Episode Transcript
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Aging congregations trying to recapture the little ones
back into the ministry. Let's talk about that now on the Church Revitalization
Podcast.
Welcome
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to the Church Revitalization Podcast. My name is Scott Ball. I'm joined by my friend
and co host, A.J. Mathieu. Hey. Hey. Well,
my friend, Father time comes for us all, and it's not possible
to grow younger at the individual level. Right.
The gray hair is coming in nice and thick. You've
got. If you're watching on YouTube, you can see AJ's
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goatee fully, fully gray at this point.
I don't know. You got some patches of color in there. When we first met,
much loved. Yeah, I think you. Yeah,
A little more color in there. A little more color in there. A long time
ago. Yeah. But when it comes to churches, you
can grow young. You can, you can. So you might be an
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aging congregation, but today we want to tackle this question of how do we
grow younger? How can we start reaching younger folks? Maybe there's
a lot of gray hair in your congregation. This is a common question and a
common problem. And today we want to give you some thoughts, thoughts,
some strategies, some inspiration so that
you can begin to grow younger as a congregation. But
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before we do, I'd like to give a shout out to the Healthy
Churches Toolkit. So if you go to healthychurchestoolkit.com you
can sign up for seven days for free. There's a lot of good
tools and training and information and dynamic
tools and resources that can help you in your
attempts to grow younger as a congregation, but also just to make you a
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healthier church. So go to HealthyChurches. Sign up free for seven days. We'd
love to see you over there. Love our friends over there at the Healthy Church's
toolkit. It's a good group of guys. Yep. Very supportive
of this episode. And gal. That's
true. Just kidding. It's us, in case you don't know. It's all
us. Well, but neither of us are a gal. We also have a gal that
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helps us run the toolkit. That's true. Shout out to Molly if you're listening.
Thanks for all your help, Molly. And so today's episode
also comes out of the big 300 episode
that we did last week when we asked previously to that the week before for
questions from everybody. So this is another listener question. The actual
question was stating that they're an older congregation and they
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don't have a lot of ability at this point to minister to children. And so
what methods would allow them to grow in size?
The way we're answering this today is what can we do to reinvigorate,
revitalize a children's ministry in a church with an
aging congregation? So, listener that submitted this question, hope
you're listening to this and that this will be helpful to you and a lot
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of you, because we get this a lot. I mean, we deal with a lot
of aging congregation churches around the country and even around the
world. And so this is a common question. Scott. We've been faced with
this numerous times, and it's,
it's, it's difficult, it's not easy, and it is a
slow process of change, for sure. You cannot snap your
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fingers or do a couple things, paint an old room and, and
expect it all of a sudden to be full of the laughter of children
next Sunday. But I think we've got some useful
things here that can begin a process of change and revitalization
in an older church. I hope this. All right. Hits the spot.
All right, let's start. Let's, let's dive in. My, my man. Okay, compadre.
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The first one I've got here for us is heart change.
So this might be difficult to hear. I don't know. I mean, that's why
you paid us, you know, so much money for this podcast, so we can tell
you hard things. You know, the first, first of all, your church
didn't become an only aged
congregation overnight. This has been a
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slow process. So, and it, and you've
known it for a while, likely, but it takes, it takes
recognition of that. So, I mean, at the, the very beginning
of this, I mean, whether that's a family meeting, there's 30 people left in the
church and we all get together or still maybe a good sized church of the
younger families have, have gone away or are totally gone.
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It's going to take at least leaders getting together or maybe the whole church
and saying we need to say what we all see
and, and that is that we aren't where we used to be and we're not
where we want to be in the future. And so let's, let's just bring this
out into the open and recognize that the other thing that needs to
be said in that is that change has to happen. You
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cannot go from a church that is shrinking,
dying, aging, and expect families
and young kids to all of a sudden want to be there unless you do
something differently. I mean, I hate to say it, your fate is sealed
unless you choose to change. But the. But the fact is you can
change. But again, it's, it's not fast and, and it requires
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effort. Try. It requires some perseverance to work through
things being different. Yeah, totally. I think
just having that brutal honesty, I think that's
so important. When we work with churches, there's often a
recognition that there's a problem, but
there's some hesitancy to even acknowledge
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specifically what the issues are. There may even be some outright
blindness to what the problems are. And we'll get
into some specific examples of this, maybe, but just
what, what vibe is the church putting off
to the. To the community and to families in general? You
may not have really an awareness of that. When a family walks in, what do
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they feel? When a family drives past your facility, what do they
see and what does that. What do they perceive about the church? And
I think that it's possible that you might
see, oh, well, they're just judging us because of all the gray hair.
And so you might be thinking, well, they just don't like us because we're
older, which, I don't know, maybe there's some element of
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truth to that, but in reality, there's usually much deeper
issues than that. We're going to be going into some of those things that you
can do to change those things. But it starts with that
brutal honesty. What are we doing wrong? There's
reasons why young families either left the church
or visit and don't come back.
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There's. There are reasons for that. And blaming the
families or blaming the shifting culture or
blaming all of those other things are not. That's not
a way to a solution that you must be honest with
yourself. What are we doing wrong? And therefore what must change
in order for the outcome to be different? Yeah.
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All right, well, let's talk in our second point about physical space.
So we want to reinvigorate,
restart a children's ministry space in
the church. We're going to focus mostly on just the smallest, just the
littlest kids, like a nursery, and then maybe, you know, a few
years of very early elementary. As a church grows, you know,
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you can expand children's ministry to higher ages depending on
how much physical room you might have to be able to separate different age groups
out. But for now, usually, I mean, with like, two rooms,
you could have, like a nursery space and then, you know, a
young elementary or even toddler
preschool Type space. So. But this, it has to be nice,
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though. It's got to look clean. It has to look
fresh. This is not just, you know, a fresh coat of paint
on some old walls. You've got to go beyond that cleanliness,
down to the details. Baseboards and switches
and safety. You know,
if we're sending kids down the old steps to the
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basement space. Yeah. Don't let that hallway be
dark wood paneling, you know, an old carpet
that, you know, you don't want it to be scary. Like, the
room looks good maybe when we get there, but it's a scary route to even
get to our room. This has got to be well lit, bright colors,
happy clean space. Parents want security,
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so they need to know that I'm handing my child to a
responsible person. They know who I am. Everybody knows whose child
is mine. We have systems in place to monitor this. When I come get my
child, I'm the only one that could possibly leave here with my child. All
of these have to play into it. So this is. Does have a cost
investment now. There's inexpensive ways to get things done
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with, you know, volunteers and donations and things and doing
labor yourselves. But in the end, it can't look like
it was donated, and we did it ourselves. You know, it still has to have,
have a really good finish to it and, and look good and that you
could say, you know, people are putting too much emphasis
on unimportant things. You know, the spiritual side of our children's ministry is
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what's most important. But the fact remains, this is what parents want.
You can call that unreasonable, but this is
2025. This is, this is what you need to
do. And if you resist that and say, we can, we can
make this happen without it, you're probably wrong. And
you, you probably will max out at a. At less than what you envision.
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So this has to be a place of investment. Totally. So many churches
that we're working with, they're going well. We don't really have a children's ministry, so
we have these spaces and we keep them clean, but they haven't been touched in
10 years. You know, we've. We had the pastor's kids
and that's it, you know, in this, in this ministry. And so we
just haven't touched them, and so we haven't invested in it. And cleanliness
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is like the bar, the lowest bar. Of course it
should be clean, but is it fresh? Is it updated? When is
the last time you put a fresh coat of paint? How old are the toys
that are in there, you know, would they be considered safe by
modern standards? I worked with a church once that had
cribs, which. That's normal for there to be, like, a nursery that's
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got cribs, but these things look like baby cages. I mean, they were.
I would not have wanted my kid to be in one of these things. It
was super old and super dangerous and frightening,
you know, so you'd rather be, you know, like a pack and play,
you know, something that's soft and, you know,
fresh and clean and these kinds of things. So just being
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cognizant and aware of those kinds of things. And if it's been a while since
you've had kids, bring. Ask a younger person to come
and just take a look and give. Say, I want honest and brutal feedback.
You don't need to be nice. You need to be honest. So find someone who
you think can do that. You know, an outside group like us. We could come
and tell you if your facilities are looking very nice at all.
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But the physical space really matters when you walk into it.
Do I go, oh, I'd be happy to let my kids be here,
or do you go, this is a little bit scary? I like what you said,
aj, about where is the children's space physically
located? Is it down in a scary basement or is it in a bright room?
I worked with a church in California a couple years ago that
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their children's ministry space was in the basement. That's just where it
happened to be. So there weren't really windows, but they did an incredible
job making that space feel so bright,
so light, so fresh. I mean, they had updated all
of the lighting fixtures down there to these, you know, really large,
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soft, white, but still bright
lights, you know, but they'd done it pretty economically. I mean,
they'd gone to IKEA and gotten, you know, less expensive
furniture. But everything looked kind of like. Kind of like going into an
ikea. Like, it's very clean, you know, and. And so
you walk into that as a parent and you go, this is a. This is
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really nice space for kids. So, you know,
take a hard look at the physical space and make sure it's prepared.
Yeah, tie into number three. Let me. But I just wanted
to add, you know, I mean, I worked with a church years ago that
had the best children's ministry space I've ever seen. And it was
an old building. It was pretty large building. It had maintenance
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issues, but. And the children's space was in the basement. And
when they took me down there, I was absolutely Blown away.
Scott, I give you a hard time about Disney, but the only comparison I could
make to this space was that it was designed by, like, Disney imagineers.
Hey, at the record show, I did not bring up Disney. I.
This, this is true. This is probably the first and only time I'll ever, ever
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mention it, but it was that, that high level, because,
I mean, you just know Disney, of course, they're capable of creating these things
that you just can't believe that, that, that they did that.
And it was a shock to me. I was like, this is the most amazing
thing I've ever seen. And of course, they were proud of it and they had
worked really hard on it, but, you know, and not everybody is going to be
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able to do that. But I'll tell you what, when you see something
that has had a lot of work put into it and really well thought out,
and kids are going to think it is the most magical place
on earth on a Sunday morning, that is a huge win.
Because when they're like, please, please, mom and dad, can we go to church on
Sunday? I can't wait to be back there. Then you've got something really going on
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special. So there we go. You know, I mean, that's a good contrast, even just
to the church that I was just talking about, that in California, where I
also was blown away by the quality of their facility. It
was hardly Disney, but just feeling like, wow. I can
tell that a lot of intentionality went into this, but it was obviously much less
expensive. I mean, it really was. It was like IKEA furniture,
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IKEA light fixtures. But it was so clean and so
thoughtful about how they were using the space. But
that came across also very powerfully. So don't think,
well, they're saying we got to spend $150,000 on upgrades.
I'm not saying that you can very economically. A smaller church
where you're only going to have maybe two rooms you're using initially,
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you could spend $10,000 and an incredible
refresh update of those places. Hey, maybe even have
an art school or something nearby. You could have, like, students do a mural for
you or something. You never know what resources you might have. All right, number
three, we're talking staffing, so you've got to be prepared.
This is one of these spaces that we talk about that is really
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sort of a if you build it, they will come kind of
scenario, and that is being prepared in season
and out of season. Actually. It's almost like if you don't build it,
they won't come yeah, this is. An old
enough reference. If this is your problem, you're old enough to know this Field of
Dreams reference. So.
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But, you know, and I talked to the. I talked to, again, aging
congregations. I say this also about welcoming
guests. You know, they haven't had a guest to the church in two
years. And I'm like, well, if you want to start having
guests, be prepared for guests. Welcome people.
Even though, you know, I tell pastors this all the time that are in this
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scenario. When you up there, when you get up there and say, good morning, welcome
guests. And even though you're looking out over the same 30 people,
say it anyway, because one of these Sundays there's going to be a new face
in the room and you will have said it and be. Just be in that
mindset. Same thing with this. Have your staffing ready,
train people to be a part of this ministry. Have them
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there Sunday after Sunday. As you, you know, you don't need to
do these things, like necessarily in these or in this as an order
of steps. You can be doing things at the same time to prepare,
but be ready, ready when that first family comes in and you're going
to be so excited and the team is going to be ready to bring that.
Oh, my goodness. Act like it's normal. Yeah,
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yeah. Don't either. You're our first kid ever.
Oh, my goodness. Don't do that. Be like, hey,
like. And it's sort of like, dress for the job you want. You know,
sort of be, be prepared. Be ready
for when it happens. And, you know, have.
Don't be like, oh, well, we've got the staff here, but we
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don't have a curriculum, you know, I mean, be prepared every week. Be prepared.
Yeah, don't turn the lights on. If a kid shows up.
Turn the lights on. Turn the lights on either. Because I'm telling
you, this does make a difference. I worked with a church in Delaware a number
of years ago where they were having this problem. The,
the pastor, he had like six kids. So there were always
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technically kids available to be there, but if it was only his
six kids, they wouldn't have someone there. And bless her heart, it was like
the wife was the only one who would ever volunteer in there.
And this was like, if she wanted to go down and run children's
ministry with her own children, there was kids ministry, but otherwise there
wasn't. And I sort of encouraged him and said, one, you need to
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broaden the base of volunteers down here. Two, you need to have
it every week, whether it's Just your kids or not, you know,
you need to be ready. And they leaned in, they took, they took that
advice. They leaned in and I, it wasn't long until I started getting calls
from him saying, you know, you'd be surprised. We're having families show
up and there's, there's kids here every week now.
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So it, I don't know how that works. I'm not the
Holy Spirit. I don't know. I'm not saying it's a
magic thing that happens. I'm not promising you
anything. But I am telling you this. If you have a guest and they
come and there's no children's ministry or they
perceive that there is a children's ministry, but, oh, they weren't prepared for me to
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be here. They will not come back. They won't,
because there are a hundred other places they could go in town
that's actually ready for them. I mean, I'll just be honest. I wouldn't, I wouldn't
with my kids. If I showed up and there was no program from,
I guess my son's now he's, he's wouldn't be in children's ministry anymore. He's too
old. But for my daughter, if I showed up and there was nothing from,
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for kids, I'd be like, I don't know if this is, I don't know if
this is gonna be a fit. Probably be a one and done for us. So
be prepared, be staffed every week. Yeah, that's good.
All right. I want to say one other thing briefly on that
would be if you were going to invest in a staff person
beyond the senior pastor or lead pastor, if you have the funds to do that.
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Children's ministry would be the first place I would spend money. And I know a
lot of churches. It's worship ministry. I would say you can do that with
volunteers. You know, the senior pastor can pick the music
and you can have volunteers run that ministry, the, the music
ministry. But if you, you can pay one part time staff person,
I'd put it in children's ministry. Have someone who's able to make sure
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that everything's ready each week, that there's curriculum ready, and maybe they
themselves are a younger person. So it's giving a younger, fresher face to
that ministry. I'm not saying that is, that is not a silver bullet by any
means. Like, oh, if we just hire a children's person, we're going to have kids.
I'm not saying that. But it doesn't hurt and it can help.
Yeah, yeah, okay. So we've been talking
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internal preparedness. Now we're going to talk about where are
these people going to come from. And the first point here is
an external resource and that is you getting out
of the church and going and connecting with this new target
audience that you're trying to reach. And you need to see it as that this
is an outreach effort really is what you're asking for. I mean,
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if, if you say we would love to have kids to minister to, that's great.
That's a great heart for outreach. You're wanting to reach children. Well, how are we
going to reach children? We're going to reach them through their families. And we have
to go to where the families are. We've got to find
opportunities that we can go and meet people and introduce
them to our church, talk about what we care about, Jesus, and
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invite them to come and be a part of what you're doing.
You have to put a little effort into what's happening in your community, in your
city that you could become a part of and be
able to begin to develop relationships with people. That's where this is all going to
start. And we've got a previous episode resource as well. And
we'll link to this in the YouTube description or the
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the show notes on your podcast app. But episode
26260 talked about this and
that'll be a good resource also to go back and check out.
Yeah, I mean, you can't expect to
connect with families if you don't know families. So
certainly if you're a grandparent, you know, and your kid
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and your grandson plays, you know, T ball or
plays little league or something, don't just go to his games.
I mean, that's good too. But maybe volunteer, maybe go and
start selling concessions, you know, on the.
At the times where your grandson isn't out there playing, you know, or
find ways to be involved in the school system there,
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there's usually like reading buddy programs or things
like that, like ways for you can. Where you can start building
relationships with families. And it doesn't need to be a direct
advertisement for the church, but it will change your heart going back to point one.
It'll change your heart and your perspective when you just start to see families.
It's so easy. The older we get, we all, we're all guilty of this. Myself
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included. Even though I still have kids in school, you
just kind of morph along with where the stage of life where your kids
are. So I, I know less and have less empathy and sympathy,
I guess for Parents of kids who are infants
and toddlers, because that's not the phase of life I'm in. And by the
time you get to be a grandparent, you know, or you know, or an older
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person, maybe you don't have grandkids, you're hanging around
older people most of the time you're retired friends, you're going, you're hanging out the
senior center, you know, you're, you're hanging out at church and doing Bible study with
the same senior saints. You know, you're going on the senior saints cruise
or whatever. I mean, that's all of that is normal. I'm not even criticizing
it. But if you would like to connect with families, you have to be where
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families are. And so it's going to require something of you.
You're gonna have to re. Figure your life a little bit
so that you're making space to be with people who are different from
you in terms of age and family life.
So outside the walls of the church. Yes,
we want you to be ready. There is a little bit of, if you build
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it, they will come. But if they don't know you, they don't
know about the church, they don't have a relationship with you,
they're not just going to show up. People don't wake up on a Sunday morning
and go, I think I'm gonna go to that random church down the street
today. I mean, they, they go there because they were invited
because they've seen you, because you made some connection with
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them. They don't just randomly roll in. For the most part.
Yeah, yeah, I guess, you know, this is, this is not a point.
This is, here's a bonus for you just thinking about that, Scott, saying, you know,
that randomly decide to go. They would have looked at a website first.
Families are going to be checking out websites. You need
a modern looking website. But don't
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portray yourself as something that you're not. So
don't have. You should have some information about your children's ministry,
but don't make it look like it's packed. Don't put up fake pictures
of packed classrooms and then have them show up in, you know, the
set of twins that they brought makes three or two.
So be authentic and you know, and be have your website
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also be fresh because people from the outside are going to want to see that.
Can I say one more thing? Yeah. One
thing that you could do. This isn't in that episode
and it's not exactly in our notes. I'm not sure exactly which point this would
fall Under I'm going to put it here, you can take a bit of a
church planting perspective and attitude, and it
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is possible, if you're trying to intentionally, like,
kickstart growth in the church, if you were able to partner up with another
church in the community and say, hey, would you loan some
of your younger families to our church for a
year and just ask, hey, would you
help us rebuild this children's ministry and participate and so on.
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I know that's maybe a big ask, but if you're part of a denomination or
if you're part of a, you know, a network or a cooperative group,
a Baptist association or something like that, doing things
together, or maybe that's a bridge too far, but. But
maybe partner with another church for vbs. Some of the older
churches in your community that none of you have children's ministries. Why don't you
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put your heads together and do a community VBS program
and, and then you split those families or whatever based on
geography and, and say, hey, we're. We've got children's ministry. There are things
that you can do kind of get creative to get to collaborate with other churches
as well to be more visible in the community and start kickstarting
revitalized children's ministry program at your church. Yeah, that's good. All right,
(25:35):
I'm sorry, you're doing Trunk or Treat, but you're not following up those families. What
are you doing? Yeah, we've got other episodes about that.
All right, so finally, that was kind of an external outreach kind of thing. You
also need some internal ministries as well that you can try
to, again, form relationships and build bridges between
your church generation, the parent generation,
(25:56):
and then finally down to the kid generation. So think of
creative ways that you can utilize your life
experience, your wisdom, your desire to build bridges, that you would
be able to connect with these families in meaningful and authentic
ways so that in addition to them just being able to be there on
a Sunday, there's something else for them. Some of this could even be sort
(26:18):
of outreach, but. But on site, you know,
I mean, it could be family movie night that you host and also have
maybe childcare for the youngest ones for the babies so the parents
and the. And their toddlers or elementary kids can. Can
watch the movie in the sanctuary or something or.
I had another idea, just slipped my mind. Parents night out.
(26:42):
That was it. Yeah. Yeah, perfect. Yep.
Yeah, you can, you can provide babysitting and allow parents to go and have,
have a night out, but also
use teachers, teach your knowledge, pass your knowledge on.
Host cooking classes for young moms. Yeah, that's cool. Sewing.
Yeah. Teach. So, yeah, sewing men.
(27:05):
Teach young men how to do handyman
projects. Most of us, I'll put myself in this
category. I don't know how to fix anything. My dad
was not handy and so he never taught me
any of that stuff. Not his fault. Don't blame him. Dad. If you're John, you're
a good guy. It's okay. He's an incredible man. He's an
(27:27):
incredible man, but he is not handy. And he will,
he will. He will be the first to admit that. So I don't know how
to fix anything. So if you were to host
handyman workshops, I promise you there would be young men who would show up at
that. So find ways to partner and pass on knowledge
to parents. Don't just think we got to have programs for kids. Program programs for
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kids are good, but build relationships with parents and
then they'll want to bring their kids because the kids can't drive themselves to your
church. So think, think about that. So these are ways
to do outreach essentially through an internal program.
But all of these things, maybe the last thing I want to say, AJ from
my end would be. One of the biggest mistakes I see churches
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make is buying into the lie that it's not possible
for them to grow young and that it's as
such, one, it's not true. And two, it becomes a self
fulfilling prophecy. Like when you really believe we can't
grow young. No young family would want to go to our church.
I hear that from churches a lot. You
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know, we don't have anything to offer. Young people don't want to be around
old people. We don't have. We can't do good children's ministry in our
facility. We don't have the money, we don't have the staff. We don't have. We
don't have. We don't, we don't, we don't. We can't, we can't, we can't. It
is such a powerful lie that it becomes a self
fulfilling prophecy. So maybe this is a bonus tip as well. Or maybe it
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goes back to the first one, first point we made. You have to stop that.
You have to go. When we can do this. By God's
grace, it's his will that our church would be effective.
Like we don't have to hope that God would want that. We
know that he wants his kingdom to expand. We know he has a heart for
families. So if we have a heart for families and we put
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in the effort and the work. We can trust that the Lord is going to
bless our efforts. To what degree, I don't know. But we're not taking
responsibility for that. We're surrendering that to the Lord. But what we're not
going to do is say it's not possible, that we can't do this.
And that's where leadership, I think, really comes in. The leaders of the church have
to go, no, we can do this. This can happen. And
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shut down the negative self talk and the negative
voices that are saying it's not possible. Yeah, absolutely.
You're not alone. There are strategies to help.
There's people to help us being just one of many.
And we'd love to have that conversation with you. If you want to go to
malphursgroup.com you can connect with us there, schedule a meeting. We'd love to
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have that chat, hear about your church, talk about options for the future. Because that's
what we're all about. We're here to help you revitalize your church, become great
disciple makers of all ages near and far.
Thanks for being with us this week on the Church Revitalization podcast.
Links to today's show notes are there below in your podcast
app or in the YouTube description. Thanks for being with us, everybody. We'll see
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you next week.