Elemental Children's Ministry

It’s been three months since Orange 2010. For those of you who attended, you know that it was an amazing time. We learned a lot, were refreshed and left challenged. The thing about conferences, though, is that many times we leave pumped up ready to revolutionize how we do ministry in our contexts only to find that we get caught up in the humdrum of every day ministry putting to the back burner those things that we were challenged by.

I’ve been re-listening to the main sessions from Orange 2010 recently being challenged once again about how I think about ministry as well as hearing things I hadn’t heard the first time around! This week I thought it’d be a cool idea to post a series called Revisiting Orange 2010 posting my reflections on the main sessions from Orange 2010. I also invite you to share your thoughts about each of the posts as well as some things that you’ve done since returning from Orange 2010. If you weren’t at Orange, please feel free to interact as well!

In the meantime, here is a promo vid for Orange 2011 that was shown at Orange 2010.

Here is a list of bloggers that I know of who attended Origins 2010:

• Renee Johnson at Devotional Diva
• Jesse Giglio at Love Is Social
• Jordan Watson at Freestyle
• Julia Kate at Tither of Innovation
• Dawn Carter at Chronicles of Dawnia

Check these bloggers out for their experiences and thoughts about Origins 2010. If you know of anyone else who has blogged about Origins 2010, let me know in the comments.

One of the speakers who will be a part of the The Origins Event this weekend is Tara Russell.

Tara is the co-founder & CEO of The Momentum Group + Common Ground, social + entrepreneurial ventures that provide job-training and job-creation for disadvantaged and at-risk international community members. Tara is a visionary, an entrepreneur, a wife, a mother to kids who inspire her daily, and passionately committed to empowering those with the least through innovative business and training. (taken from the Origins Event speakers page)

I had the privilege of interviewing Tara via email, and here’s what she had to say!

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After officially launching a little over a year ago, The Origins Project is having its inaugural event on July 24, 2010 at the Nokia Center in Los Angeles. I am excited about following the event via blogs and twitter. I’ve been following The Origins Project since I started reading on Dan Kimball’s, Eric Bryant’s and Scot McKnight’s blogs about conversations that were thinking of considering a “Third Way” of doing Christianity. When The Origins Project was announced and the official site was up, I immediately signed on.

Why am I so pumped about The Origins Project and this event on Friday?

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Unfortunately, that is not a pic of Anthony at the Orange Conference. I do have a couple, but they’re more candid shots. I had meant to get a pic of me and him, but alas… This one is off his Facebook page.

Anyway, I sort or met Anthony at The Idea Camp in February 2008. He had attended the workshop I had facilitated. Soon after that, I began interacting with Anthony via blogs and Twitter. He was even a host on a CM Edge podcast (I’ll eventually start those up again). Anthony is the Director of Children’s Ministry at Glenkirk Church in the foothills of Los Angeles.

I’ve been looking forward to meeting Anthony in person because he is a leader with A LOT of passion. I also love his desire to connect and collaborate with others in ministry. He started the West Coast Children’s Ministry blog with the vision to see it as a place where those on “the left coast” could contribute to the children’s ministry conversation. If you are in children’s ministry on the west coast, I encourage you to contact Anthony and become a contributor to that blog!

It was neat to hear him talk about the journey God has had him on concerning how to partner with parents without overwhelming them to the point of scaring them off. I look forward to hearing how that journey evolves over time. I also look forward to the potential of more interactions with Anthony since we are moving to the northern section of the sunny state of California.

On the last night of Orange 2010, I was sitting with the other bloggers up in the nosebleed seats next to one of the Orange volunteers. I asked here where she was from. She said, “I’m from Virginia, and I bug all these guys on their blogs!” All of a sudden, the rusty gears in my brain turned, I looked at her nametag and realized, “Are you Theresa Haskins? I’m Henry Zonio!”

Theresa is very gracious and could make any person feel 10 feet tall because her answer to me was, “No way! No… way!”

When I started hosting chapter-by-chapter book blog projects with different contributors and then the whole book blog tour thing, one of the people who enthusiastically raised an e-hand when I put the call out for people was Theresa. I loved her excitement at being part of these reviews and enjoyed her input into the conversations.

What I love even more about Theresa is that she is a volunteer in the children’s ministry at her church. She is so passionate, though about ministering to children that she has jumped into the blogoshpere and is adding her voice to the children’s ministry conversation. I love it!

It was so cool to meet Theresa in person and experience her infectious enthusiasm for God and families. If you have a chance jump over to Theresa’s blog and experience her excitement for ministry to children and families. I look forward to interacting with Theresa more online and hopefully more in person!

(picture originally uploaded to Flickr by mike.in.ny)

Being a blogger and a social network addict (I can stop whenever I want, though), I get to interact with a lot of people online and build some relationship with some of those people without physically meeting them. I know that can be a hard concept for some people, but it can happen (I’ll have to make that a whole other blog post!). As I started meeting many of these people at Orange, I felt the need to blog about some of those interactions. I wish I could blog about each person I spent time with, but I’d be blogging about just that for the next few weeks. So If I don’t blog about my interaction with you, I hope you’ll forgive me.

What are some of your stories of connecting with people in person that you only connected with online?

The main speaker for the opening session was Chris Wiersma. Chris is the lead pastor at Westside King’s Church in Calgary. For the life of me, I don’t know why I’ve never heard of him before because I found myself wondering if Chris has lived in my head.

Of all the things that Chris said, the main theme that we are not simply called to help people but to be fascinated with the stories of people and be personally transformed by those stories resonated strongly with me. We spend so much time trying to inoculate ourselves against mess… and even when we are OK interacting with mess, we would never consider that we could be transformed by that mess for good.

Chris stated the obvious (which we tend to gloss over) that Christians aren’t the only people doing “good” things and giving “stuff” away. There are many irreligious people doing amazing things for those in need. He then asked the obvious (which again we gloss over), “What is supposed to make Christians different?” I loved his answer: We’re supposed to get lost in the stories of the people we help; we need to undergo mutual transformation through mutual fascination!

I hear so many people and ministries repeat over and over that we show Christ’s love by helping our communities and getting involved. If that were simply the case, then why does skepticism about the Church continue to grow? Maybe it’s because, as Chris somewhat cynically pointed out (Canadians are good at that) that the world expects us to love them because they know we want to win them over to “our side.” Chris went on to say that what will really knock peoples feet from under them will be when we not only help but look in the eyes of those we help and say, “Now, tell me your story because I know it’s in there!” There is a hint of the image of God in all of us, so we need to use that as our connection point.

Specifically related to the impact a message like this has on children and family ministries is how we relate to non-traditional families. My friend Amy Dolan has been thinking about this stuff, too. Are we willing to be transformed by unchurched families, busy families, single-parent families, blended families, homosexual families? Now don’t get me wrong… I’m not saying these families are God’s ideal (does God’s ideal even exist? who are we even to say what God’s ideal is? but those are side discussions!). What I am saying, is that we are called to enter into meaningful relationships with all families no matter what they look like. And part of being in a relationship is hearing others’ stories and undergoing positive transformation as a result of those stories.

What do you think about Chris’ message?

If you were at Orange 2010, what did you take away? I’d love to hear!