JANUARY 2010
Construction Begins!
October 3, 2010
We launched a new three-year campaign—Forging a Community of Grace, to help cover the new mortgage we would be paying. It was a $7 million build out. Some of that money was paid in cash from the first building campaign. But we ended up taking a loan of $6.2 million. Five years after starting with nothing!
As is true with construction, we had a few starts and stops in terms of when we could finally get into the building.
Jan and I had the chance in October to spend two weeks in Wittenberg, Germany, the home of the Protestant Reformation and the primary place Martin Luther did his work. I served as a chaplain during that time, preaching at small chapel services during the week and leading Saturday night worship services in the Town Church (where Luther preached) and the Castle Church (where Luther is buried). One of the highlights of my ministry life!
Seven years later, Wittenberg would be celebrating the 500th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation (October 31, 1517). The night before we were to leave, we learned that, as a part of the celebration, the Lutheran World Federation was planting a Luther garden with 500 trees. Lutheran organizations were sponsoring those trees. I asked how we could sponsor one. They didn’t allow for congregations, and that it would take a while to process the request anyway. I said to Hans Kaus (of the Lutheran World Federation) that I could give him the cash the next day if we could make it happen. The next day we did a brief ceremony, and Grace added a tree to the garden! (We agreed to plant a “sister” tree on the new campus, which we did.) Jan and I had the chance to go back in 2014 and 2017 and saw our tree!
December 8, 2010 eGrace
Hey, Grace’rs,
Could this weekend be the last worship service at Zuni???
The school has served us well for almost six years…300 worship weekends not counting Christmas, Good Friday, and Thanksgiving…baptisms…prayers…one or two really good sermons…awesome music…hundreds and hundreds of hours of serving each other through teaching our kids, parking cars, greeting people, serving communion, set up and tear town, taking the offering, working the tech team. etc,…special events and picnics…Make a Difference Day weekends…hundreds of candles lit representing thousands of prayers prayed the last almost six years…dozens upon dozens of cookies and gallons and gallons of coffee…big and small touches of God’s extravagant grace week in and week out…
Over the last almost six years, I’ve aged by almost six years…celebrated my 25th anniversary as an ordained pastor…married off my two kids…said goodbye to my parents…became a grandpa…have had the privilege of stepping into huge God moments time and again with you…
One more weekend (we hope) and we move into the next phase of mission and ministry. These are weekends you don’t want to miss!
December 19, 2010
We celebrated our first worship services on our new campus—just a few days before Christmas Eve. At both services we kept people out in the lobby to build excitement and then let them all in together. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for those of us who started the church. A great day of celebration.
December 24, 2010
Our first Christmas Eve in our new church home. Over 2000 people joined us during one of our multiple services.
February 6, 2011
We held our building dedication service on Sunday afternoon. Bishop Steve Talmage, Walt and Mary Kallestad and Paul and Carol Sorensen from Joy were there, along with Peoria Mayor Cathy Carlat.
We knew building the campus would be a big financial step of faith, but we also knew that having our own building would enable us to up our mission. It opened up many new outreach, missional, and growth opportunities that weren’t quite possible while at Zuni:
- Disney Shows
- VBS
- Musical Theatre Camps
- BJ Thomas Concerts
- Block parties/Easter Egg hunts
- Bible Studies
- Youth group
- Creative worship experiences like the Les Miserables, Joseph, and Godspell services
- Youth choir
- Feed My Starving Children Food Packs
And because we tithed on the building fund, we were able to help build
- A medical clinic in Rwanda
- Church buildings in Rwanda including a new building for our partner church in Nyamata
- Help with disaster relief efforts as needed
CHILDREN
The building was and continues to be even more amazing than we had dreamed. But the one problem it didn’t solve was our inability to gain traction with families with kids.
When we started at Zuni we had about 80 kids—a good ratio to adults attending. However, for facilities we had two locker rooms and a janitor closet. Having left a multi-million-dollar kids facility at Joy, it was hard for parents to settle for what Zuni offered. In a matter of months we were down to 20-30 kids. We grew in attendance but not in young families. We had hoped the new building would help. It didn’t. And that started a rethink about how we wanted to do family ministry.
SUNDAY SCHOOLING OUR KIDS OUT OF CHURCH
This is excerpted/edited from an E-book I wrote back in 2015: Sunday Schooling Our Kids out of Church: The True Story of How One Congregation Dropped Sunday School to Save its Soul
Sunday Schooling Our Kids out of Church?
About 40-50 years ago, a profound shift took place in many Christian congregations across the country… for all the right reasons…with one troubling unintended consequence.
In the 1960’s and 1970’s my generation, Baby Boomers, rebelled against the “institutional church” just as we did with every other institution our parents built/supported. We rebelled by dropping out. In the late 1970’s/early 1980’s, innovative pastors and congregations of all sizes and denominations looked for ways to draw Boomers back to church. The Seeker service—a worship service intentionally geared to those turned off by the church, offered one model for doing so, which is the model we used at Joy.
Because these were the primary parenting years for Boomers, these congregations recognized the need to not only provide Boomer-friendly worship experiences for adults, but also to create dynamic experiences for their children as well, knowing that if the kids wanted to come back, the parents were more likely to come back.
So began a shift from kids worshipping with the big people for one hour followed by all ages attending a second hour of Sunday School, to churches creating Sunday School or Kids’ Church experiences that ran concurrently with the adult worship service. In other words, kids and parents were separated from each other, having different Sunday experiences.
Again, the reasons were right… or so we thought. Because these new Boomer services had a sense of evangelism about them (trying to win Boomers back to the church), we didn’t want anything to interrupt their focus… like squirming or crying or screaming kids.
Church leaders sensed that Boomer parents wanted the one-hour break from their kids—that they wanted to focus on their own spiritual life for an hour away from the distraction of their children. And, again, we assumed, reasonably so, that worship targeted to adult boomers would not be all that engaging for kids. So dynamic Sunday School programs were created to engage kids and youth at their level in their language while their parents were in worship. In fact, some churches didn’t (and don’t) allow kids into big people worship at all.
The result: Many of these innovated congregations had a positive, significant impact on the lives of disenfranchised Boomers and their kids. Many saw their congregations and their children’s ministries grow exponentially. The evangelism imperative to reconnect with Boomers seemed to work.
But there was (and is) one huge unintended consequence as stated above:
We have raised the largest unchurched generation in the history of our country.
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Do you want to know (one of the reasons) why millennials aren’t attending your church? Here goes… Millennials aren’t attending your church because they’ve never had to attend your church. Think about it. From the time my generation was born we were thrown into nurseries with other babies. Then we went to children’s ministries to be entertained while our parents went to “big church.” Then we had middle school ministry. Then we had youth group. Then we went away to college and found a church with a stellar college ministry. It wasn’t until we graduated college that we were expected to be a part of the intergenerational community called “church.” We’d been segregated by age for the first 22 years. And you not only allowed this. You encouraged it.
—Ministry Matters
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Admittedly, there are many reasons why each generation in our culture is increasingly distanced from the church. Some have to do with societal shifts that have nothing to do with the church. Some have to do with the inability of the church to articulate the Gospel in compelling ways.
But perhaps one of the reasons has to do with the Sunday School shift… as we shifted kids out of the main worship experience, enculturated them in their own program, and robbed them of any touch points with the rest of the body of Christ.
Another way of saying it: By segregating our kids out of worship, we never assimilated them into the life of the congregation. They had no contact points. They had no experience. They had no connection with the main worship service—its liturgy, its music, its space, its environment, and its adults. It was a foreign place to them.
And so… once they finished with the kids/or youth program, they left the church. As one person put it in a comment on one of my blog posts, quoting and responding to a comment she heard from a young person: “If the church doesn’t love me, then God must not either.” To her, the congregation had made it clear that children and teens weren’t welcome, and she took that as a stand-in for rejection by God.
With good intentions we attempted to raise kids to be Christians, but we didn’t raise them to be Churched Christians. And perhaps that, in part, is why so few of them attend a church today. We’ve essentially “Sunday-Schooled” them out of church—because we never assimilated them into church.
HOW AND WHY WE DROPPED SUNDAY SCHOOL
When we started Community of Grace in 2005, I had been the Associate Pastor of a large, ELCA, Seeker Church. We offered a full Sunday School for nursery through High School during all of our worship services. We had the people numbers and the facilities to do so. Offering concurrent Sunday School for kids made sense in terms of our mission for re-engaging with Boomers.
But starting Grace moved us to do a re-think.
- In the back of my mind, as we launched Grace, I remembered a study I had read almost 30 years ago. It said that kids who don’t attend worship but attend only Sunday School will likely not attend church/worship as adults. Kids who attend worship only, with no Sunday School, or who attend worship and Sunday school, are far more likely to attend church as adults.
- We had decided to offer communion every weekend and wanted to include the kids.
- We were meeting in a school that offered us a big meeting space for worship along with two locker rooms and a janitor’s closet for Sunday School classes (and later added in one classroom).
- We were working on a much smaller scale than we had at Joy, moving from thousands of attendees to hundreds and we didn’t have the people power to pull off a full hour of concurrent Sunday School.
We opted for a compromise. We all worshipped together for the first half of the service through communion. During the message time, the kids headed off to what we called the Grace Adventure Club. Ideally, the kids would have 30 minutes each week in their own setting while their parents took in the sermon.
We started our congregation with about 300 people, almost 100 of them under the age of 15. Two years later, our Sunday School program was down to about 30, but our overall attendance was growing.
We faced several issues, some of them not uncommon to many congregations:
- Our Sunday School facilities were inadequate, to say the least. What parent wants her/his newborn in a janitor’s closet for nursery? What parents want their kids hanging out in locker rooms for Sunday School? I tried to say that it wasn’t the space that mattered, but the quality of the experience. But reality, in this consumer culture, says that space matters. Especially when down the street is the big, huge mega-church with state-of-the-art Children’s everything! (We actually had a few families who left for that congregation and then came back when their kids were no longer in grade school!)
- We had a hard time recruiting volunteers (something that never changed). Part of that had to do with the new world in which we live where everybody seems to be overly committed—and/or unwilling to commit. Part of it had to do with the “inconvenience” of having to miss the sermon time (amazing how people actually want to hear the sermon when asked to volunteer for something! 🙂 Part of it had to do with increasing generations of people feeling inadequate to “teach” faith to others, especially to children. Part of it had to do with leadership on our end. It can prove difficult, on a tight budget, to find someone who can organize, recruit, run, develop, and troubleshoot ministry to children—part time.
- We didn’t build consistency. Because of the issues in the last point, when we did get volunteers, they served sporadically or inconsistently… once a month or once every five to six weeks. As a result, the kids had no consistent person who knew them, missed them when they were gone, prayed for them, and poured their hearts into them. Kids need stability and people they can count on to be there for them each week. We didn’t provide that.
When we moved to our new campus, we felt we would be able to turn things around. We now had beautiful facilities to accommodate our kids. But five years in, we still didn’t have much traction. We did reach new families, but certainly not at the rate we should have in our community. Though we had the facilities, the other obstacles remained.
Once you lose momentum, it’s hard to get it back. And we worked hard to get it back. We tried the latest and hippest programs. We changed leadership. We made the rooms more kid-friendly. But still… some growth, yet also a deep sense that we weren’t serving our kids and families well.
An Old-New Idea
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“The closest our research has come to that definitive silver bullet is this sticky finding: for high school and college students, there is a relationship between attendance at churchwide worship services and Sticky Faith.”
–Dr. Kara E. Powell and Dr. Chap Clark
Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids
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Spring 2014
In late spring of 2014, that began to change. I read a book recommended to me called, Spiritual Parenting. I spent the next several months reading anything I could get my hands on that had to do with raising our kids to follow Jesus. One of the main insights was the confirmation of that study I had read over 30 years ago. If we want our kids to actively engage with the church as adults, we will want to have them with us in the worship service.
In August of that year I wrote a blog post called, Sunday Schooling Our Kids Out of Church. I essentially did some out loud thinking on the topic. And it went viral. 55,000 shares on Facebook alone at that point in time! Apparently it struck a nerve.
So we did some experimenting. In the summer of 2014 we tried out an intergenerational worship model for six weeks without saying much about it. We announced that for six weeks in the summer, the kids would be staying with us in worship. No big deal. Summer offers those opportunities. At that point, I had a sense that this would be permanent sooner rather than later, but this would give us a chance to “try it on.”
That summer we were in a series based on The Story, and had some of those fantastic Old Testament stories lined up, including David and Goliath; Daniel in the Lion’s Den; and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Each week, part of my sermon was done as a children’s sermon to engage all ages with the message for that day. For example, with David and Goliath, I told the kids the story and we ended with each of the kids lobbing a huge marshmallow at Goliath (one of the men from our congregation)—and then picking them up off of the floor and eating them! For Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, we brought in a firefighter and talked a bit about fire safety and how God kept the men safe in the furnace.
During the actual sermon, the kids headed into one of the corners of the worship center to work on a project related to the message (for the Shadrach story they made firefighter hats). In other words, though they stayed in the service with us, they were not necessarily engaged with the message but with their own project. And we had still separated them from their parents and the rest of the adults. After a few weeks the kids headed out into the lobby during the sermon, as they had become a distraction.
We learned a few good things during those six weeks:
- The kids want to be engaged
- If we were going to have the kids stay for the entire service, we would have to find a way to engage them with the sermon—while keeping them with their parents
Overall, we gained a vision of what’s possible.
Two highlights of that summer experiment:
Early in August I did a message on how to be a church that blesses children. At the end of the message we had all of the kids come up front. I had each child tell us his/her name (or, in the case of our babies, mom or dad told us the name). As a congregation we then, together, said the child’s name followed by, “The Lord Bless You and Keep You.”
The next weekend our Children’s Ministries Director gave the message with the kids up front interacting with her. At the end of the message, we had the kids line up in front of the worship center and the adults came forward so that the kids could lay hands on them and bless them! After those two weekends, I knew there was no going back. I saw worship the way it was supposed to be.
Advent 2014
Christmas Goes to the Movies
After spending a few months laying the groundwork, we decided to experiment once again with having the kids (kindergarten on up) in the full worship service, this time during Advent, 2014 (which provides a natural time to bring everyone together). Each week I used a different “Christmas” movie and tied its theme to a Biblical Advent theme/story. We had free popcorn each week to help create the ambiance. As we did in the summer, the kids’ sermon tied into the main message.
But this time, during the main sermon, the kids sat with their families. And we gave kids guided instructions that cued them into the message. For example: “Draw a picture of…”, which would correlate to something I was talking about. Or…”Write down this phrase (or have mom or dad write it for you)”…which, again, would tie into something I was saying at that moment. This gave the kids a reason to listen to the message. We felt like we’d hit on something powerful. Rather than giving them a coloring page to distract them during the message, we gave them things to do that encouraged them to pay attention to the message. Each weekend, at the end of the service, I had the kids come up and show me their worksheets (we call it the Art Showcase). I was amazed at what they were catching from the message.
JANUARY 2015
Not Yet Quite Ready for Prime Time
By this point, it would have made sense to keep the kids in worship. In fact, when I told the staff we wouldn’t do that officially until the end of February 2015, they asked why we should delay now that we had created a habit during Advent. The reason: I wanted to make sure we were fully “visioned up” for what would be a “no-going-back” decision. I wanted to spend six to seven weeks creating expectation, anticipation, and buy in.
To that end, we entered into a new series beginning in January 2015 called Grace Collisions. Each weekend, we looked at a different generation starting with the Silent Generation, followed by the Boomers, Gen X, and IGen. Each of the messages focused on the unique life shapers and gifts of each generation and the things they bring to the Church table, so to speak. At the end of the message, I invited those from that particular generation to come up front for prayer, a commissioning to use their unique generational personality for the sake of the rest of us, and a blessing. The point of the series was to focus on how we are a multi-generational church called to be a multi-generational church with unique generational gifts to build a multi-generational church.
Each weekend I also laid out the vision for moving the kids (starting with Kindergarten) into the main worship service. I’d offer an occasional research insight on why this is important or hand out an article or blog post on the importance of including kids in worship (see for example: “Dear Parents with Young Children in Church”). And I continually reminded the congregation that we had already tried it in the summer and during Advent, and that it had gone beyond our expectations.
Shifting into Multi-Generational Ministry
Finally… it was time to make the shift. The final message in this visioning series on Generations took on a very practical tone. We wanted to do a few things in this service:
- Re-emphasize the new call to incorporate kids back into worship
- Give parents some practical insights for helping their kids engage with worship
- Provide tools for those without kids on how to welcome worshippers of all ages
- Offer a picture of what intergenerational worship would look like starting the following week (and again, we had already modeled it the prior summer and Advent)
- Officially welcome kids back into worship through a small but significant ceremony
I invited Julie Kurz, an advocate for including children in worship, to be a part of the message that weekend. I interviewed her on the topics just noted and added my own commentary from time to time on what her insights meant for Grace. At the end of the worship service, we brought the kids up front. We handed each of them a copy of The Action Bible Devotional, prayed for them, and then officially welcomed them back into the worship service.
We’d made the Shift!
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