Missional Communities with Youth, Kids and Families.

This week we begin a new series exploring developing missional communities with Youth, Kids and Families.  As I write I honestly don't feel like I have lots of tips and ideas for how to make this work.  In fact in our context this is one of the key questions that we are trying to crack.

What I do have is conviction backed up by story.  My conviction is this:  the best missional communities are the ones that start to function as family and family includes more than one generation.

A little bit of our story:

A few years ago we were sat with some now-very-good friends talking about our lives.  We were both couples about to start families and both recognised we needed some back up going into that new phase of life.  So we started meeting once a week and having dinner then doing the pub quiz.  Time went on,  babies came and so did new members, some who were also young married couples about to have kids others who were young adults.  We were never an exclusively family focussed community; we were just a family.

Community life began to change a little to accommodate the arrival of little people. We couldn't just meet on nights any more,  so we set up a weekend brunch.   Babysitting rotas and plans had to be co-ordinated and plans for worship or mission had to accommodate the potential risk of loud crying,  cold children or the need for feeding.  All of this I think humanized the community,  made it more real.

We had lots of picnics and barbecues,  we did a few dedications or baptisms,  we planned some family fun days and somehow the boundaries between the community life and just family life began to get very blurred.  Young adults came to take our young kids out for trips and give us a break.  Community members became lifelong friends and god-parents.   We took little faith-risks together, and involved our kids.  We went and served our community together,  with our kids.  And all this seems to have been attractive,  other people joined us and we grew.

Our kids knew they were part of that family,  their closest friends were from the community,  they got to experience being raised by a group and so the faith of the community started to become their faith too.

We've moved on to a different place now,  God called us there to work specifically with Children,  Youth and Young Adults.  We're trying to figure out how to connect them up with missional communities.  We don't really have a set of ten easy steps to do that yet,  just a desire to try it out and a personal experience that it can work,  can be a lot of fun,  can be beautiful.

Maybe there are some readers out there who have stories similar to this.  If so I'd love to hear your thoughts: How do you include kids and youth in your missional community?