we discussed the 5 essentials to the Orange Philosophy. My friend, Cathy Heitzenrater, asks a great question.
Hey Gina – How are some ways we can implement more orange strategy in churches with an Uber Simple Church structure?
This is an excellent question. One to which many of you could contribute some excellent ideas.
So, who’s game?
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She is gifted in strategy, vision, and communication. Not only is she gifted, but she cares deeply for the church and seeing people come to know and understand how loved they are by their perfect Heavenly Father. Gina has great experience in family ministry and has personally helped develop me as a leader for the next-generation!
Working with Gina the last several years has been such a gift to me! She has a way of asking questions and sharing her wisdom to help you move your ministry in a direction you never thought possible. She helped me take a ministry that relied heavily on one person and create a structure that supported teams of leaders and teachers. Our ministry today has so many people that are owners of their areas of ministry because of the coaching I received. Her counsel in my life personally and with ministry has been such a gift to me! If you are looking for someone full of Godly wisdom and practical advice that will challenge and encourage you along the way, she is it!
While the world of working in ministry is ever changing, the goal never wavers. Staying true to the vision becomes increasingly important and Gina has an ability to bring clarity to that goal, while inspiring and challenging leaders. Working under Gina's leadership was exciting, rewarding, and challenging. Gifts were brought to light, hurdles were broken and clarity was brought to every situation. Even in the moments of feeling stuck in leadership, movement happened. Gina has a gift for providing the next step no matter where the start point may be, but always in the direction of the end result.
Gina McClain has been an incredible mentor and coach of mine for the past several years. Her real world experience and humble vulnerability make her advice both wise and relatable. She is great with processing strategic systems, brainstorming new ideas, casting vision, and seeing the big picture. Gina has helped develop me into a much better leader and see things differently with new ways to grow.
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It was one of the greatest honors to lead under and alongside a leader like Gina. She has a powerful gifting to bring clear vision and strategy to teams while also stopping to walk through individual scenarios with care and intentionality. She makes things fun and understandable while leading a team always with the greatest balance of strength through vulnerability and wisdom. I have been changed as a leader because of working with Gina.
She guided our team towards a coaching structure, selection of key leaders, and ensured we had an optimal environment to welcome kids and families while not wavering on a safe and engaging experience. Her leadership and guidance not only strengthened the foundation, our team naturally grew because people were seen and known. The team quickly became a community with a thriving culture that people wanted to be a part of.
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I would say number one. Connecting with parents. Find ways to develop relationships and partnerships with parents. It doesn’t take a program or an event but instead a mindset.
Change the way you view ministry in terms of your “audience” to include the families of the children or students that you minister to directly.
I like J.C.’s answer in terms of change how you view your audience. In a super simple church you have less programs for your audience. If your audience is the entire family and not just the ones that you look at on a weekend then you would cut many programs.
My best analogy today is that of the iPad that was announced yesterday. You can look at the device as not having all kinds of things like a camera. You can knock it for not doing flash or multitasking but you have to believe all of this is on purpose. Apple didn’t forget, they made a choice. Their goal is to get you to consume material that you pay for and make it as simple as possible for that to happen.
As a church we have to decide what we aren’t going to do to be as simple as possible for the family. It may mean that we cut Wednesday night programs or Middle School mission trips but we have to focus on the question at hand. How do we become a super simple church that empowers the family to become closer to God?
It’s important that we determine how we can effectively communicate with families. No matter how beneficial the information we have will be for families, it’s useless if they don’t receive it. We can do newsletter, web sites, and podcasts, but ultimately, each church has decide what is effective for their individual families. Sometimes we use all of these and there still are families that don’t connect. It has to be something that families value enough to make time for it in their all ready busy schedules.
In efforts to remain “simple” we may not want to schedule another weekly meeting or monthly seminar. One suggestion is to have a “super” event for families. But make it an all out fun day for the entire family. Games, food, movie, all the usual “event” fare, and also provide a layout of the method of resourcing your families. So, at least once, they get the info you want to share. Then, if they find it profitable, they will continue to take advantage of that resource, however you decide to make it available to them.
Meet families where they are. What are the natural interactions that you already have with families in your church, and put some icing on it. From there you can start working with a few families and then some more. Think grassroots.
At least, that’s what I’ve done. 🙂
When you say “Simple” church structure, I want to know what you mean by simple? Do you mean simple because your small, or simple because you’ve intentionally been that way.
I think going Orange when you’re simple is better. Less things to change. If you’re only doing a few things, make those few things Orange and you’ll see great fruit of the Orange nature. Like a few people have said above, it’s changing the mindset, getting everyone thinking in the same direction. However, if you’re truly simple and you want to pull this off, it can’t just be your idea. Everyone needs to be on board with this plan and you’re working it all together.
Simple because we’ve intentionally chosen to be that way. I love the idea that I think JC and Jonathan said too about mindset and starting small or grassroots. We’re a large church so my mind doesn’t go to starting small – this was a great reminder of that!
Lots of good stuff already. I think no matter what your church structure is the biggest challange is finding out how to get your families to see the value of connecting the spiritual dots in their kids life. Try to find ways for those connections to happen at home. Especially if you are in a simple church structure.
Use the existing structure in your church to speak vision and to strengthen the families in your church. I really believe that classes really don’t change people it’s truth and grace in intentional relationships that make all the difference.
One thing we began doing in ’08 is to have parent conversations. We found that on Wednesday nights, there were a few parents (less than 10 because we’re small) who didn’t have much to do, or didn’t like the options, while their kids were in choir and missions.
We started Dessert, Coffee and Conversation. Our CM began with a list of topics that changed based on group consensus. (Examples are ideas about discipline, parenting different personalities, letting your child fail.) He would do
some legwork to get conversation started, maybe find a book that will help, a funny video intro, etc.
We tried initially to keep topics sort of non-religious, because we had a few unchurched parents from our daycare. We found that each week the conversation would turn toward our faith and how it played into parenting, though. Also, parents began to ask for topics like what to do when your child doesn’t want to come to church, how to help them make faith decisions.
As Barbara said, we didn’t exactly add a new time which would add to schedules. We found a time that parents would already be there.
As I talk to leaders across the country, there are two thing that strike me when we talk about implementing the Orange Strategy, one, that there’s a misunderstanding that the Orange Strategy means adopting a single model, adding particular programming and curriculum and secondly, that “more is more” so they assume they’ll keep all the programming they’ve done since the dawn, and add on more and more. It overwhelms especially smaller churches or ones with limited resources.
Simply put, implementing the Orange strategy means dialing up 5 essentials which in the end actually will result in far greater “simplicity”. Less becomes more.
The five essentials of Orange Strategy are:
1. Integrating Strategy: getting everyone, leadership, volunteers, parents, on the same page with defining the win and how the church will work with a synchronized plan towards accomplishing it. Simple: one vision, one sychronized strategy with everyone working together in one direction. That’s simple!
2. Refining the Message: Deciding not to use multiple programs, multiple lessons, multiple memory verses throughout a week, but amplifying what’s essential for kids to know and saying it loudly and clearly in creative and memorable ways so kids get it woven into the fabric of their being and parents know the one applicable point they can talk about throughout the week at home. There’s an important point that the message is driven, not by what the adults are learning, but what’s essential, relevant and developmentally smart for kids to learn at each age level. Makes it simple: one bottom line each week for each age group!
3. Reactivate the Family: Enlisting parents to act as partners in the spiritual formation of their own children is simpler when they have one message to connect with their children each week. Finding consistent small steps, resources, and styles of creative communication to tell them and shared experiences that connect parents with that one bottom line message builds bridges to from what’s regularly done in church to what they can do at home. That’s simpler than adding parenting classes or events that are disconnected, don’t provide consistent reinforcement, and overwhelm parents.
4. Elevate Community: When you look at how God spiritually forms all of us, and see the pattern of His use of 5 Catalysts, you’ll recognize that creating a large group/small group experience leverages what God does to shape us in a condensed, simple and powerful duo of environments. It makes sense then to balance the environments we provide for preschool, elementary, student and adults so they each engage with those catalysts. It doesn’t make sense to have random duplicates or triplicates that engage the same catalyst while either not employing some or adding additional experiences to leverage the others. Simple is resourcing and maximizing only the environments that will be most effective in moving people towards the defined win and not continuing the various others that complicate and defuse the effect.
5. Leverage Influence: Creating consistent opportunities for students to experience personal ministry once again can move towards simplicity since it would mean giving students the opportunity to allow God to work in and through them in a regular place. This doesn’t mean adding an additional mission trip or one more event, it means giving them a place leading a small group, leading worship, designing or being on the tech team in the preschool or elementary Sunday morning environments. They would meet later for an extended time in a combined large/small group experience that works for student schedules.
So, bottom line, implementing the Orange Strategy isn’t adding more, it’s getting everybody to the table and being brave enough to define the win and determining how to create the best steps to move people towards that win. It’s pulling the plug on what may be fun, good, or done for years so that you can implement experiences where the messages for preschool, elementary, student and adults are boiled down to what’s essential and relevant and appropriate for each, presented so each has a large group and small group environment that leverages the 5 catalysts, with shared experience bridges and resources for parents to have tools to connect their kids bottom lines at home, and where students can do something significant in God’s work in the experiences already in place.
I think you can see that implementing the Orange Strategy actually helps any church move towards a simple structure, not make it more complicated!
What’s great is that any church can begin where they are and redial or dial up each of these 5 pieces over time.
The Orange Leaders Handbook just got released a few days ago and is designed to help a church evaluate what they do and what steps they can take to turn the 5 dials just one notch!
So many AWESOME thoughts! The conversation and even my own question got me thinking and it’s been a huge focus of my prayer time during our Daniel fast the last 20days. The excitement of all the “could” be causes me to forget to say no to good things so we can say yes to the right things.
I’m going to start small inviting parents to join in ministry that is already happened. I’ve invited many parents and even some of our older kids to our quarterly creative programming meeting for our kids Sunday environments. Pulling parents into helping decide what the kids will be expeirencing on Sundays and also what tie-in’s we can give them via our family blog and Familytime2go packs that will help them connect the dots at home. Several have already said “yes” to the invite! I look forward to seeing how this plays out over the next couple months. Keep the conversation coming – it’s been great. Thanks!