by tommy bratton and jenny lee, Contributing Writers
Trail Marks
Students, parents, ministers share the journey of faith Like most churches, First Baptist Church of Asheville is working to address the declining young adult involvement in local congregations, the divide between parents and ministers regarding the spiritual nurture of young people, and the growing sense that one graduates from church in the same way one graduates from school.
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n a long drive home from a conference, we decided to get creative and constructive, and started brainstorming. We had looked at resources from various faith traditions, and our ideas evolved into what we now call Trail Marks. Trail Marks is a ministry model that invites parents, students and ministers into close collaboration in an effort to provide holistic spiritual formation for the entire faith journey. By working together to achieve shared goals, we believe we can create a partnership for lifelong discipleship of our children and youth. The core values of Trail Marks include intentionality, consistency, communication and partnership. We are accomplishing these goals by working in two areas. The first is to increase communication and partnership among families, ministers and adult volunteers. The second area of focus is the ongoing work of helping students to gather
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tangible markers along their faith journey. The best ministry ideas are almost always based in partnership. When we first hatched our idea for Trail Marks, our conversation was a steady back-and-forth of “What if we …” and “Don’t you think …” And we realized that we needed to replicate that flow of energy into our ministry with young families. We begin each year with individual conversations between parents/guardians and ministers. We ask families to complete a questionnaire that helps us guide the conversation. Then we talk about short- and long-term goals for their family, communication and learning styles, the spiritual self-care of parents, and best parenting practices. We have found these conversations provide us with the opportunity to minister to these parents through our presence as well as a way to learn surprising and deeply relevant information about students. In a recent
conversation, we had a set of parents tell us they worry that the privilege with which their daughters are growing up might prevent them from developing compassion and responsibility for others. We have learned about leadership potential, spiritual gifts, special needs and anxious moments within our students. These conversations have given us the opportunity to affirm our parents and to be affirmed in our ministries. Additionally, within our youth ministry we are finding it helpful to have similar conversations with our students about their goals and needs for the year. Following these key conversations, we are able to equip our teachers and leadership more fully with information about how to best minister to our children and youth. While maintaining confidentiality and privacy, we now have better information about how to train our teachers more effectively. We can be specific about the learning styles, relationship dynamics and abilities in the room. Leaders are also given the opportunity to share stories, ideas and best practices. In addition to sharing vision, ideas and energy with families, Trail Marks also contains a storytelling component. Each student in our
November 2013