I heard about some children's ministry leaders deciding to blog this week about Orange principles.  The idea started with Kenny Conley and I'm jumping in to share my thoughts as well.  If you're interested, you can follow the conversation through the twitter hashtag, #orangeweek.

If you haven't heard about Orange, you can read about Orange here

Like everyone else, I'll blog about the Orange Essentials each day.  You can read a much better description of them than I could ever write, here.  Today will be about Elevating Community.

Elevate Community

Community is our church's name, so it's core to who we are.  We believe that life change happens best within the context of community.  But, in children's ministry there are other things that compete with our efforts to elevate community.  Below I'll outline some barriers we experienced in elevating community, and then talk about why it's important to fight through those barriers:

Simplicity
Community complicates things.  In our elementary environment, it would be a lot easier to welcome the kids, and each week divide them up evenly among our leaders and work through the curriculum.  Putting them in specific groups, with specific leaders and specific peers is difficult and adds a ton of administrative work.  

Recruiting
To elevate community, we need small group leaders who will serve every week in elementary, who will invest in children outside of Sunday morning and who will build relationships with parents.  It's a lot harder to find people who will do all of that than it is to find people who will show up on Sunday and work through some activities.

Parent Commitment
If we only asked parents to drop off their kids while they attended service that wouldn't require much commitment at all.  In fact, it's a blessing to the parents.  Elevating community means asking parents to bring their child to the same service each week and encourage their child's relationship with their small group leader.  Parents have more than enough stress, responsibility and not enough time so asking them to commit to more is difficult.

I realize I just did the worst job at selling the idea of elevating community.  While there are a ton of barriers, it's completely worth it.  It is true that community is more important the older a child gets, and therefore isn't as important when they are young.  The problem is, you can't flip a switch when they're 12 and provide other people in their life they can trust.  That has to be established over time, and you can never start early enough.  After fighting through those barriers we have seen greater community on Sunday mornings and heard more stories from parents about how it's impacting their child at home as well.