One Family at a Time

One Family at a Time

By Alex Field and Lindy Warren

November/December 2004 Issue

What does today’s family look like, and how can your church connect with it? Churches share what’s working—and what’s not—to reach the 21st-century home

For Dallas-area residents Paul and Kathy Hakes, church held little interest—until their second-grader Ashley came home enthusiastically and repetitiously talking about Adventure Week at Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas (fellowshipchurch.com). The following Sunday, Ashley brought her parents to church with her—and she kept bringing them, recalls FC Kids Elementary Pastor Matt McKee.

Today, Paul and Kathy are committed members at Fellowship, both volunterring in the children’s ministry.

“Our kids are bringing their families to church,“ McKee says. “We hear multiple times that a child is so excited about being here that they ignite the same enthusiasm in their parents.“

Know any families like the Hakes in your community—families that don’t really see the need to come to church but who are in need of a relationship with God and a connection with a local church? For most growing churches like Fellowship, reaching families like the Hakes is a primary focus. Churches have long recognized the far-reaching impact of connecting a family with the Church.

“The family is definitely the backbone of the community,“ says Fellowship Church Senior Pastor Ed Young who leads the Dallas congregation of 18,000. “If you reach the family, you can change the community. If you can reach the community, you can change the city; the city, the state; the state, the nation; the nation, the world.“

Author Joe Aldrich calls the Christian family “the ultimate evangelistic tool.“

“The two greatest forces in evangelism are a healthy church and a healthy marriage,“ he writes in Life-Style Evangelism (Multnomah). “You can’t have one without the other.“

THE 21ST CENTURY FAMILY

Clearly, making a family connection is crucial, especially now. A 2002 Gallup study shows that nearly half (47%) of adults in America were considered unchurched. But reaching families in your community first requires knowing what they look like, Young says. “It’s critical to know your community because if you know your community, you know the different ways to connect with it.“

Chances are the majority of the families in your church’s sphere of influence won’t resemble the nuclear family of 20 years ago—mom, dad and 2.5 kids with a dog.

As lifestyles change and divorce rates increase (50% of all marriages in 2002 will end in divorce), the family unit has continued to morph into new forms: blended families, single-parent families, multigenerational families, homosexual families. By themselves, blended families have seen any number of variations as parents remarry, creating stepmothers and stepfathers, stepchildren and stepsiblings. Studies show that more than 1,300 stepfamilies are being formed in the United States every day, says Natalie Nichols Gillespie, author of The Stepfamily Survival Guide (Revell).

With the ongoing splintering of the family unit come other defining characteristics of the 21st century family. Recent numbers show that children in non-nuclear family environments have fewer chances to develop in key areas, have greater potential for an array of personal problems and have less chances for attending college and succeeding financially.

And the pace and stress of today’s work environment has dramatically increased, making it difficult for families to find financial security and allow one parent to stay home with the kids, let alone be together in the evenings.

“As the culture races by at an incredible pace, the parents of today are running as fast as they can to simply keep up with their jobs, their money, their marriage, their schedules and even their own health,“ says Chap Clark, director and associate professor of youth and family ministries at Fuller Theological Seminary. “Although they are being blamed for a lack of concern for their kids, many of today’s parents are secretly crying, ‘Does anyone care about me?’ The Church must do all it can to care for and strengthen the fragile familial institution.“

A CREATIVE CONNECTION

Just as the types of families increase, so do the methods and strategies for reaching them. While 47% of adults are unchurched, the good news is that the same Gallup survey shows that 58% of those adults could see themselves becoming actively involved in a church today and are open to an invitation.

Gallup’s conclusion: “These people are ripe for the harvest, but it will take creative strategies to reach them.“

Fellowship’s Young is well aware of that fact. The 43-year-old pastor has been known to drive a Ferrari on stage for a message about dating and preach on spiritual warfare from an army tank. Often, Young and his wife Lisa tag-team on stage for a message on marriage or family life.

Though the Youngs both grew up in nuclear families (Ed is the son of Second Baptist Church, Houston, Senior Pastor Ed Young), he knows they are the exception at Fellowship and in the Dallas Metroplex.

“I think Dallas is probably the divorce capital of the world,“ he says. “We have a number of people from different walks of life on our staff, and most have experience with one of the groups we’re speaking to. We get input from all those people when we plan the service.

“We continue to hear, ‘I’m involved in Fellowship Church because there are so many single parents, blended families and divorced situations represented here.’ “

Each facet of Fellowship’s ministries has a strong family element, he says. From the church’s athletic leagues that average 300 to 700 participants in a given week, and the children’s ministry (birth through fifth grade) that sees 4,000 kids a week, to Fellowship Riders, an outreach attracting about 120 (48% unchurched) motorcycle enthusiasts at each event, the church is creatively connecting families to their interests. From there, they build community and people come to Christ within that relational context.

The connection stories abound. There’s Bob Pinard, invited by a co-worker to play in Fellowship’s basketball league—one of the numerous athletic leagues the church offers to members and unchurched adults in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Sports were Pinard’s “relational bridge“ to Fellowship, says the church’s Athletic Pastor Barry Foster. “Bob was one of those guys who led a good life—good marriage, two kids. He was agnostic,“ Foster says. “But over the months that he played in our league, and was exposed to our members, he was enlightened to what a personal relationship with Christ was.“

Pinard accepted Christ, and his family followed. Both he and his wife, today a volunteer in the children’s ministry, are involved now at Fellowship.

Another family, the Dunns, received their introduction to the church, then Christ, through Fellowship Riders. Two years ago, Gary Dunn didn’t even believe in Christ, but a Fellowship Rider in his office knew of his love for motorcycles and invited him to ride with the group. Today the Jewish believer is one of his best volunteers, says Fellowhip member Justin Jordan, who leads the ministry.

“Gary was with us when we took Christmas presents to 800 kids as part of Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree program,“ Jordan says. “He saw what church really is about.“ Now Dunn and his family—also Christians—lead one of Fellowship Riders’ three home teams.

The church’s creative approach to ministry has seen families come in droves. Says Young: “We’ve discovered that if you impact families, they will bring five, 10, 20 families with them. Influencers will bring other influencers.“

FOR EVERY GENERATION

More often than not, churches build their outreach on the traditional model that’s worked for many dozens of years: children. From there, churches do their best to program a unique and exciting ministry for each generation of the family. Children’s ministry often takes the form of Sunday school, Vacation Bible School or Awana, while youth ministry becomes groups for junior high, high school and college students.

The method is the same for reaching out to parents. Adult ministry spreads across a host of divisions built for every segment of the adult population, separated by age, life experience and education.

“A church must also address the needs of all the family members,“ Thomas E. Trask, general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, says in Enrichment Journal. “When I pastored, I had to find ways to minister to the whole family—children, junior and senior high, college and career, single adults, young marrieds, middle-agers and senior adults.“

SIMPLIFYING A FAMILY’S LIFE

While Randy Frazee, senior pastor of Pantego Bible Church in Fort Worth, Texas (pantego.org), and author of The Connecting Church and Making Room for Life (Zondervan), agrees that the family is key to reaching a community, he believes the traditional strategies churches are using need a facelift.

“One of the reasons why traditional family programming is not working in churches today is because church programming is further segmenting the family,“ he explains. “The children go in one direction; the parents go in the other.

“In suburbia, American families have upwards of 35 different relational worlds that they manage. As a church, we don’t really think about those worlds in relation to the programs we create. So we create programming that requires them to completely leave those worlds. And that’s just not really going to work today.“

When Frazee came on staff at Pantego he realized very soon that he needed to reach out to families in a new way. As he studied the family of the early ’90s, he saw that families’ lives were already immensely fragmented and that the church often compounded the problem, instead of helping to solve it.

“The church can’t continue to add more commute time back to the church building, then separate the family when they get there,“ he says. “We need to find a way to simplify a family’s life and let them be home. Instead of trying to create community in the Church, we need to find a way to let the Church be the Church in the communities they’re in.“

So instead of competing with those social circles, Frazee decided to base the majority of his ministry strategy around what he calls Community Groups. This unique ministry style centers around regional areas and neighborhoods, and sees the congregation meeting together regularly with their neighbors, playing on sports teams together, celebrating birthdays and holidays—all within their unique community group. “At the same time, they’re introducing unchurched neighbors to Christ,“ Frazee adds.

And that’s happening. Brad Gartman, pastor of Pantego’s Fort Worth zone, remembers a young woman who came to his group, without her agnostic husband.

“He had no interest in being part of the group,“ Gartman says. “She continued coming for about a year, and he kept watching. Eventually, he started coming to our dinners or big events. The group just continued to reach out and pray.

Last spring, he became a Christian crediting this community group directly. He didn’t know God could be that way.“ Stories like that are common at Pantego.

Within each of Pantego’s 30 Com-munity Groups are three to seven Home Groups that influence other areas of the Community Group’s ministry, such as student ministry expressions and compassion to the poor. Each event, ministry or group is driven by one of the 30 Community Groups, not a centralized, church-run department. And each Community Group is actually pastored by a member of Pantego’s pastoral staff who lives in the group’s area.

“We started this about eight years ago, and what we’re finding is that it’s a little bit of a shock for highly churched people,“ Frazee says. “But people are very appreciative of the simplification of their lives and the deepening of their relationships. It may or may not be considered the fastest way to reach families, but I do know that we need to find a way to address the discontinuity and get the family back together again.“

For a less radical change that aims to bring families together, some churches have combined their Sunday school classes, creating more intergenerational mingling across a wide span of age levels so that families are not separated.

For his part Chap Clark, Fuller Seminary’s youth and family ministry director, finds that the segregation of the families in a church needs to have purpose.

“The Church as Christ’s body on earth must remember that we are all necessary to be a healthy community,“ Clark says. “Each program must see itself as a part of something bigger that God is doing. A unified vision for the local Church is the step in reshaping the Church into God’s family.“

A frequent contributor to OUTREACH, Alex Field has also written for the Los Angeles Times and Relevant magazine, among others. Lindy Warren is managing editor of OUTREACH magazine.

OUTREACH Associate Editor Heather Johnson assisted in preparing this report.

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