Simple Kidmin Podcast: Episode 002 KidSplash Family Experience

What do you do in your church when families start asking questions about salvation and baptism?  At my church, we throw a party.  It's called KidSplash.  Check out Episode 002 of the Simple Kidmin Podcast to learn more.

What Is KidSplash?

Here's an article I wrote for K! Magazine about KidSplash that gives you a great overview of the experience.

Want to see what KidSplash looks like for yourself?  Check out this video we use to promote it with our families.

Kidsplash from Southland Christian Church on Vimeo.

Making the Most of Holidays with Kids

It’s not always easy to make the holidays meaningful for our kids.  Take it from me.  I learned the hard way. 

A few years ago my daughter’s birthday fell on Thanksgiving.  We had cake and presents first thing in the morning, then shifted gears to prepare for a traditional dinner with family.  Before we knew it, the house was flooded with relatives we hadn’t seen in ages, and we spent the whole afternoon playing games, watching football and catching up.

Later that night, when I tucked my daughter into bed, I asked her if she’d had a good Thanksgiving.  She gave me a confused look and said, “It was Thanksgiving?” 

She thought the whole day had been about her­–her birthday, her presents, her celebration.  I couldn’t blame her.  It was an epic parenting failure.  In the busyness of preparing for the holiday, we had never talked about what we were celebrating and why. 

Even without a birthday thrown into the mix, the busyness of the holidays can make it tough for parents to keep family discipleship on the front burner.  We want the holidays to be spiritually significant, but how can we do it in a way that’s light and easy? 

Read More on the 3DM Publishing Blog

Don't Miss the D6 Conference Live Stream

Hey, I wanted to share some great news.

If you'd love to attend a family ministry conference but just can't work it out with your schedule or budget, this week the D6 Conference will be live-streaming several of their general sessions.

It will be great content focused around generational discipleship and strategies to bring the home and church together. 

Also I'll be tweeting highlights during the general sessions @jasondbyerly and posting on the Simple Kidmin blog all week long.

Check out the live stream schedule below.

The Best Way to Connect with Parents

How do you get a parent's attention?  It's one of the biggest challenges in building a vibrant family ministry.  In a recent workshop I led, I was sharing some of the take-home resources we use at my church when a woman in the crowd commented, "These tools are great, but how do I get my parents to actually use them?"

I totally understand where she's coming from.

21st century parents are busier than ever, and many of our efforts to support the family fall on deaf ears.

It's not that parents are trying to ignore the church.  It's just that there is only so much information they can process in a given day.

As a dad myself I can tell you that some weeks it's all my wife and I can do to keep up with the steady stream of information flowing from our kids' school and extracurricular activities.  Anything else becomes white noise, lost in the whirlwind of information rushing through our home.

And we are one of the least busy families I know.

So how can the church reach parents?.  How can we cast vision and provide tools that actually get used by the families in our ministry?

By taking advantage of strategic launch windows to build bridges between the church and the home.  

What are launch windows?  They are the seasons of opportunities when parents come into our orbit, looking for answers or help.

Photo Credit: Stuck in Customs via Compfight cc 

Let me explain.  If NASA is going to launch a probe to Mars, they don't just launch a ship any time they want.  They wait for an opportune moment, a launch window.  During the launch window Mars is closer to our orbit than at any other time.  That means we can connect with it using much less energy and effort than it would normally require.

The same thing is true for bridging the gap between the church and the home.  There are times when families come closer to our orbit.  That's when it's easiest to reach them.  

So what do these launch windows look like?

When do parents come to us looking for answers?  When are they confused or need help? When do we have the chance to draw alongside them, love them, serve them, give them direction and share a little vision?  When are they open and when do they need us most?

Here are a few suggestions:

1. When kids have questions parents don’t feel equipped to answer.  
In our church when kids start asking questions about salvation and baptism, parents come to us for help, so we created a special experience called KidSplash to help answer those questions. It's the best thing I've ever been a part of in Children's Ministry.  We've had over 2,000 kids and parents experience the message of John 3:16 together because we capitalized on meeting a real need for families.

2. When families are new.
First time guests are a huge opportunity for your ministry. When families are brand new, parents have to talk to us to get their kids checked in so they can go to service. That's a great time to serve and communicate value to the family. Make first time check-in as easy and simple as possible and slip in a little vision about how you want to partner with parents in their children's spiritual growth.

3. When families have pastoral care needs.
When families are in crisis, it's a great chance to show that you love them and are there to offer support. Hospital and funeral visits are huge, but so is walking with families through divorce and other major life crises.

For us we rely on our Life Group Leaders (leaders over small groups of kids) to be aware of what's going on in the lives of the kids in their groups and provide that personal touch that our staff could never make to hundreds of kids.

We also have recommended resources we point parents to during difficult seasons like these.

4. When parents have children with special needs.  
One of the most untapped opportunities in the church is ministering with families with special needs. This is an area we're really trying to figure out because our heart goes to out to families who hurting, tired and have found their children unwelcome or misunderstood because of developmental or healthy challenges.  Any effort you can make to serve, include and reach out to these families is a fantastic step to building bridges between church and home.  Ryan Frank led a fantastic breakout on special needs ministry at this year's D6 Conference.  You can check out my notes here. 

5. When parents are upset or have an issue with the Children's Ministry.
It's always fun when parents are angry or complaining about something going on in our ministry, right?  Well, actually, this could be one of the best seasons to build a bridge between their home and the church.  

This is your opportunity to listen to a parent, connect on a personal level and help them see that you share a common goal, their child falling in love with Jesus and following Him.  It's a chance to communicate vision and to invite them to work with you to resolve the issue and help their child grow in their faith.  

Okay, so those a few launch windows our team has discovered. How about you? Are there are situations you can think of when parents come into your orbit?

Here's my challenge to you. Pick one of these seasons of opportunity and think about how you can:

• Serve families and provide real help.
• Build relationships and trust. 
• Cast vision about family discipleship and partnering with the church.

While you may not be able to get all of your parents using a Sunday School take-home sheet each week, I can promise you they will take advantage of whatever resources you offer for these special times when parents come looking to you for help.  

Each time that happens you build trust, credibility and relationship. Over time, that's what you'll need most to connect your church and the homes you serve.

Building Bridges Between Church & Home, Part 1

Photo Credit: Joel Neild Photography via Compfight cc

Bridges are a big deal.  Take the Sherman Minton bridge in Louisville, Ky, for instance.  It spans the Ohio River carrying thousands of drivers on I-64 from Indiana to Louisville and back every day. 

Back in 2011, inspectors discovered cracks in the structure, shut down the bridge and threw Louisville traffic into chaos for five grueling months.  $20 million later the bridge reopened and people cheered like it was the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Why?

Because without the right bridges in place, life becomes a lot harder than it needs to be.  True for commuters, but also true, and with much greater stakes, for families and the church.

Being a parent is hard.  Raising kids to love and follow Jesus is hard.  Helping your kids to be a light in a dark world is hard.   Inspiring your kids to become the people God made them to be?  Hard!

But all of this is much harder without a church that empowers and supports you.  What parents need is a bridge, a bridge that connects the church and the home, a bridge that provides you as a parent with vision, community, encouragement, and helfpul tools to make the tough journey of parenting a journey of joy and victory.  

Sure, parenting kids to follow Jesus is still hard, but when the church and families work together, amazing things can happen.  

As I tell the parents in our church, "You are the experts on your kids, but sometimes, even the experts need a little help."  

One of our greatest challenges as leaders in the church is providing that help by building bridges between church and the home.  

That's why I'm so excited that the theme of this year's D6 Conference is "Connect."  It's going to be two days focused on building these bridges between church and the home.  I'm going to be leading two breakouts to help people figure out what those bridges might look like in their church.  Here's a sneak peek:

Easy First Steps to Creating a D6 Culture
How can you build a D6 culture in your church in the midst of all of your other responsibilities?  The good news is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.  In this session, you will learn how to retool what you’re already doing to empower parents and ignite a passion for families in your church.  

Kid-Speak: Giving Parents the Language to Talk About Faith at Home
Spiritual conversations can be intimidating for parents. They may understand their own relationship with God but don’t have the words to talk about it with their kids. In this session, we’ll look at simple techniques that will give parents confidence to have faith conversations at home.

I'd love for you to join me there so that we can dive into bridge building together.  

For those of you who can't attend, I'll be unpacking some of the big pieces of bridge building over the next week right here on the blog.  We'll look at six tools for building bridges between church and home and how to take advantage of special seasons of opportunity to connect with parents.  

Check out Part 2 of this post here.

How about you?  What are you doing right now to build bridges between church and the home?

6 Reasons You Need to Go to the D6 Conference

Last year I attended my first D6 Conference and wasn't really sure what to expect.  I was excited when I signed up in the spring but by the time the conference rolled around I was having second thoughts.   All I could think about was the work that was waiting for me back at church piling up while I was gone.

Then the conference started, and about twenty minutes into the first session I texted my wife and told her how dumb I was for second guessing it.  It was awesome.  It was fantastic for me as a ministry leader and even better for me as a husband and a dad.  D6 gave me a much-needed jolt of new ideas and inspiration to help the families I love follow Jesus together.

Flipping Take-Home Papers On Their Head

Photo Credit: Mark van Laere via Compfight cc

For years our team has wrestled with the dilemma of the take-home paper.  You know, the stuff we send home to tell parents what we taught their kids so they can talk about it at home?  Sure, we all agree that God's plan is for parents to be the spiritual leaders at home.  We all agree that what happens at home is more important than what happens at church.

But do the papers we send at home each week really help?  Does anyone actually use them?  Or do they end up as paper airplanes or wadded up in the floorboard of the minivan on the way home?

Okay, first I think there's nothing wrong with take-home papers.  For parents who are already discipling their kids, they can be a good tool to keep the conversation going.  Also churches that have a strong discipling culture have a much better chance of seeing families actually put these to good use.

But I was really challenged last year when I read what Michelle Anthony wrote about take-home papers in her book, Dreaming of More for the Next Generation.  Anthony talks about the fact that take-home papers may be sending the wrong message to parents.  She writes, "Without saying it directly, I was communicating that we would be the primary teachers of God's Word and they would support us by reinforcing the message at home."

So what did she and her team do?  They flipped the process on it's head.  Her ministry created a pre-teach resource to equip parents to be the first one to read the Bible story to their kids.  This put the Children's Ministry in the position of just following up on what was happening at home.

"Now, instead of parents asking, 'What did you learn in church today?'" Anthony says, "we, the ministry leaders, were able to ask the children, 'What did you learn at home this week?'"

Webinar: Building a Discipling Culture In Children's Ministry

Over the last twenty years I've chased a LOT of trends in Children's Ministry.   I've watched the pendulum swing from event-driven ministry (just how many carnivals can you do in one year?) to weekend-driven ministry to family-driven ministry.  And I'm sure in a couple of years we'll have a something-else-driven ministry model that will be the next big thing. We'll have a conference for it and everything, until, of course, a new trend emerges.

But, honestly, I'm kind of tired of chasing trends.  I'd much rather chase Jesus.  When you look at the life of Jesus, He says ministry really comes down to one thing - go and make disciples who make disciples who make disciples.  

Are we really doing that?  Or are we just keeping kids busy?  

Effective Children's Ministry is about making disciples.  It's actually much simpler and much harder than any trend we could chase.  

Three years ago, I discovered some really helpful tools produced by a group of folks who are discipleship ninjas, my friends at 3DM.  I loved their discipleship stuff so much I asked them if I could bring it to children's ministry.  

Last summer we released the first year of a curriculum called Kairos Quest that's now being used in churches all over the world.  I've been connecting with those churches over the last couple of weeks, and have learned a ton about how they are innovating and getting serious about making kid disciples in their churches.  

Next Monday, at 2:00 pm, I'm going to share some of what I've been learning in a webinar for 3DM called Building a Discipling Culture in Children's Ministry.  I'm really excited about what God's up to in unleashing a discipleship revolution with families and can't wait to dive into it with you on Monday.  

Here's the official blurb and how to register if you're interested:

Building a Discipling Culture In Children's Ministry

The tools of discipleship and mission are not just for the adults in your church — in fact, a discipling language can and should be taught to the youngest members of your community. Within the missional movement worldwide, kids are being taught to live as disciples of Jesus and to disciple their peers. Parents are being taught to take a more primary role as disciplers of their children, and the Church is empowering and equipping them to lead a family on mission that calls the next generation into a lifelong adventure in God's kingdom.

Resourcing children's workers is an important part of what we do — as well as one of the most consistent requests we receive. To that end, we would love to invite you to join us on Monday March 4th from 2-3:30p (EST) for a webinar on How to build a discipling culture in your children's ministry. 

In this webinar, Jason Byerly (Children's Pastor at Southland Christian Church and author ofKairos Quest) will discuss how churches within the missional movement are using their children's ministry to plant the DNA of discipleship and mission with children and their parents! He'll be discussing the way a shared discipleship language can give families a compass they can use it to navigate whatever life throws at them that week and what that looks like in a range of ministry contexts.

Some areas we'll be covering on this webinar:

- Our philosophy of children's ministry

- Scope and Sequence of our curriculum 

- Stories of breakthrough and practical examples

- Q&A

You can register for the webinar by clicking here or by visiting kairosquest.eventbrite.com.

We hope you can make it — and look forward to talking with you more. If you have any questions about the webinar, Kairos Quest or 3DM in general, please don't hesitate to contact Peter Wyngaard, our Resource Specialist, at peter@weare3dm.com. 

Inside Kairos Quest

Over the past couple of months since the release of 3DM's Kairos Quest, I've had some questions about what exactly it covers. What is the scope and sequence? How is the curriculum organized?  How do the units fit together?

To answer some of those questions, here's an inside peek at each unit.

If you just want a general overview of the curriculum, click here to see a previous post.  Otherwise, read on.