Orange Tour DFW - Session 3

Session 3 was with Carey Nieuwhof, a senior pastor from Canada. Great session with deep insight about the "c" word, change.

• Change is a constant
• Every change has a life cycle; an upswing and an eventual downswing
• Easy change takes place on the downturn, though this may not be the best time to change
• Well-led organizations change while on the upswing; this is the most difficult point of change, but potentially the most productive
• We may have to change stuff that was working in order to have greater impact
• We need to look at why we do what we do all the time

5 Steps to Implementing Change

1. Study the concepts
2. Get as many of your team on-board as possible – need leaders aligned
3. Define an action plan
4. Reorganize for change
5. Implement the change – soft launch, evaluate

A great session to wrap up an inspirational day. Tomorrow, Children's Ministry 101 continues the love!

Wayne

Orange Tour DFW - Session 2

Session two with Reggie. He talked about the phrases that need to come in-between the words from the two lists he talked about in session one.

So to get from list one to list two, we need to do the following:

• To get from focusing on Students to focusing on Leaders, we need to Integrate Strategy.
• To get from Content to Experience, we need to Refine Our Message
• To get from Production to Relationship, we need to Elevate Community
• To get from Age-focused to Family-focused, we need to Reactivate the Family
• And to get from Growth to Service, we need to Leverage Influence

Reggie passed out the “Calibrate” card. A "scorecard" to be used to see where our churches/ministries are at when it comes to getting us from the first list to the second list using the "in-between" phrases. Very good stuff. Even during our break, great discussions with our leadership that are here with us this weekend.

Check out Orange Tour to check out the conference and Children's Ministry 101 will continue the live blogs.
Wayne

Orange Conference - DFW Friday afternoon

The giant ice storm was a dud, so right now, at this very moment I'm in the opening session at the Orange Tour DFW stop with the great Reggie Joiner. And as usual, incredibly "meaty" material from "the man."

Here's Reggie's list of things we probably think about every week:
Students
Content
Production
Age-focused ministry
Growth

And here's Reggie's list of things maybe we should be thinking about every week:
Leaders instead of students: most effective way of reaching the kids is us as pastors reaching the adult and teen volunteers who can multiply our influence.
Experience instead of content: There is a gap between what we’re teaching and what really happens out there, and it’s our job to close that gap.
Relationship instead of production: The world’s culture will always have better production, BUT what the world’s culture doesn’t have is the importance of relationship
Family-focused instead of age-focused: our 40 hours per year with the children we minister to has limited influence and impact. We need to leverage parents because of their 3000 hours of influence. We need to help make our parents experts at influencing their children. We need parents to fight for their relationship with their children, and we need kids to fight for their relationship with their parents
Service instead of numeric growth: serving must be a component of discipleship. We need people to volunteer for our ministries to help them grow spiritually, not for them to help us with our ministry

What would happen in our ministries if we moved from thinking so much about the first list and rather focussed more time on the second list?

Children's Ministry 101 will keep the updates coming.
Check out the Orange Tour website and sign up for the tour stop near you. It will be well worth your time, energy and money.
Wayne

Orange Tour - Dallas

Tomorrow, hopefully we'll be able to attend the Orange Tour stop here in Dallas. I say hopefully because it's forecasted that we'll be receiving this year's ice storm tonight/tomorrow morning. We'll see...
Anyways, Children's Ministry 101 will post with the best from the tour stop, maybe I'll be able to blog live!

Wayne

Honor's Reward

Honor’s Reward
A few weeks ago, Pastor John Stickl let me borrow a cd set entitled, Honor’s Reward. It’s six cd’s of messages that John Bevere preached about the concept of honor. I’m only on cd 2, but getting smacked pretty hard in-between the eyes.

Growing up, the Korean half of the family was pretty forceful in molding me into what I thought was a honoring mindset. In fact, I prided myself on how respectful I was to those in authority in my life. Bevere’s messages have made me reexamine how I show honor to everyone.

I always think of honoring those in authority over me, but Bevere uses Scripture to show that I need to also honor those equal to me and those I’m in authority over. Very thought provoking stuff so far.

A couple of honor verses have grabbed a hold of me.

• Romans 12:10 “Honor one another above yourselves.” So I guess I need to respect, value and show as precious everyone, not only my authorities. Not that I’m a total jerk all the time, but I can’t be a jerk ever, to anyone.
• Psalm 15:4 “honor whoever fears the Lord.” No more making fun of the folks on the Christian tv channels. That’s truly the first thing I thought about when reading this verse. Certainly I need to be proactive in honoring those who fear God.
  

If only there was a honometer, so I could see how I was doing on this road of honoring...

If you’re interested, you can get the book here Though WARNING, I have not read the book, I’m just listening to the cd’s, but understand the book to be the written out version of the concepts in the cd’s. Let us know here at Children's Ministry 101 what you think about the cd set or the book.

Wayne