Which Children’s Ministry goal is hardest for a church plant to achieve?

Church plants have an inherent problem fulfilling one of the most common goals in children’s ministry. It’s the goal that states, “Parents are equipped to be the primary spiritual leaders of their children.” This is a great and worthy goal, one that most children’s ministries worth their salt would aspire to, but one that is challenging to accomplish in a church plant, and in many well-established churches too.

Why is it such a challenge to get parents to disciple their children? The challenge children’s ministry leaders come up against is that many parents don’t feel qualified or capable of becoming a spiritual leader.  This is especially true of people who have not grown up in the church, or whose spiritual background did not give them much exposure to the Bible. So, when well-intentioned children’s ministries send home conversation starters for the dinner table, or ideas for reinforcing the lesson during the week, parents may very well ignore these suggestions. At the heart of their resistance is the insecurity triggered by that take-home paper: “I don’t feel capable. What if my kid asks me a question I don’t know the answer to?”

What’s the best strategy to employ? So, how does a church filled with people who are new to church or rusty on their Bible knowledge get parents to buy in to the idea of becoming their child’s primary discipler? For Pastor Jeff Gauss, church planter of Epiphany Station in Thief River Falls, Minnesota, the answer lies in creating a long-term aligned-learning experience for every age group in the church. “I’ve always been very big on everybody from the youngest children through the adults in the small groups and in the church services learning the same thing. Families that are just coming into the church and just coming into faith have no foundation for raising their children in the faith, but they want to. Teaching everyone the same thing at the same time is a great method for bringing everybody along in this discipleship process, together, and it gives parents a feeling of confidence.”

How can a church plant pull off aligned learning? A year after Epiphany Station’s launch, Gauss discovered a church program that would facilitate his goal of bringing everybody together, going the same direction, learning the same story. At that stage they didn’t have the resources to develop their own curriculum for every age group in the church, but when he found The Story, Gauss knew he had found the solution he had been looking for, already laid out for them.

The Story is an all-ages aligned-learning Bible literacy experience based on a book called The Story which contains the narrative portions of Scripture arranged in chronological order. The Story experience offers books of Scripture for every reading level in the family, 31 weeks of curriculum for every teaching department in the church, and sermon materials for preaching through the whole story of the Bible for an entire ministry season.

As Jeff Gauss rightly observes, “In our culture, there are so many things vying for people’s attention, even in our churches.  But The Story counteracts that. It’s no longer hearing the sermon on one thing, going to small group or Sunday school and talking about another thing, the elementary-aged kids learning a different thing and your teenagers on yet another thing. All of a sudden in your household you’ve got four or five different things in one week that everybody’s learning, which makes it difficult to really grow together as a family.  On the other hand, if the family is all together learning the same thing then it’s very conducive to having natural conversations around the dinner table.”

Why is there so much power in aligned learning? Therein lies the power of aligned learning: Parents and children are reading the same Scriptures at the same time in books at their own reading level; then, while children are in Sunday school learning about what they read in their books, their parents are hearing a sermon on the same subject in church and following up with a discussion on the same topic with their small group. So now, when the child brings home a take-home paper with ideas for parents to engage with their children, the parents have gained the confidence they need to truly be the primary spiritual leaders of their children.

To learn more about THE STORY, click here

To learn more about BELIEVE, click here

Call 1-800-524-1588 to speak with a church resource specialist. Be sure to ask about the ChurchSource custom package pricing of up to 45% discount for your church.

Use the Promo Code PLANT10 for an additional 10% discount on any purchases from ChurchSource.

Thanks to Shelly Leith, the Director of Church Relations for Zondervan Publishing, for writing this post. We appreciate your support!

The post Equipping Parents To Lead Spiritually appeared first on Passion for Planting.

Church planter Jeff Gauss was concerned. He was observing that the very people he was trying to attract to his church were unintentionally being made to feel excluded or inferior. “There was this barrier for our un-churched people who would come in to a small group and they felt like a total tool because they didn’t know the Scriptures. Other people were talking about all these things, and they’re like arghhh! I have no idea what they’re talking about!”

How do you assimilate people of diverse spiritual backgrounds? Getting everyone “on the same page” is a great assimilation strategy

How do you catch up the newbies without boring the experts? Enter The Story. For Epiphany Station, in its second year of existence, Gauss says The Story was the best thing that could have happened to them. “Oh, yeah, The Story was huge. The best thing about The Story for us was that it didn’t matter whether somebody had no church background, no previous history with Scripture, or if they’d grown up in the church ~ everybody learned together. People who grew up in the church were like, wow, I never understood how that went together! And, of course, it was all new to people that didn’t grow up in the church, and it was really remarkable for them to see there’s a central theme of redemption throughout The Story.”

1. Start with the Bible. The Story is an all-ages church-wide experience based on a book of Scriptures called The Story, where the storyline portions of Scripture are arranged sequentially, in the order in which they took place in history. Reading the Bible in this format makes the Scriptures accessible and non-threatening for the unchurched, while still eye-opening for seasoned Bible readers. According to Gauss, “The Story is a great tool that gets everybody on the same page and going in the same direction, whether they are completely un-churched, or grew up in the church. It puts everybody at the same access point, with the same foundation.”

2. Establish a common foundation. “There aren’t very many churches now who have the luxury of being able to assume that every person in their church knows a certain base knowledge,” says Stephanie Moore, Minister of Spiritual Formation at Ten Mile Christian Church in Meridian, Idaho. When it comes to assimilation, she believes is it important to establish a baseline, where everyone in the church shares a common knowledge about what we believe and why. So at Ten Mile Christian, as well as at Epiphany Station, they followed The Story with Believe, another 30-week all-ages aligned-learning Bible engagement experience, in order to establish that baseline of common understanding.

Moore says, “We want to be able to assume you grasp a foundational knowledge about the main message of the whole Bible, which you get through The Story, as well as key concepts about who Jesus is and how he leads us, which you get with Believe. Now, we’ll be able to assume our current congregation has that foundation, so our task from here forward is to transfer that baseline of knowledge to new people.”

3. Assimilate the new people. The way some churches are giving new people the baseline of knowledge is to establish a perpetual Story group where new believers and new members are placed when they come to the church. They might enter into the study at chapter 11, stay until it cycles back around to chapter 10, then they graduate and move to a neighborhood small group. This experience gives them the equivalent of a Bible survey course. With the introduction of Believe in 2015, many churches are adding a second option to their assimilation and discipleship strategy by offering perpetual Believe groups that teach the 10 core beliefs, 10 primary practices and 10 key virtues of the Christian faith. This is the equivalent of a systematic theology or spiritual formation theology course, and is a great platform for teaching newcomers what we believe and why.

At Epiphany Station, Pastor Jeff Gauss is transitioning away to plant his third church, and his successor is planning to lead the church through The Story again, after they did Believe last year. Gauss says, “The Story and Believe brought everybody together on the same spiritual journey so people who didn’t have a strong church background felt like they were learning along with those who did. Everyone felt welcome and included, which was probably the most important aspect of The Story and Believe for our church.”

To learn more about THE STORY, click here

To learn more about BELIEVE, click here

Call 1-800-524-1588 to speak with a church resource specialist. Be sure to ask about the ChurchSource custom package pricing of up to 45% for your church.

Use the Promo Code PLANT10 for an additional 10% discount on any purchases from ChurchSource.

 

Special thanks to Shelley Leith, Director of Church Relations for Zondervan Publishing, for providing this post. We greatly appreciate your support!!

The post Rowing in the Same Direction — Effective Assimilation appeared first on Passion for Planting.