danscottblog

The other night we found ourselves watching the Iron Chef Super-Chef battle at the White House. We watched as Alton Brown divided four of the most talented chefs in the United States into two teams for one ultimate showdown.

About halfway through the show, I realized that I was witnessing real teamwork. Here you had, four great individuals, all executive chefs, working together without any trace of ego getting in the way. What could have been an explosion of wills was actually a beautiful give and take of submission to authority for the given challenge.

Emeril never said, “Bam!” Not even once.

Obama’s executive chef never said, “Oh, I cook for—you may know him—THE PRESIDENT!”

Even Iron Chefs Flay and Batali never once mentioned that they were the Iron Chefs for the competition.

For the rest of the episode I watched with new eyes and noticed five qualities that helped leaders lead and leaders follow:

1. Focus on the Bigger Task at Hand: The goal was not only to win, but to show America how to prepare locally grown food. This was the vision that drove the chefs to do their best. The goal wasn’t about making themselves known as the best chef but rather make known that preparing healthy food isn’t difficult. The bigger picture for their job was at the forefront of the task. They had a goal and strove for that.
2. Play to strengths: Each chef realized the strengths of their partners and played to those strengths. Cooking is about technique which is at a different level of expertise for each chef. These chefs allowed for each other to cook according to their ability.
3. Willing to Ask Questions: Each chef at a certain point during the competition asked their team members for advice on a technique or flavor. The chefs showed humility in their willingness to ask questions. The result was better tasting food.
4. Allow the Each Other to Shine: Each chef cooked according to their specialties and flavor palates as they fit within the grand vision of the meal. Batali didn’t demand Italian from Emeril but rather allowed him to prepare a New Orleans inspired dessert that was a highlight of the evening. Batali in turn gave him the credit for the dish. They worked hard to make those styles fit within the meal to great success.
5. Have Fun: They all had fun. Laughter was the key. Even when some dishes weren’t going as planned, the spirit was one of fun and camaraderie. Without a doubt, everyone in the studio was having a good time.

As we work together with each other, it’s too easy for our egos to get in the way. However, we have something bigger at stake: the very lives of kids and students for the sake of the Gospel. We can’t let ourselves to distract others from what God is trying to do through us for his Kingdom. Keep the end in mind, play to each other’s strengths and let each other shine, and make sure to have fun.

I’m sending this from my iPhone, please excuse any typos! Thanks for your grace!

Leverage Influence: Create consistent opportunities for students to experience personal ministry

Out of all the Orange Essentials, this one gets me the most excited. Being a follower of Jesus means taking up the call to serve him in bring hope to the world. It doesn’t matter whether a child is 3 or 18, he can experience what it means to serve Jesus. You just need some creativity and parents to help you along the way.

As part of our Integrated Strategy, we’ve decided to prioritize service in how we attempt to pass along faith to the kids and students at Ada Bible Church:

Embrace | Preschool: Children are introduced to getting their hands dirty serving, mostly in the context of family and home. We rely heavily on parents at this stage to help with the different projects we have. Most of them are projects that collect food or other products for local ministries.

Expect | Elementary: Children start to see their place in serving through a variety of planned service projects led by the Discovery Village Staff, as well as opportunities within your family.

We do quarterly service projects in elementary. We budget these project right into our annual programming expenses. We’ve partnered with local organizations and ministries collecting food and making blankets. We’ve raised money to build a library in Kenya and brought in food for our own food pantry.

Experience | Junior High: Small groups serve together. Students in junior high become more consistent in serving as they develop a rhythm of serving in their life.

We desire students to serve not only within the ministries of Ada Bible Church, but also to communities of needy people around the world. Small groups and cell families are encouraged to provide opportunities for students to discover and use their God-given talents. Opportunities include partnering with World Vision to local missions to short term mission trips throughout the United States. We also LOVE junior high stedents to serve in our preschool ministry.

Express | Senior High: Serving for the senior high student is an expression of their faith. To follow Jesus is to serve.

We desire students to serve not only within the ministries of Ada Bible Church, but also to communities of needy people around the world. Very often, small groups and/or cell families will generate these service projects on their own based on how they are feeling led. We want for our senior high students to express their faith out the passion that God has given them for their world. We also allow older high school students to serve as small group leaders in our elementary ministry.

We are always looking for new ideas to integrate service into our family ministry. I’d love to hear your ideas! Please leave a comment and share how your ministry incorporates service into your program.

Elevate Community:
Connect everyone to a caring leader and a consistent group of peers

When we call ourselves “a church of small groups” we have a specific idea in mind. In our program, from a time a child is 3 years old to the time she graduates from high school (as long as they remain in our program) she will be connected in a small group. What that looks like on each level is different of course, but the idea is that if a child is in our program we are seeking that she may be part of a community larger than herself. The following goes along with our birth – 18 strategy that I discussed here:

Embrace | Preschool: Children receive consistent care from loving and capable adult and students. Community is something that happens TO your child.

Expect | Elementary: Children see how relationships are an essential part of growing through small groups with the same children and a common small group leader.

Experience | Junior High: Students experience the necessity of relationship in their faith journey. Small group is becoming a way of life.

Express | Senior High: Students continue to grow in small groups, becoming more responsible for identifying and building community within their own life.

Once a child reaches second grade, the expectations for small group leaders start to grow. In our trainings at the beginning of the year we begin with talking about how important it is for a child/student to have another voice speaking truth into their lives.

Knowing the importance of a consistent leader and group of peers, we strongly encourage parents to choose a specific hour and campus to attend. God uses small group leaders to influence positive change in a child’s life. In many ways they are mentors to those kids. Discovery Village is not just child care. The volunteers are committed to the spiritual development of each child whether they are 3, 9, or 15. We truly believe and act knowing that the relationships formed between leaders and children will be pivotal in those kids’ relationship with Jesus.

I don’t give enough props to our student ministry team at Ada Bible Church. The following is a guest post by my friend Jonathan Gruden, who is the guru of all things junior high at our church. He gives some insight into how we’ve brought parents into the conversation happening in student ministries.

Over the last five years our Student Ministry has made several changes to make partnering with parents a priority.  We realize that parents are the single greatest influence in a student’s life, and our ability to influence students is deeply affected by how we value and care for their parents.  One of the most significant changes we made is to shift our fall gathering for parents  from one big gathering in the beginning of September to our Cell Families (gatherings in homes of small groups from the same school district) in October.   Parents are very busy and their time is a precious commodity.

In attempt to make this event more convenient for parents, we moved this event

1. later in the fall when life slows down a little
2. to our home environments which are more welcoming and often closer to their homes
3. to be a part of our existing programming so they are able to experience and participate with their student.  This is also convenient since they already have to drive their student.

I have come to love this event, because it creates a face to face context for parents to meet their student’s small group leader, gain a deeper understanding of what their students are doing and learning, and for our leaders to cast vision for our ministry and how we fit into the overarching vision for family ministry.  Most excitingly it lays the groundwork for us to continue to care for and encourage parents as they lead their children.  This fall we had 120 parents attend between eight houses.

Jonathan Grunden is the Minister of Small Groups for Jr. High at Ada Bible Church in Ada, MI.  Blog: lljonnyg.blogspot.com

Because we’re talking about Reactivating the Family today, it’s a good chance to talk about the family experience aspect of using 252Basics.

Six years ago, when I was first hired on at Ada Bible Church, my primary responsibility was to find a creative way to get parents and kids in the same room for a shared, faith experience. At the time we were not using 252 Basics, and in all honesty had never heard of reThink.

That first year, we partnered with a gentleman and developed a series of four events we called “Family Gatherings.” (LAME, I know!) They were decent and received decent attendance and buzz. While they were not exactly what we had envisioned, we learned a few things that we’ve brought into how our family experience has evolved over the past several years.

We learned that the family experience must have a purpose beyond the event itself. It’s great to have a slammin’ event, but the event becomes a catalyst for family growth only when we keep the end in mind. We built our family productions with four aspects of family life:

1. Family Devotions – not in the sit-around-the-table sort of thing, but the sort that embraces the natural messiness and rhythms of family life.
2. Family Service – When we submit to Christ, we take on the fact that he expects us to serve our community and engage our culture to further make his name famous on planet earth. The family plays a HUGE role in that.
3. Family Traditions – Families have celebrations, some of which are given to them on the calendar, others that they’ve discovered for themselves. Are families integrating their faith into these aspects of family life?
4. Family Conversations – How a family communicates with each other in private and public says a lot about that family’s health. Do families have a safe place to practice these conversations?

As we’ve moved to using 252Basics, we’ve continued to bring these ideas into how we program our current experience.

If you haven’t seen it, check out the promo video. It’ll give you some insight into how it all works:

Here’s the rundown of the elements:

Hype: 10 minutes of crowd banter and activity as families are coming into the environment. We’ve done everything from a giant game of telephone (BOMBED!) to a pocket scavenger hunt. Anything to get the crowd warmed up to have fun!

Worship: 2 or 3 songs with motions and excitement. Most often these songs are chosen because they go along with the virtue for the month.

Welcome Sketch: The co-hosts introduce the topic for the month with lots of humor. We will often introduce the Application Tool for the month at this point.

Intro Sketch: The “secular” part of how the virtue gets played out in real-life through several characters that become house-hold names. (My son wanted to invite Gordo to his birthday party last year!)

Rapid Response: We use this as either another chance to share the virtue or advertise the application tool. This section is all about the funny!

Word: This section is what it sounds like. It’s what they Bible has to say about the virtue for the month. Sometimes this is a storyteller with the help of a Bible character. Other times the Word features reoccurring characters such as Sam Shovel who add a nice dose of humor to the story. Regardless of the method, this part is all about God’s Word and what HE has to say.

Family Activity/Verse: Here is where we diverge from the 252Basics’ script. One of the things we learned in our writing attempts several years ago was that we needed to have families interact over the topic at the event itself. We know we gave them tools they can use at home, but we could never be sure they were using those. We wanted to help them start the conversation, work on a quick service project, or begin using the application tool in order for them to see that interacting over faith really isn’t that difficult. We also put motions to our memory verses. We teach this to the crowd, giving them a chance to stretch their legs and get the wiggles out.

Exit Sketch/Wrap Up: This is the conclusion of the intro sketch and a moment for the actors to reemphasize the bottom line for the night.

Closing: A chance for the host to pray and give any announcements we may want to give.

Each month we have a blast staging this event, we pray that it is a catalyst for growth in the lives of those families that come out and support it.

If your ministry puts on a family experience, I’d love to hear what you do! Let me know in the comments!

Kenny is talking about Elevating Community today over at Children’s Ministry Online, but I’ve got all things about Reactivating the Family today.

Reactivate the Family: Enlist parents to act as partners in the spiritual formation of their own children

Let’s face it. If we don’t have the support of parents, there is a good chance that our ministry will only get so far in helping a child in developing their faith. Sure, it’s possible; the combination of great content and caring small group leaders is a powerful force in a child’s life. However, it’s not enough. The X-factor in the equation is missing. And that X-factor is a parent or guardian who is engaged in a child’s life on a regular basis.

The on-going question for a ministry must be “How do we partner with parents?”

The answer often feels daunting. If I look at my own situation, I believe in what I’m preaching and attempting to practice it. Yet, I find it difficult to put Orange into practice in my own home. If I struggle as much as I do, I can only imagine how difficult this is for the parents who aren’t on staff in family ministry.

I’m thankful for the Reggie’s thoughts on partnering with parents. Every parent is a partner with our ministry, but the level to which that parent aligns with our ministry is different. He describes four levels of partnership in Think Orange.

Aware: Parents, most of whom are outside the church, who understand they have a responsibility for their children’s spiritual health.

Involved: Parents who have a basic relationship with the church. Even if that means they are simply bringing their kids to church; they are taking steps to work on their children’s spirituality.

Engaged: Parents who are committed to partnering with the church. They are personally growing in their relationship with God and assume some responsibility for spiritual leadership in the home.

Invested: Parents who are proactively devoting time and energy to partnering with the church. They understand the strategy of your ministry and in community with other Christian parents.

Every parent you can name or can’t name within the radius of your church belongs in one of these categories. When we see them as partners in our ministry, when we act like every parent will do something, it’s a game-changer for how we do ministry.

How we begin doing this is another story, one I’ll touch on in part two.

Yes, one more post for today. Refining the Message is just that important!

Refining the Message also matters when it comes to marketing. A rule of thumb: a person needs to see/hear about a product or service seven times before she will make a definite decision about that product or service. As you plan out your calendar of events for the year, make a conscious effort to plan out how you will communicate those events.

We create a document that we can post as a visual reminder of when we need to begin talking up events. The initial work is time consuming; however, in the end we know that parents and kids will find out about what is going on in our ministries.

A few ideas that have worked for us:

In our environments, we have TVs hooked up to MacMini desktops. We create a Pro Presenter script that includes all of the slides that coordinate with the lessons for the month. My tech coordinator creates these weekly shows with the bottom line, memory verse, and virtue slides. The show also includes several of the videos from the Get Real videos from 252 Basics. This is a great way for parents to find out what’s being taught in class as well as learn more about the strategy behind the curriculum.

Because we still have physical name tags posted in our environments, we do direct marketing for events in their plastic holders. Since parents need to take the name tag off the board, they will see the direct marketing piece and take it with them. We place these in name tags two weeks prior to an event. You’ll notice this is a great visual for your attendance patterns.

For e-mail blitzes we use Constant Contact. It’s a great easy e-mail service with both templates and fully customizable layouts for e-mail marketing. They also have a new archiving feature with the ability for the recipient to post the e-mail to Twitter, facebook, or a whole host of social networking sites.

Video advertisements are a great use of time and energy for communication. People are used to watching commercials. Cleaver, exciting videos can be a great way for people to hear about your event and catch vision as to why they should attend.

Getting small group leaders to attend events is one of the best ways to market events. A child will have much more buy-in to your event if their leader is coming. Have leaders call kids at home and get the KIDS excited about the event. If kids like what’s going on, guess who will also like what’s going on: Parents.

What are some of the ways you’ve had success in marketing your events? I’d love to hear more ideas!

We’ve already talked about content, but Refining the Message also is about the experience.

One of the ways you can Refine the Message is to create an exciting environment that shows kids that you understand them. For this I’m going to let our Senior Pastor of Family Ministries, Brian VanderArk guest post and speak on his 80/20 idea. These posts were originally published on Orange Leaders:

In this economy where many churches are cutting budgets or delaying spending, I firmly believe when it comes to budgets sometimes less is more. I often describe our philosophy about environments by saying we get 80 percent of the WOW for 20 percent of the dollars.

I confess our philosophy didn’t start out as a philosophy but rather a necessity. When creating our children and student environments, our budget was quite limited. Yet, while the budget reflected the limit of our financial resources, it did not limit the creativity of our people resources. For our team, the challenge (and the opportunity) became how to best leverage those funds to create environments that met our desired goals. We found having limited resources in fact generated greater creativity, producing environments that became more personal to kids, volunteers, and the team.

After determining the theme for our spaces, our team settled on picking one WOW item per area and designing around it. In our elementary spaces we designed a city park theme with businesses surrounding it. Our WOW item in the entrance was a tree made from plaster and forms for concrete columns.

We created a diner in our first grade environment and were able to recover diner booths from a restaurant that was remodeling.

For our fourth/fifth grade environment, a local climbing wall operator built a climbing wall for our Extreme Park and for second and third grade, a handyman volunteered to build us a theatre ticket booth for a check-in station.

Each item was done as inexpensively as we could think of, then we painted around those features to finish the look.

Here are a few more practical ideas that will help you spend wisely while creating a killer environment for your ministries.

Watch several episodes of Design on a Dime to prime the creative pump. I know you think I’m joking, but really, you can become an expert at this at least in your own mind. My personal test of ability is if one person other than your spouse thinks you are good at something.

Try this experiment: pick a project and see what can be done with $500. I have found that $500 is a good starting number because you can always sell one or two items around your church (the senior pastor’s desk for example) and come up with the cash.

Get to know your local construction people, artists, and garage sale shoppers to see what ideas they have or ask what they could contribute. When building our elementary space, we asked a few construction guys to help out in a special design and they brought their families to church to show them what they did.

Check out eBay, Craigslist, and your local junkyard or pawn shop. One man’s trash really is another man’s treasure.

Paint. Check home supply and hardware stores for returned cans of paint. If you like the color, it’s often cheaper than buying it new.

I’m not sure the “less is more” principle was meant to describe our budgets, but managing fewer financial resources is much more fun when we recognize that God has given us creative people resources.

Refine the Message: Craft core truths into engaging, relevant, and memorable experiences

Refining the message is about two things: prioritizing the content and making that content engaging

In Orange Thinkers, Reggie put words to something I had thought for a long time: “All Scripture is equally inspired by God, but all Scripture is not equally important.”

God has given us his word in order that we might know him and come into a relationship with him. Scripture is the story of God’s movement throughout history in making his name famous on planet earth through broken people such as myself. Along the way, we’re given lists of people, laws, and how much families donated to different building projects. While important in the idea that people gave and were a part of God’s story, not so important as to how I hope to teach my kids (or myself for that matter) to make wiser choices tomorrow.

Priorities are part of every facet of our life. They have to be part of how we plan content for the different area of family ministries.

Think about it: At best, a church has 40 hours with a child. At best. Look at your attendance records, most of you will find that the actual hours are less. When we look at our own percentages, the numbers are more like 25 hours per child. This means that anything you say needs to be exactly how you want it said at the exact moment you want it said.

Granted, only you and your leadership can make the choices on what you will or won’t include in the content you deliver. This is true even after you choose a curriculum and begin using it. Be discerning enough to look through the curriculum and not take everything at face value. Continually evaluate the material to ensure that it is saying what you want to communicate to your kids.

This is the brilliance of using a curriculum such as 252 Basics that gives you editable documents. You have the ease and freedom to make the curriculum fit your exact situation from small group activities to large group scripts. As a team, we edit about 30 percent of the material each month. We love the activities, but with our numbers some might take too long or be too expensive or dangerous (insurance companies frown on 90 kids running relays in our spaces). With 252, we have control over content and how that content is produced. The ideas are great; even if we don’t use the exact activity as written, it becomes a spring board to launch us to what activity we eventually use.

Once you know what you’re going to say, the challenge becomes how to say it with excitement. In Part 2 of Refine the Message, I’ll talk more about that.