Just sat through a workshop giving a brief overview of the middle school ministry at North Point. Pretty simple stuff:
- One weekly 65-minute program that includes two songs, a game, a 12-minute message and 25 minutes in small groups. This happens during both adult services.
THAT'S IT! They also do three overnight events/camps per year. Nothing else. Anything else is expected to happen through the small groups.
Interesting that they feel content with a "less is more" approach. Are they onto something?
What does your junior high ministry look like?
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Our Jr. High Ministry meets on Sunday's for 75 minutes and our small groups meet on Tuesday nights for 90 minutes. We've got a once a month activity and winter camp. During the summer we have a couple of day trips. That's about it for us.
Sunday's we run two programs. First is worship, teaching, and small groups. Second is a curriculum based table discussion setting.
We have a monthly outreach program during the school year and a weekly after-school program.
various service projects and trips/camp
As I wrote my comment it went from 3 things to 4 to 5 to 6 and if I keep thinking it will probably stretch to 8 or 9. I think having less sounds good. As a staff we feel busy and I think quality may drop from this.
We do 6 things
1. Large meetings on weekends
2. Every other Friday night small groups
3. Annual summer camp
4. Annual mission trip
5. Twice a year classes
6. We have about 8-10 student leadership meetings a year, one is a overnight trip
Our church is in the middle of a major "retooling" of all our ministries. We currently meet for 45mins. during the "Connection Time" that follows our Sunday morning service. We also plan extra activities through-out the year. In the fall, we plan to reintroduce a Weds. night program.
We run twice a week as a well, with small groups meeting during the weekend services (during the school year) and our large group worship / teaching / etc. meeting is on Wednesday night. (year round)
We ask each small group to do two decent events a year with just their group and we have 2 retreats a year for the whole group.
As I have gotten to know the ministry and folks over at North Point better, what intrigues me is the idea of once a week.
Leaders and families are only getting busier, and where churches used to expect 4 time slots a week from folks years ago (Sunday school, church, youth group, small group) we find that two is the limit for most of our people today. And two is actually becoming too much for a lot of our folks as we see twice the number of students at our weekend small groups as we do our wednesday large groups. And most of my leaders can only commit to the weekends as well.
We're in the midst of evaluating it all these days!
wow...ours is nothing like that
we have:
2 services sunday
1 service wednesday night
services are a mix of worship, games, and teaching
small groups/disciplship every other friday
summer and winter camps
summer = 1 weekly activity(kids are bored)
IE beach, knotts, swim parties, park days, etc.. varies not everything cost $ either we'll meet at houses, play broomball at the church, etc...
Every year for spring break we do a different trip/activity every day of the week... this is usually the biggest week of the year for us and we always get new kids plugged in to the church
It's always interesting to see how everybody runs their services and how different things work for different areas
Okay, but when do their kids go to church with the larger, intergenerational body of Christ?
M.S. students attend a community group with their parents.
One Wednesday night a month they join the H.S.
One Friday a month they get together for a game night.
Once a quarter they are invited to do a community service project during the 1100 Sunday service.
[i don't work a lot with them, not that there would be a lot to do, but i don't think it's enough]
Brand new to the church we are revamping the jr high ministry (cause nothing exists now) and our leaders are asking what can we do to maximize time & ministry time. The whole conversations have been a 'less is more' mentality. So our thoughts are Small groups sunday morning wrapped with a 10 minute teaching, quick crowd breaker game before it. 3 major events during school year on a midweek night.
our middle school program looks like a 45 minute sunday school time, and a midweek program that is a ~45 minute small group/hangout time, and an hour large group time. throw in monthly service projects, spring retreat, and summer camp/festival. it's been working, but we're looking at revamping some things for the fall. change is good.
in response to abram k-j
since we don't have adult Sunday School we hope that the kids go to adult church (which is a lot more fun than the church I grew up in) one of the hours for their shared experience and then the kids go to their program (Xtreme) while their parents serve somewhere else in the church. That's the dream...it works some of the time. In the end it's up to the parents to make it work... Kurt...it was good to meet you while you were here!
we responsible for the full 90 minutes during the adult worship service.
we have a south campus that focuses more on small groups that meet after the adult song service.
we take communion with the adults once a month.
we host an 'in house' retreat and join up with some churches in Austin to have a camp experience here in town.
summer camp
monthly outreach to the homeless/less fortunate
We did:
1) a Sunday morning fun/teach that's more light than heavy (parents typically go to 1 service - no Sunday School, etc. for them) -- 50% break into small groups, 50% not.
2) Mid-week that's fun with light teaching - what they DON'T know is that this is a major relational time with the volunteers (the "organization" of the evening facilitates connection)
3) Random-timed Discipleship (small group) for those that want it - fits the time of the volunteer & students.
4) 3 camps: one focused on God (Summer), the Body (Fall), and those who don't know Jesus at all (early Spring).
5) Various service-type projects (1 timers) plus the volunteers often go 'play' with students.
We went after a way for kids to have (1) Relationships (2) Dialogs and (3) ways to live-out the content of their Faith, the dialogs, etc. Thus, #5 above is basically an always-changing shot at expressing or "practicing".
Plus, we had to do this all within the constraints of the whole congregation (meeting on Sunday morning, etc.)
We didn't go after "simple" as much as we went after Relationships+Dialogs and various Animation of Beliefs
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