Rebecca Ligtenberg

Perhaps the most important question to ask is "why?"

Why do the kids feel more connected and have a stronger desire to worship at the church plant? Is it worship style? Is the regular preacher at the church plant better at reaching younger listeners? What other factors lead them to feel more connected and engaged in worship there? Perhaps there are ways to consider these factors and make some changes to worship to better engage students at the service their parents want them to attend.

Also, why are the parents so adamantly against separate worship (or for family worship)? I'm certainly not trying to suggest that the parents are wrong. Not at all. Rather, I just want to suggest that it bears some thought over their motivation for requiring that the family worship together. Perhaps the family can attend the church plant together part of the time. Perhaps there could be a compromise reached where the students can attend the church plant sometimes and attend worship as a family other times.  Perhaps there is an age for their teens at which the parents would consider this appropriate as a stepping stone to a future time when they will be on their own and making an independent choice where to worship (or even if to worship.)

It's been quite some time since I was in high school, but I clearly remember feeling more engaged in worship at school chapels and summer camps than I did on any average Sunday (except the token annual service where the youth group planned worship.) I sympathize with teens who feel that their parents church lacks relevance for their lives, but worry that if that is their only experience, they will lump all churches together in the irrelevant pile and walk away altogether.

We are trying to get our calendar up right now, and it's still a bit rough around the edges, but you can check it out here:

Crossroads CRC website - http://www.crossroadscrc.com/Church_Life/calendar.htm

One of our members implemented this at the Christian school in our area, so we were inspired to try it ourselves. Their calendar is here (and not so rough around the edges!): http://www.calvinchristianescondido.org/calendar.htm

Count me in as noticing the first sign and watching for further info. I hope you'll continue to use this space to keep us posted on this task force. Thanks!

 Don't you mean, "Reformation is so last millennium?" ;)

I was interested to read this article, but had no knowledge of the referenced overture on deacons.

For reference, I believe this author is referring to Overture 16: Appoint a Task Force to Revise the Church Order Articles Related to the Office of Deacon which may be found beginning on page 678 of the Agenda for Synod 2010, a copy of which can be accessed from this page:
http://www.crcna.org/pages/synod_front.cfm

Please update if that is not the correct reference.

Full circle: coming back to a thread I started to offer tips. :)

I did start a church facebook page for us at https://www.facebook.com/CrossroadsCRC

Also, for Josh's question about interaction, that IS tricky. Facebook has these algorithms so that pages for organizations/businesses don't always appear in everyone's feed. These pages behave differently from our friends in feeds. Facebook may omit a business or organization feed if you haven't shown interest (like, comment, share) in the posts in the past. All that to say, you have to try and post compelling information that will engage people and encourage them to interact by liking, commenting and sharing.

Our page is small with just a few likes, so it doesn't see much traffic, but we are a small church. I also heard somewhere* that if you have page likes = 10% of your "customer base" that's a pretty good target. I'm well over that for our page, as our official membership number is around 160 and our average weekly attendance is something like 200-225.

*Somewhere = Facebook Marketing Solutions https://www.facebook.com/marketing There are a LOT of case studies, articles, archived webinars, etc. at that page that might be helpful for understanding how to engage your audience. They will try to pitch you on advertising, but I just ignore that.

One thing I did when I learned this was send  private Facebook message to a handful of friends at church who I know are active Facebook users and specifically ask them to go out of their way to like, comment or share because that helps with our page visibility.

Hope that helps!

Rebecca

Thanks so much. Great church website, too.

Thanks!