Examples of Strategies We Discuss on our VLOG
Youth Retention, Relationships, & Training
Education: Provide a curriculum of Christian apologetics, heritage, heroes, polemics training that begins early and layers through adolescence. This is no longer an option.
Training: Engage youth to serve the needy members of the church including the disabled, elderly, sick, struggling, build self-esteem and character while meeting the needs of the church and providing bonding and activities.
Activities: Provide a mixture of activities to prevent other ideologies from poaching youth on weekends, holidays, and summers. Offer fun and work combined.
Relationships: Train youth leaders in group dynamics like all military officers. Ensure leaders understand how to break down toxic cliques, reduce arrogance, and build confidence.. Join together small youth groups and divide large youth groups that are too big for regular interaction.
Peer Trainers: Assign pure on peer mentors to build friendships, reduce clicks, increase bonding, and train older youth that can return even in college to mentor high schoolers
Adult Mentors: Provide adult mentors to build relationships and break barriers between generations, offer internships, entrepreneur, training, job placement and good workers, and to train the church to hire from within
Value proposition: provide use with a value proposition that for their dedication they get help with education and employment and future leadership training in the church
Adult Retention, Relationships, & Support
Groups: learn from the military to divide up groups with small, medium, and large groups so that every individual has access to a midsize group where there are enough potential friendships to find a few that work. provide leaders who are trained in group dynamics, can minimize clicks, integrate new people, and know when to break up a group if it gets too big but not have it so small that it suffocates, Ensure the primary midsize group has the function of relationships and not education, that it is a working group and that people have meaningful roles that are rewarding, such as helping the people in need in the church. give members meaningful roles such as helping solve the problems of members and having the group take care of itself and struggling members financially until those people become contributors. most forms of abuse are reconciled on their own through this method.
Activities: Ensure that church members have activities on every major holiday and church holidays. Don't allow them to be lonely on days of celebration, and help them understand a church calendar. Offer meaningful ceremonies, and meaningful work roles that help people. Avoid repitive assembly line tasks like parking cars and setting up sound equipment every week. Instead rotate groups of people to work as teams so it becomes a relational opportunity shared by all members.
Training: Christian schools make sure schools are teaching a curriculum that will produce strong faith and not manipulated by the state and coerced into State curriculum that will produce a different product. pressure or start new colleges that can produce graduates who can earn a living, and ministers who will be successful at ministry with MBA level skills which require understanding group theory, competition, finance, real estate, marketing, management, leadership. leadership. make sure pastors are not trained like theologians which would be training a pilot like an aeronautical engineer.
Support: Design a care system that can promise every member receives access to the same care process. Create an organic process that honors special days like birthdays in group sizes where the recognition is meaningful. Plan a system that organizes friends to mobilize during crisis, sickness, or financial difficulty. Structure accountability until the system works consistently. Avoid automated, impersonal systems. Don't specialize a small group of people without relationship to handle events like funerals, guest visits, hospitality, or hospital visits. Instead, use specialized workers to delegate organic responses with people who have relationships( or willing to begin relationships) with the member. Churches suffer from bored members and members in crisis. At any time, 2/5 of the church is in crisis. Engage the majority to help the minority as those roles will change except for the small number of people who need permanant help like the disabled.
Visitor Assimilation, Motivation, & Care
Sponsors: Hosts or sponsors. meet new people and introduce them to people that may also be like them and also to look over them during their first year in the church to help with the transition to being a member and diagnosing any needs such as training, friendships, or support
Options: Create other paths into the church besides just into the main service on a Sunday to help acclimate them such as in smaller community groups based on interactions and not just the service ceremony. Some people cannot handle direct exposure to a large number of strangers, unfamiliar music, and confusing rituals.
Motivation: Provide visitors and guests with motivational experiences designed to build and excitement for the Christian life and church membership. Help new members learn and adjust to the errors of previous beliefs. Help them to picture the future of their life with the church. Create milestones, accomplishments, and points of honor for members to acheive.
Family Support, Training, & Activities
Training: Provide marriage and parenting classes to all members on a regular schedule at strategic times. Offer marriage and parenting certification.
Activities: Offer activities on a regular basis for every age group, men, women, and joint family activities.
Scrapbooking: At the end of every year, ensure a minimum of memorable events occurred for every member. At the beginning of a year, plan the process for the next year's scrapbook. Assign a videographer as accountability that you are making a film worth recording. What does each age group find truly fun or meaningful. Plan memories or els they will not happen.
Christian Education, Schools, & Colleges
Schools: Integrate curriculum that will produce a Christian World View. Do not allow schools or home school curriculums to be coerced by governmental credentialing bodies or funding ( which has happened to most schools and charter schools).
Colleges: Colleges also need to integrate courses that deepen and cement Christian Worldview. In addition, they need to be aware of providing an optimal environment for spouses to meet. Students need to learn how to support a family, become future church leaders, and become leaders in the different spheres of cultural influence. Students should be strong enough to carry their faith into advanced studies.
MBA'S: Christian graduate school should produce MBA level skills so alumni can operate organizations on a high level compatible with Ivy League institutions. Christian leaders shold be able to understand the highest levels of group dynamics, management, leadership, finance, real estate, marketing, law, and political reality. Graduate school should produce practitioners as opposed to theologians. Pilots need to learn how to fly as opposed to aeronautical science. A church is a complex peice of machinery that requires a specific skill set. Graduate school teachers should be capable practitioners.
Seminary: Seminary is designed to produce the theologians, apologeticists, educators, archeologists, and protectors of philosophical Christianity.