Josh GriffinMore PostsWhat’s Happening with Saddleback’s Parent Ministry

I’m pretty excited about where we get to take our parent ministry in the coming year. Kurt Johnston (Saddleback’s Student Ministry Pastor and my boss) and I recently met with the guys over at ParentMinistry.Net and started to talk about using their tools and resource to help us boost our parent ministry. With as much as we’ve got going on we can’t seem to get a ton of traction really empowering parents. Time for a change!

As we’ve evaluated our ministry and made some D6/Sticky Faith transitions (read more on that here) we also realized we were doing a great job of informing parents, but not really equipping and resourcing them. And as a parent of a 5th grader myself, I’m pretty excited about the Rites of Passage Experience to use as a dad!

Here’s some of the ways I’ve thought about using the ParentMinistry.Net resource – stay tuned for more details as we roll stuff out in 2013:

  • Communicating monthly with parents via newsletter (we’ve done this for a while)
  • A free resource of the month offered to parents (started this last month)
  • Creating a “web hub” of monthly online training seminars
  • Making the Rites of Passage available to parents
  • Physically gathering parents together a couple times a year (hit and miss for us in the past)

For a while we’ve focused on a couple important audiences: ministering to students and empowering volunteers. I hope soon we can say we do a great job of equipping parents in the future, too!

JG

TagsComments 2 View Comments November 15, 2012

Josh GriffinMore PostsGUEST POST: Care Packages to Graduated Seniors

I recently started putting together a project that I have wanted to do since June, care packages to our graduated student leaders! This was largely inspired by the Sticky Faith concept that we should continue our ministry into our student’s freshman year of college. We thought that a great way to show our continued support of them would be to send them some college essentials for them to keep going as they come in close to the end of their first semester. We wanted to send make sure we sent them some useful things, some “study break” things, and some random things. On our list:

On top of all of that, we are also giving them a handful of encouraging notes written by our Student Leadership Team. I believe that these cards are the real star of the whole package. Those encouragements are where the majority of the ministering is happening. Your first year of college can be crazy! You’re not just figuring out how college works academically, but socially as well. For many of them, this is the first time that they have lived on their own, thus beginning a huge self-discovery phase of their life. It is my hope that these cards will remind them that there is a community back home that loves them and is praying for them.

Care packages aren’t something that we have done before, but we believe that these will make a huge impact on our graduated students!

What is your ministry doing to minister to your newly graduated students? Take a moment today to pray for those students as they continue their transition into college!

Colton Harker is the Student Leadership Coordinator at Saddleback HSM.  If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact him at coltonharker@gmail.com or on twitter at @ColtonHarker.

TagsComments 1 View Comments November 7, 2012

Josh GriffinMore PostsWorship Together Weekends: So Far So Good

A few months ago we talked about our first steps in helping our students develop a more Sticky Faith. We interviewed Kara Powell about how to help students have a faith that lasts beyond graduation and how churches are working to build communities that are integrated to a degree but still have effective age-specific ministries as well. If you missed the interview please check it out right here.

The second half of that week we talked about what our church was introducing that very week: Worship Together Weekends. The plan was to cancel youth services once a month in order to encourage families to attend the adult worship services together. The hope was that exposing our teenagers to the larger church experience at Saddleback would help them feel like part of the overall church family, not just part of the youth group.

We’ve been getting a ton of questions about it and many have asked for an update, so here we go!

So far, so good!
The first several weeks of Worship Together have been really great—by cancelling youth services the first weekend we actually also happened to coincide with several holidays (July 4th, Labor Day, etc.) so having the joint services was helpful on the lower-attended weekends anyhow. The real test is probably still coming soon, but it has been great so far.

We have a student section.
Yes, we have a section that is specifically designed for students—but we encourage students to sit with their families and friends first before heading there. Some choose to be there and our student ministry team is very present at all services that weekend, meeting parents, greeting, or on stage for announcements or welcome.

No momentum has been lost.
You would think that cancelling youth group once a month would kill momentum, but we haven’t had adverse affects yet. We communicate with texting and Facebook almost exclusively with our students so they know exactly what’s happening each weekend if we’re on or off. Hasn’t been confusing at all, which is a slight miracle.

So where will we go from here? We committed to a one-year experiment, and so far it seems like everybody is pleased with the results, and we’re excited to hear about other churches that are experimenting with new ideas to help students STICK!

Are you trying new things to develop Sticky Faith in your students?

This post was written by Josh Griffin and Kurt Johnston and originally appeared as part of Simply Youth Ministry Today free newsletter. Subscribe to SYM Today right here.

TagsComments 1 View Comments October 25, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts5 Questions with Kara Powell, Author of Sticky Faith

“Sticky Faith” is making waves in the youth ministry world, so we thought today we would interview Kara Powell, the person behind the movement, and get a little insight into what churches can do to help teens develop a “sticky” faith.

K&J: Explain where the Sticky Faith concept originated.

Kara: Actually, it originated in the mind and heart of a youth leader who was a Fuller student. As a youth pastor, she noticed how many youth group students from her church drifted from their faith after high school graduation. The Fuller Youth Institute worked with her to do an initial pilot study of just the students from her church, which raised provocative questions about the long-term trajectory of youth group graduates. From there, thanks to a grant from the Lilly Endowment, we were able to broaden our research team of Fuller students and faculty to study 500 students over a period of six years to try to figure out what leaders, parents, and churches could do to build faith that lasts.

K&J: What are some concrete examples of some first steps a church can take to get sticky?

Kara: As we’ve tracked with churches throughout the country, there seem to be three primary first steps that parallel our major research findings. First, leaders are trying to make sure that they are teaching what we call the “Sticky Gospel” of grace instead of the “gospel of sin management” (to quote Dallas Willard) of behaviors. So Sticky Faith begins with making sure that students know that their faith doesn’t revolve around behaviors, but rather an ongoing experience of God’s unconditional love for them. One of the messages our team is trying to spread to young people (including my own children) is that Jesus is bigger than any mistake.

While the first step focuses on the core of our faith, the second and third steps are more about relationships. We’ve seen that young people who are involved in inter-generational relationships and worship tend to have more mature faith in both high school and college. It’s been exciting to see churches take steps toward inter-generational relationships—ranging from periodically cancelling their youth group on Sundays so that young people are involved in one big worship service to specialized mentoring for high school seniors.

The final and third step relates to partnering with parents. So many parents are what we call “Dry Cleaner Parents” who think they can drop their kids off at church all dirty at 9 am on Sunday and pick them up 90 minutes later, with the youth or children’s ministry team doing the cleaning. That’s a far cry from the type of partnership between parents and churches that is best for Sticky Faith. So a big part of our research involves how to support and equip parents with ideas ranging from more training to involving parents more in youth ministry events and programs.

K&J: Are there tools and resources to help youth workers grow in this area?

Kara: Thanks to funding from amazing donors and foundations, we at the Fuller Youth Institute have been able to develop a host of practical resources, which can be accessed at stickyfaith.org. The Sticky Faith books and our Sticky Faith Cohorts have been two of the most powerful forces for change, and we also have a host of free resources available on our Web site.

K&J: What are a few other sites/books you would recommend to help students keep their faith after high school?

Kara: We are big fans of the reThink/Orange group led by Reggie Joiner and his team. Their “Orange” philosophy in which the “yellow” that is the light of Christ in the church combines with the “red” that is the heart of love in the family closely parallels our own research. We highly recommend their work, as well as the College Transition Initiative hosted by Walt Mueller, Derek Melleby, and the Center for Parent and Youth Understanding.

This post was written by Josh Griffin and Kurt Johnston and originally appeared as part of Simply Youth Ministry Today free newsletter. Subscribe to SYM Today right here.

TagsComments 1 View Comments August 21, 2012

Josh GriffinMore PostsSticky Faith = Worship Together Weekend

My boss Kurt put together a great post called Things Are Getting Sticky at Saddleback talking about the origin of something new we started this summer called Worship Together Weekends. Here’s a little of the backstory, head there for the full perspective:

  • About a year ago, I started really digging into the Sticky Faith research and asking myself some tough questions.
  • About 10 months ago, I started using my allotted “report back” time in our executive meetings to share some of my learnings, to let the senior leadership of my church know that I saw some changes on the horizon.
  • About 6 months ago, I suggested the radical idea (radical in our setting) of taking tangible steps to get our teenagers more involved in the overall life of the church. These ideas included combined missions trips, ministry teams, discipleship classes, etc.
  • At the same time, I suggested the idea of creating a monthly “Worship Together Weekend”. I pitched the idea that on the first full weekend of every month we cancel our JH and HS church services, completely shut down our youth building and encourage families to go to “big church” together. In essence I proposed that we spend 25% of our time NOT doing the type of ministry that our church has been built upon.

JG

TagsComments 3 View Comments July 18, 2012

Josh GriffinMore PostsStickyFaith.org

Kara Powell, Chap Clark and Brad Griffin (no relation) have kicked off StickyFaith.org – a new website and book designed to help youth leaders and parents disciple their kids with a faith that lasts. I just got a copy of the book last week and am hoping to read it soon – until then I’ve been jumping around the new site a bit and found a great article on what new college freshman need to hear from their youth pastors:

Head there to check out the site and read the rest of the article, too!

Students’ biggest priority during the first two weeks of college is to establish friendships and figure out where they fit in. Across the board, the freshmen we interviewed indicated that these first two weeks are absolutely critical for creating a social life. The primary–and most accepted–way to do this in college is to engage in the party scene. All too quickly, partying becomes a regular part of the weekly routine for many freshmen.

Often, kids who come out of youth groups have been told over and over what “not to do.” We’re usually pretty good at giving them a list of temptations to avoid, but perhaps not as helpful in equipping students with healthier strategies for other real-life needs like finding friends. Our research affirms that the first few months of college can be incredibly lonely for students who are away from family and life-long friends for the first time, and who may show up not knowing a single other person on campus. Desperate to begin to build new relationships, students go where those from their immediate living situation (roommate, floor-mates) go to find friends. The last thing they want is to be “left behind” on a weekend night. And once they’ve tried the party scene they feel hypocritical if they then add commitments to Christian groups, simply layering “Christian” onto their new identity. Others intentionally decide to shelve their faith and “do the college thing,” intending to pick faith up again later after they’ve enjoyed the party scene guilt-free for a while.

In The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens after High School, sociologist Tim Clydesdale describes this freshman phenomenon as an “identity lockbox”. Students recognize that faith is “good for them” in some way as part of an adult lifestyle, but see it as something to put on hold in order to attend to the more immediate needs of their college lifestyle.

JG

TagsComments 1 View Comments August 27, 2011
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