For the past several months, I have been working alongside of our student ministry team and our parent leadership team to develop our next programming change. Today, I’m ready to release it to the general public. It’s been about 3 years since we’ve updated our lineup and now that the church has adopted and implemented a new strategy, we need to adopt it too. I don’t do change lightly (even though I like it) and everything has been carefully looked at. Today, I signed 240 packets that detail our change. I thought I’d upload the document for you guys in case you wanted to borrow some ideas/approach.

Here are some key things:

1. Every parent in the church with students in 5th-12th grade will receive a packet. If you don’t have a list like this, you need to get one!
2. We are sending this out EARLY. We want to give people time to think through it and respond. We won’t be implementing the changes until August.
3. We are trying to answer as many questions as possible. (Someone once told me that doing so would create more headaches, but I totally disagree!)
4. We’ll be having an open house in July to provide a forum for questions.

If you are looking at changing your programming, I beg you to take your time! Think about what you are doing and why before you announce anything. Get with a diverse group of parents to run ideas past them too. Try to build as must trust as possible while being as transparent as possible. We’ve been working on this for almost 6 months! Have at it!

[button link="http://www.nickfarr.me/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/servicechange_final_packaged.pdf" type="icon" newwindow="yes"] Download Document[/button]