4
11:30 am – Ages 5-6
12:00 pm – Ages 7-8
12:30pm – Ages 9-11
1:00pm – Ages 12-17
1:30pm – Ages 18+
Preschool Parenting Class
We had our first Preschool Parenting Class about 4 weeks ago and it was a great time. The class was called Preschool Parenting: Creating a Rhythm. We had an intimate group of 8 parents attend. Some have one preschooler and some had 3 preschoolers at the house right now. The material for the class came from the ReThink group DVD resource of the same name that was given to the church by Gina McClain.
During the class we went through how to use the Small Talk resource that we provide to parents each week and explored what it would look like to use the stories during the month. We use props from bath time to tell the story of Jonah and the Whale, David and Goliath, and a few others. The parents really got a kick out of playing with the toys and learning how to take their parenting skills to the next level. It was great to get feedback from those in attendance about how the class helped them break through their fears of spiritual leadership as they realized how fun and easy it was to educate their children about the Bible and how much God loves them.
We are hoping to offer this class twice a year to our Preschool Parents. The resource provides two ways to offer the class. One is for a large group and the other is for an intimate setting. The intimate setting really worked out well for us, but we hope to one day approach the large group presentation because it seems like a lot of for to put on.
If you are reading this and hope to participate in our next event please feel free to contact Jeremy Davidson at HARRAHkids at Jeremy@HarrahChurch.com.
Orange Week: Reactivate the Family
A huge part of the HARRAHkids and Orange Strategy is to reactivate the role of the parents in the spiritual development of children. Pastor Jimmy Holbrook’s book Shelter is a part of that effort. In the book Jimmy discusses how to build a shelter where you can raise little warriors and princesses who will one day leave the home and enter the world on their own. We believe that it is the parents primary job to educate children in following Christ and that we as the church are here first to support parents with resources, guidance and programming.
We provide parents with take home materials that they can use at home to reinforce the lessons that their children are learning in our children’s programming. FamilyTimes.org is a resource that we direct parents to which provides grade school parents with some incredible tools to use in the home. Small Talk is a resource we provide for parents of Preschoolers each month with activities that they can do during the month to reinforce our lessons and to keep them up with the Bible stories we are studying.
The church has about 50 hours each year to work with a child. A parent has more than 3,000 hours to work with their children. When the church and the family begin to work together we multiply our impact in the life of the child.
Another way we are working to reactivate the family is by providing Family oriented ministry events and activities so that parents can serve beside their children. I think that one of the best things we can do for children is allow them see their parents experience and worship God. We are working on breaking down the programming walls that prohibit children from seeing other generations worship and serve God. By doing this we are seeing the family develop together in Christ.
Orange Week: Refine the Message
Do remember the opening scene of Back to the Future. Check it out here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feXM9Nml_74. Marty McFly gets blown away by the speaker. That is exactly what we want to try to do every week at HarrahChurch. One of our core values is to be relevant to the people we are trying to communicate with each week. Pastor Jimmy works really hard when writing his sermons to craft memorable phrases and ways to communicate the truth each week. In “Think Orange” Reggie Joiner states, “How you say what you say is as important as what you say.” We couldn’t agree more.
If you want people to really hear what you are saying then you need to:
- Say Less
- Say What Matters
- Say It Clearer
- Don’t Say It
- Say It Louder
At HarrahChurch we are doing this each we by coordinating each of our weekly experiences for our children and students to say the same thing. That means that even though your son or daughter is here (3) times a week they are hearing the same message in all three experiences. We believe that when we teach less, your children will learn more.
We have been spending a lot of time in the recent weeks working with architects on building plans for new Children’s and Student Worship Space that will allow us to communicate more effectively. There are still a lot of ways we want to communicate to our students and parents that are currently out of our reach. We believe that these new spaces will not only create more space for the kids, but it will create new means of communicating with them. It is not just our words that communicate to people, but our environments and classrooms communicate to people. We have enjoyed tremendous growth over the past years, but we have come to a point where we can not grow our Sunday School classes without building more classrooms or asking our adult small groups to stop meeting so that we can have more class space for our children’s classes. I feel that when visitors come to our church and go to drop their child off in a classroom that is so crowded that they couldn’t walk to the other side of the room they come to the conclusion that we won’t be able to provide their children with an environment conducive to effectively communicating the gospel. There are a lot of different learning styles for children and students, but some of them require more space to facilitate. We believe that our future space will enable us to communicate more effectively to children with a learning style other than the traditional lecture.
Pastor Jimmy and I spend time each week going over how we are going to say what we are going to say. We work hard to stay on the same page with each other. We want our messages to be sticky. We don’t want to just talk. We want to be heard, so we spend time crafting clever ways to communicate the truth each week. My favorite quote from Jimmy’s message this past weekend was, “We need intentional parenting, not conventional parenting.” He was so happy about that quote that he had to come and share it with me. He was like a kid that found a $20 bill at the park and he just had to tell everybody. That was a sticky point of his message for sure.
Finally I want to share with you that we are using every possible environment and tool in our hands to communicate our message each week If you look around the church this week you will see that our sermon series is called FamilyTimes, that we are selling a new CD curriculum for parents to use at home called FamilyTimes. This new curriculum reinforces the messages that we are teaching your children in Sunday School, Worship Care, and on Wednesday nights each week. We are sending GodTime Cards, Refrigerator Cards and/or Small Talk Sheets home with you kids twice a week for you to use at home to reinforce the bottom line for each week. We have placed posters in our halls to teach you the three important truths we want to communicate to your children. We have created the HarrahKids and RenovateStudents websites to help you learn our strategy and to keep you informed about what we up to.
So how are you keeping up with our strategy? One of the best things you can do is to pick up the book Think Orange by Reggie Joiner in the cafe or online or attend one of the upcoming training events we will be having to educate our volunteers and to show parents of preschoolers how they can use our materials at home to reinforce each month’s teaching.
