Two Cents Tuesday: UnChurched Parents
3 Comments Published by Terrace Crawford on 7/26/11 at 8:19 PM.
"Two Cents Tuesdays" is a blog series where you get to help other church leaders who are struggling where they are. I take one question (one scenario) each week from my mail bag (...er email inbox) and share it with you (protecting the innocent of course by keeping it anonymous). I want your TWO CENTS.
Our church reaches a lot of people from our community. We actually have more students in our ministry whose parents aren't church attenders than those whose parents attend. The problem is that its hard to get the unchurched parents involved at all because they don't attend. We continue to reach out to them but they just don't seem to be interested. Do you have suggestions on how to get them connected?
So what say you? Have any parent ministry advice? What "two cents" would you offer this youth worker?
Labels: Resources, two cents tuesday, Youth Pastors
I don't have an answer to that question, but another question on top of this one that hopefully someone can answer. What do you do when unchurched parents ground their students from youth group? We had two guys who were so close to giving their lives to the Lord. They did something stupid, and their parents grounded them from church for the summer. How in the world do you handle this when you don't even have a relationship with these parents?
Sorry for potentially hijacking the discussion :-9
What about getting the kids to do some kind of performances..parents like to come watch their kids perform. A play, a concert...and make sure it presents a message they need hear.
I have been struggling with this for a few years. It is especially frustrating to plan a parent meeting and communicate with all of the parents about it, only to have almost no one show up.
Potential solution: make parent meeting attendance mandatory for youth to participate. Parents are used to mandatory meetings at school, sports information, etc. If their children love being involved then they will make their parents go (in theory).
I have yet to pull the trigger on this one, so I don't want you to think I'm speaking from experience. It would be interesting for a bunch of people to experiment with this and then reflect on how it played out!