Tag Archive - trinitychurch

Parent Sunday

October 6, 2009 in Ministry with 5 Comments

FamilyChurchKids

I’ve chronicled our adventures at Trinity Church of getting families more involved in the spiritual experience we offer their children during our weekend environments (Check out our Going Orange Baby Steps #1 and Baby Steps #2.)

We’ve worked hard to get parents involved in our traditional drop-off events, and have made changes to our child baptism procedures, and we’ve totally revamped our Child Dedication process in the past few months.  One of the other things we’ve wanted to do is offer parents a glimpse of what we do with their children each and every Sunday morning at Trinity Kidsplace.

So what were the goals?

Goal #1: To see parents participate in a Trinity Kidsplace experience with their child.

Goal #2: Parents would be exposed to all that happens in Kidsplace with their Elementary age children.

What were the challenges we were up against as a team to get parents involved?

1. It was not possible to do a Children’s Ministry led service for adults in the main sanctuary.  We have 4 services each weekend, and to plan for all 4 services would be quite the load.  I’m also not sure it would be as effective at our church as it might be at other churches.  In the future this might be an option, but I don’t see it fitting the overall vision of our church.
2. We have tons of parents involved in Adult Education opportunities on Sunday Mornings.  This means we need to offer something that floats between multiple services so everyone can have a chance to attend Kidsplace with their child.
3. We operate in limited physical space.  We do children’s ministry in a room that barely holds the children.  Adding a 100 parents would be a logistical nightmare!
4. We wanted to resist the temptation to pull a bait and switch on our parents.  You know the kind.  Where you ramp everything up and bring in the chainsaw juggling clowns for the parents, then back to the puppets talking to the ceiling when the parents leave.  We want to show what we really do for kids.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Here is what we did:

1. We planned five “Parent Sunday” events over the next 3 months.  There are five, because our Elementary ministry currently ministers to 1st-5th graders.
2. We also spread them out so we have a week gap between each of our “Parent Sunday” events. This was done to prevent volunteer burnout, and to allow me time to promote and get the word out.  The way it’s setup, we’ll get 1st through 4th grades in before Thanksgiving, and we’ll get 5th grade parents down in January 2010.
3. We promoted the event only to the parents that were invited on that particular week.  No mass mailings, no church bulletin insert, etc… We only want parents to hear about it when it pertains to them.  How did we do it?  We created mailed personal invites for the parents, handed out left-over invites to parents the Sunday before in the specific small group that applied to them.  I also posted on our parents blog, and on the Facebook Kidsplace Fan page what was coming up.  I used the parents blog as a place to answer those commonly asked questions.
4. We did what we do.  We sang the songs we always sing, and did our large group and small group programming like we always do, and the only added element was the parents being in the room.  We even made very little mention from the large group stage that we had parents in the room.
5. We gave a gift to each parent in attendance when they checked-in at the parent table.  The gift included some the lesson take-home page that pertained to what they experienced, included the “How to talk to your child about Salvation and Baptism” materials, and a small book about connecting with your kids.  It was an easy, easy, easy gift.  Nothing too huge.
6. We had some family-friendly gift cards in the small group time with kids and their parents.  I left it up to the small group leaders to determine how they were given away, but I heard they worked them into some review-type games.  This week it was some Krispy Kreme gift cards.  I tried to make it something family friendly.

So how did it go?

It actually went remarkably well.  I’d say about 1/3 of the kids in the 1st grade, had parents in attendance.  Which was pretty great!  The parents loved it, and I had many comments that they were so glad to be a part of what happened.  Even a few comments like, “I had no idea you guys did this with the kids!”  We really exposed ourselves to people in our church that had no idea what we did with their kids every Sunday morning.  These are good things, trust me.

In the coming weeks we’ll see the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, & 5th grade parents come down to experience Kidsplace and it’s my prayer that we can build some momentum for more family involvement going into 2010 and beyond.

Here are the invites we sent to parents.  It was postcard sized, and printed front and back.  We put them in some nice invitation quality envelopes, and put our gears logo all over the envelope.

Sam Luce has done some great things at his church to reach out to parents and the like; but as is the case with most things…it didn’t fit our model.  I encourage you to flood his inbox with questions about their Parent Sundays (or whatever they officially call them.)  He’s the pro at these kinds of things!

Creative Volunteer Training

August 17, 2009 in Ministry, Technology with 4 Comments

Kidsplace UnscriptedOne of the things I’ve struggled with over the years of working with volunteer leaders, has been how I could train my volunteers (leaders, partners, whatever you call them at your church) without stopping down their schedules for afternoons at a time.  My experience tells me that when holding a training meeting those people that most need the training don’t show up.  It’s a strange phenomenon actually.  (If you’re that volunteer that has missed the last dozen training meetings at your church, then consider yourself the person I’m talking about!)

I’ve also tried emails, but I found that most of them were not reading the emails all the way to the end.  How do I know this?  Because I got sneaky and started hiding messages at the bottom of the email offering Starbucks, Sonic Drive-In, and Smoothie King incentives to those first 5 people to respond to my email.  When nobody but your wife responds, something isn’t getting through to the people!

Over the past few months, I’ve tried something quite different.  Different for me anyways.  I’ve been sending training videos out to a portion of our Sunday Morning volunteer team.  The videos are rarely longer than 4-5 minutes and are filmed in various locations around the church.  I’ve been testing it out specifically with the team that serves during our largest gathering of Elementary children; at the 4th service on Sunday.  In total this team represents 13 people, so it’s not a small team; but it’s not too large that we don’t all know each other.  (That being said, I could use an additional 13 leaders, if you know what I mean.)

Here are some of the things that these silly training videos have allowed me to do:

  1. The videos have opened up opportunity for more “fellowship only”  time.  My team loves to hang out, and now when we gather we simply want to hang out.  No agenda, no training, no meeting; just good old fashioned fellowship time!
  2. I’ve worked hard to not let the videos become stale and tired.  I’ve attempted to make them personal, by being funny and letting my mistakes just stay on the finished product.  I’m going for informal, not formal.  I fill it with titles that poke fun at my mistakes and my looks.  I’m not afraid to laugh at my own expense, so it comes naturally.
  3. I’ve used the videos to push upcoming events, and remind my leaders about  things I’ve reminded them about 100 times before.  Repetition is the key to good promotion!
  4. I’ve taken requests from the leaders about what small group leading training tips they need.  I’ve gotten great ideas for topics.  For example, I’ve covered how to get kids to open up and talk, how to control an unruly group, how to pray with children, and how to adjust small group materials to different age groups.

Now for the obligatory disclaimers:

I still see us doing some in-person training down the line, and when we do I hope that I can make it worth their time and energy to attend.  I don’t see myself offering a in-house training more than twice a year.  (I’m settled on maybe once a year.)  I also email the links to the videos through Constant Contact, so that I can see who has opened and watched the videos.  I’ve even gone to some leaders that never opened them, and inquired about why they are not watching the training.

Now in all honesty, you’d have to talk to one of my leaders to gauge how worthwhile they’ve really been.  If you can find them and get them to open up, then do share!  The feedback that I’ve gotten is that they like them, and I keep getting requests for more.

I’m sharing a few of my videos here, but the rest are at VIMEO.  It’s quite amazing what you can do with a camcorder and iMovie these days, huh?

So how do you get information to your volunteers? What have you tried with success?

Would something like this work for you?

Orange Baby Steps -Part 2

August 7, 2009 in Ministry with 10 Comments

We’ve been making some minor changes in our Ministry philosophy at Trinity Church.  Yesterday I laid out the first step I took to help shift the thinking of those all around me. There is a great desire to move from creating programs for kids, into creating programs for parents and kids.  We are early in the process, and have taken some very small steps to make this happen.  These next three steps have been tiny, but huge all at the same time.  What did we do?

  1. The big programming change we made started this Summer, and in reality it wasn’t a huge change.  We simply changed the “drop-off your kids” events into “Family Time” events.  It was simple really.  That event that in the past would cost $20 a kid to go to the amusement park with the Children’s Ministry leaders, is now only $5 a person and the entire family in encouraged to attend.  We budgeted this year to eat some of the expense so the entire family could attend (I could totally make a comment about how eliminating VBS changed our budget for the better, but I won’t.)  We saw double attendance from year’s past, and have seen the families in our church soften towards our leaders.  This isn’t rocket science people.  We’re trying to open the door to our families to be together, and not just create events that compete against everything else happening inside and outside the church.  If this is all we do, I know it won’t be enough; but we’re taking baby steps here.
  2. We’ve also changed our cattle call of a Child Dedication service to more of a parent training event.  What happens on stage on a Sunday Morning will be about the same as it’s always been, but what parents have to do to get to that stage has changed.  I know that to some this might sound so simple, but we just asked that all parents desiring their child be dedicated attend a parenting class.  The class will be about 75 minutes in length, and include a few minutes of table discussion.  No dinner is served, no public speaking by those in attendance is needed, just their presence and a desire for them to be spiritual leaders in their home.  Simple really.  There is lots of room for improvement, and it will be tweaked to further benefit our parents as it grows.
  3. We taken away the drop your kid off Baptism training, and instead put tools in the hands of our parents.  We’re distributing information (online only) that will help parents discuss whether their child is ready to accept Jesus as their Lord, and help them introduce baptism to their children.  We’ll still do occasional large group altar calls, and I will always be available to help families that want their hand held during this journey; but we’re really surrendering the main responsibility to the parents on this one.  I should probably say that after mom/dad/grandparent/guardian use the tools to talk with their kid, I will be meeting individually with each family before an actual baptism takes place.

These are some of the simple steps that we’ve taken to reintroduce our families to spiritually leading their own families.  Simple, right?

Orange Baby Steps

August 6, 2009 in Ministry with 3 Comments

changeThose familiar with my journey will know that I’ve been helping our church to take more deliberate steps towards more Family Ministry.  And by Family Ministry I mean, a more ORANGE setup.  I believe we’re taking some baby steps towards interacting with our parents in a serious way.  Trinity Church is an older church, and comes with years of history that can be both good and bad. Things move a little slower here than they might at an adventurous church plant, if you know what I mean.  However, I really believe that our church has it within them to make positive ORANGE changes.

Here are some of the steps I’ve taken.  I hope that those much further along this path won’t think I’m super-lame, but instead I hope that those still learning to integrate parents within the Children’s Ministry will be inspired to keep pushing forward.

The first thing I did was educate myself on the principles of what I wanted to see at Trinity. I then started to plant the seeds of these principles in the hearts and minds of those working for me, and those that I work for. I’d do this in private conversations over lunch, voicing ideas in meetings, and quietly picking occasions where it would be accepted to share “What could be…”  It’s been almost 18 months of planting seeds of ORANGE principles in my leaders, and I’m finally starting to see some movement. In the book Think Orange, Reggie Joiner speaks specifically about the danger of instituting practices before you have the principles of “Why?” in place.

I’ve been careful in my situation to not push too aggressively for parent-friendly events, and instead have taken a baby step approach. There is a lot of confusion and fear when parents see the church trying something “new.” I’ve waited until there was a felt need, then jumped all over it. I’ve had certain options in place for over a year, and just waited until I saw that need come up then worked feverishly to meet that need with authority. For example, we’ve made some major changes to our Child Dedication process after hearing some parents express a desire for something more relevant. Every little thing matters, especially when you’ve got 45 years of doing things a certain way! Somebody say Amen, please!

Tomorrow I’ll address three very specific steps we’ve taken to reintroduce our families to the church.

Sharing the Summer Camp Experience

July 15, 2009 in Ministry, Technology with 0 Comments

Last week I took 49 kids (one dropped out at the last minute) and 4 adult sponsors to Summer Camp.  It was our third time to attend camp at Dry Gulch U.S.A.  Dry Gulch is really the Ritz-Carlton of summer camp experiences.  They’ve changed in quite a few ways since I was a kid, and have changed even more over the past 3 years.  Our kids and families have thoroughly enjoyed each years trip to Dry Gulch, so we’ve continued to attend.  This is NOT a post about why kids should attend summer camp, nor is it some review of Dry Gulch.  All I will say is that Dry Gulch is 9 hours away from Lubbock, and every year it proves to be worth the long drive.  My intention is to I to share something that we did this year at camp, that has brought us tons of good will from our families.

We kept and updated a camp blog, complete with pictures and video from each day.  We actually had a Flickr group last year that parents could look up each night, but we’ve taken it to a new level this year.  First thing I did was create a sub-domain for the camp blog.  I did not link it to the main website, and instead decided to only share it with a direct link.  I had some privacy concerns, and thought that by not directly tying it to our ministry website that it might be better.  (In retrospect, I think this was a bad decision and next year I will run it on the normal parent’s blog.)  I then setup a feed with feed burner and made an early post about how parents could signup for email updates while we were away.

So what did I do exactly?  I had one of my volunteers take about 95% of the pictures with his really fantastic camera.  By the way, I cannot overstate what a difference it made to have someone take pictures that knew what they were doing!  Then each night I would load them into iPhoto, and use the Flickr upload tool that is built into iPhoto.  I went ahead and paid the $30 for flickr Pro, which gives me unlimited uploads and allows for some cool stat tracking options.  Flickr is also cool, because it allows for people to purchase photos directly from their site (if you setup the privacy settings correctly.)  I would then grab the HTML code from flickr and simply insert it into each nights post.  I also made an effort to create a few 15 second video each day with the Flip iMino HD camcorder, and uploaded them to Vimeo.

So each night I’d take this flickr slideshow and a few of the Vimeo video’s; and post them alongside a quick text recap of our day.  Easy, easy!  I’d estimate that it took me about 2 hours each night to upload the pics and video.  I say 2 hours, but really about 30 minutes of that was spent in front of the Macbook.  I usually let it upload pics while we ate dinner, and never gave it much thought.

I knew a ton of parents were following along, because I was watching the stats; but it wasn’t until I returned that I heard how much it has meant for the parents.  I heard story after story of parents waiting up til midnight each day until I could upload the pics and videos.  The site was passed along to family and friends, and it became a great hit for the kids when they returned home and wanted to relive the camp experience.  As time has passed, I see that I should have hosted it on the main parent’s blog because now I’m wasting all those that took time to sign up for updates.  I could have continued to keep them updated on additional happenings at church, but I’ll make the change next year.  I’ve also been impressed with how much this has increased traffic to additional pages on our ministry website, and love it that I’ve introduced parents to our heart for their children.  The camp blog also has immediately become my best advertisement for camp in 2010!

I did have a few Internet issues one of the nights, and had to do an early morning upload and update; but besides that it went off without a hitch each day.  Here is a video recap I made after we returned from.  This was made using iMovie and includes some of the songs we did at camp this year.

So do you do something like this for parents when you take kids to camp?  As a parent how much would it mean to have this?

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