Some detractors from the Orange Philosophy say this, “What about the kids? Shouldn’t we be focusing efforts on the kids?” It’s pretty funny actually that my targeting parents, in some way is leaving kids in the dust. You can’t help parents and not help kids. But it’s so much more than that. It’s putting an emphasis on the God-given role of parents. And it’s allowing them to Parent their child in all walks of life.
A Couple things I would like to highlight about families and their importance in scripture:
Genealogies
Not sure if I even spelled that right. But when I was a kid, I always, always, always skipped through this part in the Bible. ( I still do :/ ) But the reality is that ALL SCRIPTURE is God breathed and so there must be a reason that it’s in there right? Well, yeah there is. First I think it’s because family tells a bigger picture. And secondly, to go along with one of my favorite messages of all time by anybody. Reggie Joiner talks about the stock family and how the families that we deal with aren’t perfect. The perfect family just isn’t where it’s at. We’re jacked up and messy just like families in the Bible. So check out a little genealogy from Matthew 1:
1. Roboam begat Abia;
a bad dad had a bad son.2. Abia begat Asa;
a bad dad, a good son.3. Asa begat Josophat;
a good dad, a good son.4. Josaphat begat Joram;
a good dad, a bad son.
So this is in the “Jesus-line”. That should give you some hope about your family and also your children. 4 sequential generations with a great mix of the good and the bad, and probably some ugly.
Families are a Fabric of Creation
God saw Adam and it wasn’t good that he was lonely. So God created Eve. Fairly simple concept but it changes the dynamic of the created world. Families have existed since the beginning. God has used families to teach young people since creation and you can even see an instance in Deuteronomy 6 called “The Shema”. God uses families to develop and maintain faithful generations of people.
So what?
Well when you really believe that parents and families are where the power to develop healthy kids that love Jesus, then your priorities change, your programming changes, and your communication changes.
Here are a few of those in our context.
- Creative meetings include ways of engaging parents not just kids’ programming
- We think about how best to move families in the direction of building their child’s foundations in our milestone programs (Baptism, Child Dedication, etc.)
- We communicate to parents where they are.
- We have a Facebook page for Switch even though our students can’t use it because of Facebook minimum age requirements that we use to communicate to parents.
- We design challenges for kids to do with their Parents.
- We email parents at the start of every series to let them know about series, events, and ways to plug-in.
- We challenge parents personally, audibly, and tangibly.
- We make Families a priority.
And that’s the reality. Do we get it right or perfect? More times than not, probably not. But we have some families that can attest, some of what we do works.
But enough about us, what about you?
What about you? What’s your Red strategy?
