Parenting is a difficult journey. It’s always been hard and it always has been an adventure! A few years ago many of us came to terms with the truth that the church would never be able to duplicate the spiritual influence that parents carry. We began to partner with families and try to figure out how to combine the influence of home and church to make a greater impact. We realized that we could really help parents become spiritual influences in the lives of their children so we started to create resources to help them. If you looked at what most of our ministries are doing for parents you could sum up our efforts with these words…
We create great stuff and great events for parents.
We may have missed a step in our desire to partner with parents. What we missed was the fact that parents need more from our ministries. Parents are really reaching our everywhere asking this question…
Will you help me better parent?
Parents do want to know how to influence their kids spiritually but in real life they are struggling with how to be a good parent because parenting is challenging and we all feel like we are messing it up. If you want to make a difference in the lives of parents you have to step back and create an entire parent strategy.
In our journey at Grace Community Church we finally feel like we have a comprehensive strategy that has real potential to make an impact in the lives of parents in our church. We crafted that strategy with help from the team at Parent Ministry, our curriculum partner at Orange, and the hard work of our family ministry team to sync it all in our context.
I want to give you a chance to check out our parent ministry strategy at our church and how we have shaped it. There is no way we could have done this without the help of both our partnership with the Parent Ministry and Orange teams but know that a parent strategy can work with any curriculum. Your strategy needs to be shaped to fit your church culture!
Here is our central parent page! Check it out and then process this question. Do you really have a parent strategy?
