Family Ministry

I didn't realise there were quite a few ways of doing family ministry. Jon Erwin presents us with a great working table of Family ministry models. There are many options. There are several organisations individuals promoting literature and methods for family ministry as well. Two that that we've taken ideas and resources from are

Mark Holmen's "Faith begins at Home" - great book - we were able to distribute this to our parents last year. This year the book has expanded into Church wide package, which we're looking into here at FAC. Mark Holmen is coming to GTA in May and we're taking a group of our parents to hear him.

Orange is all about family ministry. I went to the Orange Conference last year in Atlanta. It reinforced my changing philosophy of ministering just to children. Since at Church we have the children most Sundays for 1 hour and the parents have between 80 and 100 hours - unstructured time with their children each week we need to find a way to help parents make better use of some of that time for things of God. This is especially important when we look at Deuteronomy 6 - charging the parents with sharing God's words with their children throughout the day.

So this year we've added a monthly FamJam to our family ministry schedule where the whole family come together. This is on top of Families Eating And Sharing Together (FEAST) which we started last year.