Reconnect with our Orange Vision
5 Reasons why we Think Orange at Harrah Church – Taken from the Reggie Joiner at the Orange One Day in Dallas
- STRATEGY | It gets our leaders aligned and on the same page.
- MESSAGE | It brings a clear path and map for unforgettable environments for our kids to encounter core spiritual truths in a life-transforming way as they grow up in Harrah Church. Presentation, not just information leads to transformation.
- COMMUNITY | Small groups the greatest gift that we can give to our kids and parents. One of the greatest things we can give our families is another leader in the life of your children who speak life-changing truth in the lives of our children. We stive to put consistent leaders in their life so that they can connect in a deep and meaningful way.
- INFLUENCE | We believe that students have a responsibility to change the world around them. Our students need to understand how TO BE the church. We want to give them something significant to do. At Harrah Church service has a greater role in discipleship.
- FAMILY | The family has 3,000 hours a year in the life of a student, but the church only has 40 hours. Both the church and the family have responsibilities to teach children about God.
We think that our potential to influence the family is linked to what we think about the family. We know that the family and church working together has a greater potential to change our children than if we were working alone. Some people are influenced by the church but everyone is influenced by family. Somewhere along the way everyone developed a picture of what you think family should look like. According the the last US Census taken – 23.5% of families have parents who live with their biological children. If you hold to tightly to an idea picture you set yourself up to become disillusioned. We realize that all kinds of families attend Harrah Church and live in our community and we want to help all families live in the love of the Father above. None of our stories are the same, but God can use all of our families to change our world. There is no perfect picture of families in the Bible. God doesn’t use perfect pictures, He uses broken people.
We desire to help broken people and families tell a story of restoration. God desires to work through every family to demonstrate his story of redemption and restoration.
How are you connecting with our Orange Vision for the church and family? Are you asking your kids what they are learning in church? Are you asking the KidMin and StuMin leaders for resources to reinforce our lessons in the home? Have you looked into the CueBOX? Are you regularly volunteering? Have you sought out a person to be a consistent voice in their life of your student?
Resources:
- Think Orange by Reggie Joiner
- Parenting Beyond Your Capacity
- Shift: What it Takes to Reach Families Today
- The Slow Fade: Why You Matter in the Story of Twentysomethings
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.
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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