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.
read moreOrange 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.
read moreOrange Week: Integrate Strategy
This week we will be unpacking some of the Orange Strategy that we use in our family ministry. It is our belief that by integrating the same core values and operating principles throughout HarrahChurch our ministries will be stronger and much easier to develop and administrate.
Here are the 5 principles that we use to guide our ministries:
1. Monday – Integrate Strategy
2. Tuesday – Refine the message
3. Wednesday – Reactivate the family
4. Thursday – Elevate Community
5. Friday – Leverage Influence
Tonight we will take at look at how we are integrating our strategy.
Our strategy integration began with HarrahChurch’s decision to hire a Associate Pastor of Family Ministry to oversee the ministry to those from birth-high school graduation. This is our way of doing intentional ministry instead of conventional ministry. Many churches have separate Children’s and Student departments that operate separately of each other. Many times these ministries wind up becoming silos that compete against each other for resources and volunteers. Jeremy is seeking to tightly integrate our Family ministries by using curriculum that looks at a child as an 18 year learning process and not as a quarter publication.
Our current FamilyTimes Sermon Series is a way we are integrating our Sunday morning teachings into our strategy to create a holistic teaching and learning environment. Pastor Jimmy and Jeremy consider how the Sunday sermon can support the teachings that are happening with our preschool, children, and student ministries.
We have challenged our Renovate Student Leadership Team to serve with our Children’s ministry. By serving in our Children’s programs our MS and HS students will learn our strategy and be better equipped to help lead their younger brothers and sisters at home.
Our First Sunday Serve is a way we are integrating our mission to the poor into a Family experience. Families of all sizes are encouraged to serve together and forge new bonds through the act of serving together. We believe that these experiences help provide teaching moments for parents and the opportunity for parents to model what the church should be to their children.
We are constantly thinking about how we can better integrate our strategy through the church. We hope to begin allowing our adult small groups the opportunity to join the strategy soon.
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