Recruiting and family engagement has taken on a whole new level of relationship-building. Or has it? Motivated by a spirit of compassion, love, ‘we are still in this together’, and a respect of how each person will live out their call to love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength, AND love their neighbors as themselves, we proposed a Chill & Chat About McEachern Kids (MK).

Promotional Vocabulary: Children learn best to love Jesus by spending time with people who love Jesus. That’s you! McEachern Kids Dream Team’s training with Tropical Cafe’ smoothies will be on Wednesday, July 22 5:30pm-7pm.
Bring your camp chair and we’ll gather at the McEachern Kids entrance to CHILL & CHAT about the many different opportunities to serve Jesus on the McEachern Kids leadership team and have some fun.
This is for you if you’re all in, if you want to get more connected, and even if you’re just curious and unsure of making the commitment to serve when we open our doors to in-person gathering in The Treehouse.
For more information, contact dreilly@mceachernumc.org.
RSVP at…

We ordered Sunrise smoothies from the local Tropical Smoothie and with camp chair in-hand, we set up outside with appropriate social distancing. Everyone got a smoothie, a pen, a copy of the calendar hot off the presses, and an index card. The index card was to write notes to me of thoughts, ideas, concerns, dreams for MK. Earlier in the day I’d sent a text to everyone in my phone asking a set of 3+3 questions: What 3 things do you LOVE about MK? What 3 things do you WISH for MK? Our new senior pastor had asked these same questions of the staff as part of his on-boarding. My phone blew up all day with responses. Those who couldn’t respond by text and those who popped in out of mere curiosity were able to follow up with emails to the 3+3 later or write them on the index card and leave the cards in a basket for me to review after the meeting.

I’d asked two servant leaders to take notes and one to take pictures.

We chatted about small groups and tossed ideas onto the table for returning to in-person children’s programming beginning on Labor Day Sunday. We chatted about looking into the next 2.5 years. We chatted about Faith Milestones, Parenting with a Purpose classes, why we chose how we did Drive-in and Drive-thru, Christmas Eve children’s services, what CLUB345 and GLEE Club could look like. I shared stories of why we would start Grandparenting with a Purpose classes and what Camp Chair Meetings to come in September and October will look like. This team is the first to hear about Camp Chair Meetings so I needed to be clear and begin stirring much energy as they are the connectors to spread the word much better than a social media campaign could ever do. We took a tour of the Children’s Ministry spaces inside the building for the first-timers and first-lookers explaining the staging chaos for Drive-in services with the Ambassadors present telling their stories of the spaces and taking pics. “This is my favorite supply closet. This is where Ms. DeDe stores the snacks and especially the Rice Krispie Treats!,” shared by the fabulous Miss Olivia who started as an Ambassador and is now an MK intern. 

Then the ask: Would you prayerfully consider serving on the McEachern Kids servant leader team next year?

Let’s get this party started!

“Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started!” Matthew 23:32

What is YOUR plan for this next school year to move closer to the center?

The holy habits listed around the target are the most impactful holy habits which grow our love and faith as followers of Jesus. Practiced by the saints who came before us, we have amazing tools today easily accessible to practice every single one.

Mark where YOU think YOU are around the target in practice. No judgement here, just a realistic place from which to start.

Then choose one area/holy habit to make the move closer to the bullseye over the next school year. Moving one step closer to the bullseye is reasonable and realistic and achievable.

What next? Make a plan to take a class, read a book or two or more, grow a deeper relationship with a colleague skilled in that area, subscribe to a podcast with that specialty, wake up or go to bed an hour earlier to make margin, and stick it out until the end of May 2023. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at your movement over time because following Jesus is a lifetime journey, one intentional season at a time.

Elisabeth George, A Woman After God’s Own Heart, calls it ‘building a faith file.’ 

Ken Willard, Stride, calls it ‘creating a discipleship pathway for yourself.’

My volunteer/servant-leader team goes through this exercise every year as part of our Taco ‘Bout, Chill & Chat, or Winter Pasta-bilities Dinner. They don’t turn it in. Each leader keeps it for themselves as a reminder they are on their own discipleship journey and get to choose how it will go. This year we’re using Top Gun vocabulary since it’s part of our church’s Basic Training fall campaign.

Top Gun Training Officers are always better than their students because they practice their skills more. What skill will you take to the next level this school year? Share this as part of your team training, but this is also about you as a child of God growing in your own Jesus muscles as a way to beat the Devil who will be at you like fleas on an unprotected, unprepared dog. (I’m from the South and we like using dogs in our expressions for emphasis.) Remember you are a child of God, not His employee.

May 2023 will be here eventually, short of the Rapture. We’ll get closer every day we wake up. Thank you, Lord! Let us not look back and hope we just float into a robust faith and trust in Jesus when life hits us hard. Be ready. Be prepared. Join the holy habits of the saints who have gone before us with the tools the Lord and the Body of Christ has provided today.

How can I help?

How can we help each other? 

Tell someone, so you can celebrate together. Jesus never sent out His disciples one at a time, but rather, two, three, or seventy.

“So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.” Colossians 2:6-7

Our church has taken the last year to determine not only our core beliefs, but our core values. As a staff and a church in our local community, it was decided that our number one core value is hospitality.

Hospitality is any opportunity to show over-the-top love and care. In true edit-to-excellence mode, the kidmin team has been evaluating our family’s experiences with an informal hospitality audit from the pre-visit through dismissal.

Intentional Pre-visit experience should include

• Overcommunicating where to park, enter, and what to bring (most non-typical item first), then we know where to jack up the greet/sign-in/place additional information, and signage at registration.
• Consistent start times. Families don’t have time to wait, so CLUB345 begins at 3:45, Bible study always starts at 6:30pm on a Tuesday (but we are ready at 6pm to build in margin for chatting and relationship-building).
• Consistent end times. No one likes finishing late. Everyone expects to finish on time. Everyone likes finishing early. Family schedules are too tight to add to their stress. This attention to time builds trust.
• Communicate Sunday info on Tuesday AND Thursday to give time for weekend planning and the checking of emails.
• Update social media the morning of a special so that families can easily find the info at the top of the social media feed.
• Online registration confirmation reads, “All communication for this event will be by the email address used for this registration.” By communicating several times to that email address beforehand, we build energy.
• Space looks updated, clean, sharp, and intentional. Be a good sharer of spaces because most people don’t know how to do it well. Tip: Walk the entrance, hallway, and rooms. Wash the windows, doors, light switches, throw away the clutter or buy storage bins which look like we are ready for company all the time. Add mulch/pine straw and flowers at the entrance all your families use to attend your programs on a regular, scheduled basis. 
• It matters how people feel BEFORE the experience and AT THE END of the experience, so be sure to ask, “How will this space/event/experience make someone feel walking in?, Waiting for pickup?, At closing, Whey someone is walking out the door?”

Present Assessment

With the eyes of a parent/grandparent, we ask…“Have we made it easy for families to know the what, when, where, who of Sunday morning and any special event?”
– Communicate where to park, then we know where to focus the greatest attention to visual elements..
– Consistent update the website. Develop a system and shared process for everyone, then do updates early and with great joy.
– Check the website weekly for what applies to the children and check ALL the registration links.

Action Steps

Thirty to 45-minutes prior to all activities/events I walk through ALL of our spaces picking up remnants of ‘whatever’ from the floors, turn on all the lights, check the temperature, empty the dehumidifiers (our space is underground and surrounded by trees), open all the doors, check the bathrooms that all are working for supplies, and basically inspect to set aright all the spaces shared by littles and the bigs who serve them.

• Is our dismissal (ending experience) as great as our arrival experience?

Story: What we saw in our auditing our Sunday morning dismissal experience is that we had a couple of runners (students who didn’t want to wait until their parents picked them up) and students who crowded the exit door waiting for their parents, requiring our team to likely ask students to step back, and not crowd. We felt like we were fussing at the kids. Not a great dismissal experience. Talking through multiple scenarios, we now return all the students to the Welcome Center where they play games with friends until called by walkie-talkie to exit through another doorway. No more crowding nor running, and kids are laughing and playing. What we say to them as they leave is a blessing. Their last experience is with a smile and a ‘kind send off’ into the world . Their ending experience is as good as their all-morning experience.

Evaluation

• Goal: I’m shooting for visit #3. “Do what you do so well that kids will want to see it again and bring their friends.” – Walt Disney
• Goal: I’m shooting for another connection. With multiple onramps, we can target what would be a natural next step in discipleship for a family.
• Goal: What will be so greatly consistent, one of our own will want to invite someone else from their team, class, neighborhood, school, server at the local restaurant they frequent, to come to their church? Be ready to ask a kid, “Who can you bring next time?” 
• Ask: How can what we do in kidmin hospitality be a blessing to others in the church outside kidmin? We are not responsible for every area, but we are responsible for all the areas and experiences of our own.

Story: Last Sunday was the first chilly morning of the season. I picked up 3 gallons of apple cider to set up a hot apple cider station in the Children’s Welcome Center. The Children’s Welcome Center opens 30 minutes before all other programming on campus. The kids who came early enjoyed hot apple cider to taste and smell. A really great smell! Once Sunday school started, we moved the hot apple cider station to the gathering outside the Children’s Welcome Center with a balloon which read, “Happy Fall” to share with those who linger between services in that space and a senior saints Sunday school which meets in their large group after. 

Story: I wash the glass doors where my families enter and church greeters stand because a beautiful day has got to be seen clearly.

Story: Since most of our kidmin families enter through those glass doors from the parking lot, I pay a lot of attention to that entrance so it looks attractive and welcoming, uncluttered and ‘prepared for company’. I’ve invited several folks who love to play in the dirt to update the island flower beds for fall/winter including pine straw. 

What does an edit to excellence of hospitality look like in your ministry with children and families? I’m always wondering, “What am I missing?”

My current pastor gently corrected a colleague recently when she referred to our servant-leaders as ‘volunteers.’ PTA recruits volunteers. We recruit servant-leaders.  Most of my conversations with colleagues at other churches revolve around building their servant-leader team. Anyone else feel like a new church start? Yep, we all do!

I had a great conversation with a new-to-director Children’s Ministry champion last week and we chatted through several ideas:

Open House – Invite all kids and their parents/grandparents to a 30 minute open house after a Sunday service. Build it up, think sandwich boards worn by kids to promote. Post jumbo post-its on the walls in the kid’s area with “Sunday Morning”, “Hospitality”, “CLUB345”, “Missions”, and “Special Events” with cups of crayons below each one. Pull a Vanna White sharing a 1 minute elevator pitch in front of each one inviting those in attendance, “If you’d like more information about >>>, write your name and email/phone number on this post-it note (their choice for how to be contacted), and our team will get back to you.” Every 10 minutes, play a game of rock, paper, scissors for prizes OR pull carnival tickets for $5 RaceTrac/QT gift cards for tasty beverages. Prizes for kids AND adults in attendance. End in a fun interactive prayer and make those phone calls by week’s end.  Lots of energy, music (bluetooth speaker, even), and have your kid’s space shine!

Chill & Chat  or Taco ‘Bout – Promote this 1.5-2 hour event as a time to ‘get more information’ about the church’s ministry with kids/families.  Put up the jumbo post-it notes with similar headings as above and offer  a similar 1 minute elevator pitch followed by inviting someone in the room to share a story about their experience in that area. Lots of other voices will be telling great stories. Offer a take-away book with some meat to it that speaks to how the ministry will support them as parents, grandparents, etc.. Your current servant-leaders are your best recruiters so give time for some general chatting. Follow up with thank you notes to everyone who attends and especially those who shared a story. Offer a tour of the spaces, too. I have Ambassadors take care of this part. This is also where parents/grandparents get the first-look at what’s coming in the ministry for the upcoming season or school year.

Mission Field – Bring a suitcase and visit an adult Sunday school class. Say, “This is what I know about you. As a Christian you always wanted to be a missionary.  But you had to work, had little people, or maybe were taking care of big people. Perhaps now is the time. What if I were to offer you a 1-year gig (big hairy ask!) and you wouldn’t have to take shots and you could sleep in your own bed? Would you consider it? Being a missionary, I mean?” Give pause. Say, “I’m asking you and a friend to serve as a missionary, one month on and one month off, to serve in the mission field of children’s ministry on Sunday morning for 1 year.”  “I ask for you and a friend because Jesus never sent our his disciples one at a time, but in pairs or threes or up to 70 to do what He asked, and He asks in the scriptures for us to lead the littles to Him.” Oh, and come bearing goodies by bringing a box of biscuits or donuts along with the suitcase.

Church Committee Meetings – Find out when the Trustees, Staff-Parish Relations, and Finance Committees are meeting next. Leave a box of yummy goodies, a bowl of ice, cold water bottles, you get the idea. Add a note or picture signed by kids in your ministry inviting one (and a friend…see above) to serve together at an upcoming event, or say THANK YOU for making the ministry possible by the decisions they make. It will delight them to know you appreciate their hard work of ministry, too.

Lord, Who? Prayers – Write Lord, who? on your car windshield with a sharpie and as you drive pray for a name to reach out one-on-one. One-on-one invites are the best and really should be done all the time.  Whoever the Lord gives you, make contact. Don’t’ talk yourself out of it. You never know how the Lord is working in that person’s life and they are just waiting for the invite to do something about it.

Youth Milestone – If you have access to your church’s youth group, make serving in Children’s Ministry a faith milestone of one month on and one month off for a year. Make them jump through the hoops necessary for training and equipping so they are aware of the expectations to be a great servant-leader. This is first-job training kind of stuff. Talk to them about what they’re doing well. You can talk to them about how they can do something better. Speak into their lives the opportunity to serve others well and with excellence and be sure to tell them WHY something is important. Remind them they’ll need reference letters for jobs and college program applications in the future and you can help them with that.

Faith Milestones and Grandparents – Faith Milestones are those once a year special events which mark a remarkable season of life with a spiritual training like Bread & Juice, I Can Pray, Acolyte, I Love My Church and the like. We require our students to have an adult with them at most Faith Milestones. If that adult is a grandparent, that grandparent is all-in to support and join in sharing sacred experiences. I will always reach out the next week to invite him/her to serve at something their grand might participate in.

“We are many parts of one body, and we all belong to each other.” Romans 12:5

Grandparents hold a special place in the hearts of the grandchildren. It goes both ways. Grandparents are part of God’s continuing plan to grow up disciples of His son Jesus. Take a look at Deuteronomy 6 and Psalm 78 to get a small glimpse of that plan.

We are leveraging that relationship and intentionally helping with a Grandparent’s toolbox to share their faith through a closed Facebook group entitled Faith Grandparenting and four in-person opportunities each year to share stories and resources to help them along their way we call Grandparenting With A Purpose. “You cannot be a Christian family if you are not a disciple-making family, because your family can’t truly follow Christ if you are not doing what Christ commanded – trying to become more and more like Him and leading others to do the same.” (Family Discipleship by Chandler & Griffin)

Last week’s Grandparenting With A Purpose: Holiday Edition, shared in-person and through a Facebook Live event on the closed Faith Grandparenting Facebook group, was a very special time to share life and some great ideas.

We serve a God of celebration! Through festivals, special food, visuals, decorations, and community we stop and remember the faithfulness of God: Passover, Festival of Tabernacles, Feast of Purim, Harvest time, Holy Communion. We celebrate with our five senses with special sights (lights, tablescapes, decorations), smells (food, spaces, candles), sounds (music, words), tastes (food), and touch (clothing, expressions of affection). Traditions offer rhythms for connection and belonging for which we are wired by our Creator.

Holidays like…
Thanksgiving – table cloth with names of who has shared the Thanksgiving table over the years; favorite foods and the magic of the “how” to make it; handwritten recipes and sharing the faith of the ones who started the family recipe.
Christmas – Ask “What three things will make Christmas Christmas?”; three gifts (Magi)
New Year’s – Do overs; time capsules; goals for physical, spiritual, family faith experiences.
Mardi Gras – Looking for the baby (Baby Jesus) in a King Cake; masks (God knows all of our mysteries).
Valentine’s Day – The greatest love story in all the world is John 3:16.
St. Patrick’s Day – story of St. Patrick; the color green reminds us to ‘grow in our faith’ continually and discussion of how we will do that this spring.
Independence Day – visit patriotic/historic places and share the stories of the faith of our founding mothers (Harriett Tubman, Abigail Adams, Susanna Wesley) and Christian heritage (John & Charles Wesley, George Washington Carver, Jimmy Carter).

Milestones like…
Birthdays teach our kids to celebrate others. On #1 Son’s 16th birthday we collected gifts of tools from Godly men who wrote him notes of wisdom for the tool they gifted. On Baby Girl’s 16th birthday we collected letters of wisdom from Godly women, teachers, and local officials we knew who knew Jesus and compiled a ‘Book of Wisdom’ she carries with her to this day.
Anniversaries teach kids to revisit big family moments. We will share that #1 Son and his lovely wife went to church for worship on their first date after greeting her at the end of the preschool Sunday school class she was teaching.
Spiritual Birthdays – annual celebrations of making their decision to follow Jesus with a gift, donuts (life without Jesus is like a hole in the middle of your heart), balloons (God is round about His people), they tell their faith story of when they decided to follow Jesus and how they’ve grown in the last year as we prepared a plan to move forward in the next year.
Gotcha Day – celebrating when an adoption came through to become part of the family.
Driver’s License – hold a ‘blessing of the license’; laying on of hands and speaking truth of this new responsibility.
New Home – praying through each room before moving in; a New Year’s home blessing.

Moments like….
Rediscovering the wonder of the everyday – my granddaughter remembers me when she smells biscuits and bacon.
Time to linger – breathe & sip; chill & chat
Gifts of time – my step mother checked me out of high school just to take me to lunch and we talk about the great issues of my teenage life.
Gifts of words – handwritten notes; postcards; journals; recipes; scribe the scriptures; gift a Bible.
New skills – teach about tea; take a cooking class, power tool class; shadow a church saint (Baby Girl shadowed an ER nurse from her home church to discover if nursing was really what God was calling her to. It WAS!)

For those in-person, they enjoyed an ice breaker with The Visual Faith Project, took home confetti cannons and their own Share the Love Drive-thru bags of goodies we’d prepared for our Children’s Ministry drive-thru that had taken place the Sunday afternoon before.

If the average age of a first-time grandparent in the USA is 47, this is a demographic who is leaning into Christian Grandparenting with tenacity. These are amazing disciple-makers and I want to be on their team.

How else can you build up your grandparents with a purpose of intentionally sharing their faith with their grandchildren?

“We will not hide them from their descendants; we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, His power, and the wonders He has done.” Psalm 78:4

Listen to this and other posts on the In The Trenches with DeDe Reilly podcast.

There is an intentional balance required between WHAT we teach/model and WHO we teach. I can know every Bible story in the book. I can deliver it with every ounce of energy and passion in my body and soul. Yet if I don’t take into account my audience, their needs, their world, their developmental appropriateness, are they really learning? I don’t think so. This has been my motivation for studying my students. How are boys wired so I can speak to their boy-ness? How are girls wired so I can speak to their girl-ness? What are the ‘-nesses’ of today’s culture that were not there just 15, 10, even 5 years ago?

In Dr. Leonard Sax’s book, Girls On The Edge: The Four Factors Driving The New Crisis for Girls, we read that the first factor is the unintentional consequence of our girls growing up too quickly and hitting puberty at 8 or 9 years old. That blog can be found here.  Girls today are missing middle childhood, that special period from roughly age 8 to age 12 when girls in previous generations were able to figure out who they were and who they wanted to be. A long childhood is one of the features that define us as a species (pg 100) The second factor he calls the ‘cyberbubble’ where girls are hyper-connected to their peers causing them to become disconnected to themselves.
When I grew up, my home life included relationships with a parent, siblings, and close extended family. There were many circles of friends between school, church, and recreational activities likely involving many age groups. Today, “social life” for children and teenagers means social life with kids the same age. (pg 46) Much of their world today is set in ‘age levels’ from school, dance class, softball, and even most churches.

Before the explosion of the availability of cell phones, email, instant messaging, and the technology of 24/7 connectedness in 1995, girls had a private life and private time. Tweens and teens need a time to reflect on who they are and who they want to become: time to just chill (pg 47). Hard to chill out when something next to you is vibrating every couple of minutes. How can she sleep? Most pre-teens and teens need nine hours a night to function at their full potential (pg 49). Side note: Sleep deprivation can mimic ADHD almost perfectly, having trouble focusing or finishing tasks. She’ll be absent-minded, lose her house-keys (pg 50). Research has even shared that once a child hits the age of 12, they begin ‘dropping’ info from their minds that is not the most important in the moment, because there is so much to remember. I’m having flashbacks from my kids hitting middle school and forgetting their gym clothes, band shoes, or lunch. Whew!

What does this mean for ministry with children? Am I still giving information, or am I inviting them to ask questions? Good questions. Let the room go silent to give them time to think. Every young girl needs ‘an alternative community of girls and women’ who can give a hug and remind one another that God made them and Jesus loves them. It matters to God how His kids treat one another. Can we provide another place, a community, where she feels at home? Go ahead and write the note she’ll read over and over again. Send the postcard and make comments less about what she looks like and more about Who she belongs to, how they’re treating one another, and displaying the fruit of the Spirit.

Let’s model for our girls, and talk about, setting time aside each day to be with the Lord. At 8 and 9 years old they can begin to try often enough to succeed by 10 years old some holy habits of prayer journaling, reading the Bible, giving a tithe, and serving in community. Let’s give our girls a new target for their obsessive tendencies. I remember the summer I was ten years old. There’s something that happens when a kid (boy or girl) turns 10 that begins trajectories in many directions in music, art, writing, and interests in lots of things for many seasons to come.

This brings me to Dr. Sax’s third factor: obsession.  Our girls obsess over things we think aren’t important, but they rehash conversations from their peers like a stuck record-player (NOW I’m dating myself, for sure.) Do we know what keeps our girls awake at night?

Be a good listener. Don’t be in a hurry to make recommendations. Just nod and keep your mouth shut until your daughter has her say. When we listen to our friends it is usually with the purpose of understanding their dilemmas, of helping them clarify how they feel, and of letting them know that we care. We listen long enough to know what it feels like to be in their shoes. Too often with our children, we rush in and offer suggestions, propose alternatives, or solve problems. (Madeline Levine, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating A Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids, pg 134)

What are you thinking about the girls in your ministry? What are they ‘obsessing’ over? Join me next week for part 4 when we unpack Religious involvement seems to work as an antidote or as protection against preoccupation with physical appearance and unrealistic standards of thinness and performance. (pg 191)

“We typically believe that going to church and reading our Bibles a few times a week equals a personal relationship with Christ. Most of us would rather spend our time and energy focused on more immediate issues in our life – guy problems, friendship challenges, or weighty decisions that need to be made about our futures. And yet, amazingly, the answer to every single issue we will ever face can be found through deep intimacy with our true Prince (Jesus). Leslie Ludy, Authentic Beauty, page 184-185