from 30K feet

The Goal of Ministry and Parenting - Growing in Intimacy with God

Several months ago, I started reading through Exodus to get a feel of how God used Moses in leadership. It was great to see how they interacted with each other in spite of Moses' shortcomings. (Very encouraging for me.)  I moved from there into Deuteronomy. I confess I skipped Leviticus and Numbers for many reasons.

As I was reading through the first four chapters of Moses's sermon to Israel in Deuteronomy, I was struck with the personalness of God. And then it hit me...everything wraps around intimacy with God. (duh!)

Unlike any other god, God, our God wants to be intimate with us. Moses warned the people to not make idols of people, animals, the sun, the moon, the stars, etc. Coming from Eygpt, they were very drawn to making idols of these things. These idols would lead them away from intimacy with God.

What are the things that lead me away from intimacy with God? Everything we do, every choice we make either leads us toward intimacy with God or away from it.

The goal of children's ministry must be to model, teach and encourage kids towards intimacy with God. It must help parents make the same choices towards intimacy with God and assist them in leading their kids there. This is why the 5th and 6th grade years are so difficult? Because kids are beginning to make decisions for themselves. Decisions that will either lead them toward intimacy with God or away from it.

Fellowship Kids is committed to keeping this the main focus of what we do. It will be the barometer we will use to measure healthiness.

Jump In and flowcharts

Do you remember doing flowcharts in school? I remember doing them many years ago but it seems like a lost art since I never see them any more. Now that I think about it, I can't remember the last flowchart I looked at.

Well, I passed on the task to the Fellowship Kids Director to put our new Jump In process into a flowchart. I hoped it would help us think through the steps and give us something we could communicate to the rest of the team with.

Click here to take a look --> Download Jump In FlowChart-small

We will unroll this tomorrow in our team meeting and then begin to put together the needed pieces for each step and the material needed to train leaders on making it work.

Team Meeting - part 2

This Wednesday is our Fellowship Kids Team Meeting and the primary focus of our time will be on building great teams. The meeting is only for 90 minutes so we will need to move quickly.

After talking through the vision for next year, which I mentioned in the post Clearly Defined Problem, we will begin talking about building teams.  First we will look at some of the Biblical examples of team ministry with Nehemiah, Moses, Jesus and Paul.

We will talk about what makes up great teams: (borrowed from Tammy Melchien)

• Chemistry
• Common Values
• The Loss of "I"
• Growing Intimacy

 We will look at 3 steps to identifying and building into key leaders

1. Look for people who already have a high level of ownership in Fellowship Kids
2. Get connected
3. Share responsibility (we will roll out Jump In)

Team Meeting

February 11, we have the first in a series of team meetings focused on planning for the next year. This is a chance for me to cast vision and get our team on the same page for how we will move Fellowship Kids from a good Children's Ministry to a great one.

At a basic level, we will focus on two things over the next 6 months.

1. Creating solid environments

2. Building great teams

On February 11th, we will take a closer look at how to build great teams by:

• Defining what a great team looks like 
• Defining what makes a "key" leader
• Identifying was to invest in key leaders
• Measurements of success

I will further break down over the next couple of posts how we are preparing for this meeting and what we hope to come from it.