Conspire Day 2 -- Family Ministry Strategy For a Medium Sized Church

I don't think any title has been more fake than the title of this breakout session, well maybe titling Milli Vanilli as an artist is worst. BUT IT WAS AN AWESOME SESSION!!! I don't even care that they didn't even utter the words "Medium Sized Church".

This Breakout session was lead by Pat Cimo, Dave Huber, & Holly Laurent; the three staff members that make up the Family Ministry of Willow Creek Community Church. As I mentioned above the session wasn't really specific to medium sized churches, but I think most churches that would be in the position to implement the the strategy they talked about would be medium sized churches. The notes were pretty basic and a lot of the discussion came out of hungry audience members who wanted to figure out how to be more successful with Family Ministry.

However here are the notes on the Willow website, just click on "C86 Family Ministry Strategy for a Medium-Size Church".

Here are some of the points that I noted:
Willow's Philosophical Model Journey

1. Supplemental Method: Sending take home sheets with parents in the hope that they will interact with their children. Pitfall -- the papers don't necessarily make it home or get used
2. Program Method: The Family Experience program where the parents and the kids have a shared experience. Pitfall-- it's isolated to the Children's Ministry
3. Structure Method: The ministry's report to one person who works to sync them together. Pitfalls: There is only one voice represented
4. Integration Method: All ministries have shared language, shared mission, and it's all shared at home, with the goal of using what is taught at home in authentic and real-world ways. In this method the Teaching Pastors are telling parents to ask their kids and the kids are being told to ask their parents. Leadership buy in is essential for success and the content and values come from the theology of the church.

Then they went through and put some Willow Flesh on their 3 year journey

• FX -- Was their Family Experience (Program Method) for parents and K-5 grade kids. FX was based around the adult service content that ran every week for a month after the Saturday service (7pm) and between the 1st and 2nd service on Sunday. The Pitfalls: it was another event (event driven ministry), placed at the wrong time of the week (if service went long on Sunday time was cut, so a 30 minute program became a 13 minute program), and people were not using the DVD resources that they sent home with them.
• The Story -- Zondervan bible titled "The Story" was used to go through the Old Testament from Jan-June (a children's version is in production and will be released soon). Resources, including a shortened version of the teaching for the whole family can be found on the willow website here and click on the . This resource can be used by families or churches, they stated that more than 400 homes are utilizing this resource every week. They combined the FX lessons with the Integration Method.
• Celebration of Hope -- Church wide compassion project, including a Feed The Children Event. Created the "Jo Jo's suitcase" resource and handed out to everyone who came to bag food.

All in all it was a good session with a lot of already tried, failed, and improvised examples to share. If the session is offered as a CD resource it would be worth purchasing.