The Family Communication Project

 

The Family Communication Project comes from and moves toward a vision of holistic family based youth ministry. It would be inadequate to simply describe a project or activity without explaining the understanding and vision behind it. The following paper begins with an understanding of the need for holistic family based youth ministry, followed by the rationale for the project, and finally an explanation of the project itself. Included in this paper are some of the necessary materials for the project to be effective. The Family Communication Project is designed to be flexible and adaptable to every community situation. Therefore the explanation of the project below could simply be considered as a guideline or an explanation of what an actual project that a church would implement might look like.

 

A New Type of Youth Ministry

Adolescence is a difficult time in life because it is a point when the student is moving away from their parents and exploring their own identity. In it's most simple form it is a time of separation from their parents and individuation.¹  Because of the personality crisis that takes place in adolescents, an important search for truth and religion occurs as well. This is one of the many reasons why youth ministry is so important today. Many youth pastors want to see the students in their ministry learn to ‘own' their faith.

When considering family and youth ministry, it is fair to ask if modern youth ministry has the right goals in mind? One of the common characteristics of a youth ministry is the separation of the students from their parents and family in order to produce a fun and spiritually conducive environment. While this separation does have benefits of allowing the students to feel free to be honest around their peers without the prying eyes of parents, the negative effects must also be considered. This separation effectively removes the role of spiritual formation away from the family and into the hands of the ‘professionals. However, a new movement in youth ministry began over 20 years ago when people began to realize the biblical importance of the family in spiritual formation. In fact, the family and the church are the only two institutions that God created.²  Why then, is the church trying so hard to separate the two? Mike DeVries reminds us that, "it isn't the role of the church to be the main force behind student's spiritual formation... it is and always has been, the role of the parent".³

"Traditionally, youth ministers have seen parents as an interruption, as obstacles to success in ministry...but doing youth ministry without parents is like driving a car without an engine, eventually it will stop".⁴ The idea that parents are a ‘distraction' or ‘burden' to youth ministry has been rampant for years, and continues to plague many youth pastors and youth ministries today. This line of thinking inhibits the church from realizing the potential role of the parents and family in spiritual development and ministry. The reality is that students need adults around them, and that they actually do want them around especially their parents.⁵ Not only do they need adults in their lives, but students also "idolize a happy family".⁶ Students feel the dissonance between their desires and expectations and the reality of the world they live in. What then is the church doing about this problem? While our culture is trying to pull students and families apart, the church ought to be working hard to bring them back together.

Where does this equation of family and spiritual formation leave the youth pastor? Instead of considering himself or herself to be the mentor or spiritual developer of the students in their ministry youth pastors ought to think of themselves primarily as resources for families. Youth pastors have the unique calling to understand and serve students, which makes them an invaluable resource to parents. While parents love their children they often have a very difficult time understanding them, and this is especially true during adolescence.⁷  Understanding each other is incredibly important to the over health of the family. Studies have shown that the degree that a parent understands their student is directly correlated with the positive or negative choices made by that student.⁸ If parents and their children have strong and healthy means of communication, it is far more likely that those children will make healthy decisions. However parents and students often seem to live in two entirely separate worlds. Because of this the role of the youth pastor is still vital to a family-based youth ministry because they acts as the bridge between these two worlds. While the youth pastor can help to build bridges and fill in the gaps, there must be some preliminary work that is done, and this is where the Family Communication Project comes in.

The Importance of Communication

Understanding is the basis of any relationship and understanding is fostered by communication.⁹ This project works from the idea that, while family communication is very important, most families do not know how to communicate in a healthy and beneficial way with each other. Families must be able to communicate well to function well on all levels of life. They must be able to communicate with each other for daily life activities, emotional and social support, and also for spiritual growth. Perhaps the reason that parents don't think they have an impact on the spiritual growth of their student is that they rarely discuss it.

The Family Communication Project is formed around three important beliefs. First, is that all students at some point in time wanted to be able to communicate with their parents. They wanted to be able to talk honestly, to seek wisdom, and to trust them. The second belief is that if a student has given up trying to communicate with their parents, it is because they believe that they cannot effectively communicate with their parents. This fear of inability might cause them to loose the desire to try to communicate with their parent altogether. However, the fact remains that most students are bothered by the lack of communication and understanding that they have with their parents.¹⁰

The final foundational belief is that because students have lost meaningful contact with their parents, their parents believe that they do not want to communicate with them and that they do not care to communicate with them. This notion, while understandable, is very often incorrect. From these three beliefs, the Family Communication Project works to begin to rebuild healthy and effective communication within families.

Laying it Out

With the foundation of communication informed by understanding being properly understood, the Family Communication Project can begin. It must be deeply stressed to the families that this is an entirely voluntary process, and that families should not have their ‘arm twisted' to volunteer. Of course, this recognizes that some students or parents will not want to participate in the project while the rest of their family does (at the least they will show resistance or a lack of desire to participate). This project also recognizes that students do feel the need to communicate with their parents, but this will not stop them from refusing to participate. It is impossible to make a blanket statement about how these situations should be handled so the coordinator will have to use his or her discretion. Perhaps the signs of resistance are simply deeper evidence of the need for communication. The voluntary nature of the project should be strongly emphasized at the initial meetings.

The project will primarily consist of group meetings and planned activities on a regular basis. All of these meetings will focus on communication through understanding, and will include a lot of discussion based activities. The project will also include some activities and goals that the families should meet outside of the regularly scheduled meetings. These meetings should be held every two or three weeks, and should last for several months. The duration of this project comes from the recognition that good communication is a skill and that it takes time to learn this skill.

The Family Communication Project is probably unlike anything that your church has done before, and because of this it is important that you help families to understand what it is and what the goals are. This should be accomplished by appropriate ‘advertising' before the project begins, and an initial meeting with interested families. The advertising should help families to feel the need for communication and understanding in their families, and the initial meeting should discuss the need for communication and understanding as well as explaining the goals of the project. While this project is essentially leading towards family-based youth ministry, that will come later and does not need to be discussed in this initial meeting. This information meeting should only cover the information necessary and each family should include a calendar and as many copies of the family survey that they need.

The family survey is meant to be an activity filled out by all parents and students interested in the project. It is not a commitment to the project. The goal of the survey is to help the parents and the students to begin to think about and talk honestly about their family relationships and themselves. This is a very important concept in the project, and family members should understand that the surveys are entirely confident and they need to respect the confidence of the other members of their family. It is also important that the surveys are completed anonymously, and therefore should not have any names on them. This is to protect the confidence of the participants and the project coordinator. Only the project coordinator and their staff will look at these surveys in order to gain a better understanding of the family groups that they are working with.

After a family has decided that they would like to participate in the Family Communication Project, they will contact the project coordinator and will attend the first actual meeting of the project. This meeting will discuss more in depth the concept of family communication and the need for understanding. At this first meeting, each participant will sign an agreement to honesty and confidence. This agreement asks them to be honest with themselves, their own answers, and with other people as well as containing guidelines for being respectful to other participants. The second part of the contract is an agreement to respect the confidence of the other people. This means that they will not discuss issues brought up in the meetings unless all participating parties agree to discuss them outside of the meetings. One of the goals of this agreement to confidence is to give students the freedom to be honest about their family and parents without the fear of reprimand or consequence from their parents. Again, there will be guidelines to being respectful in their discussion and comments.

The expectations and importance of honesty and confidence will also be discussed in this meeting. The participants will then divide up into age groups to discuss their reactions to the presentation as well as their fears and/or expectations about the project. A neutral group leader should be present with each group. The role of this leader is simply to keep the conversation on track. They should not guide or correct the conversation, but must always allows the participants to be honest and move at their own pace. However, it is very important that the group leaders understand the particular and relevant developmental issues that their group is dealing with. For example, early adolescence are very often prone to numerous ‘rabbit trails' in their conversation and often struggle with interpreting and articulating their thoughts and feelings. It is important that the group leader is aware of these particular developmental hurdles and that they help the participants as is needed.

This first meeting will have a wide range of responses from each age group. It would also be best if each group were isolated from the other to give a stronger sense of confidence and safety in the group settings. These groups will also remain consistent throughout the majority of the project. Each consecutive meeting should follow this same pattern. The meetings should begin with a presentation/lecture from either the coordinator or a qualified person and should end with group discussions. It is strongly encouraged that the first several discussion are with the separated age groups. It is important to later mix the ages, but a child and their parent should never be in the same group. This will give all the participants the opportunity to discuss these relevant issues with a wide range of age groups, which is in essence a goal of the project. Below are some ideas to plan the lecture and discussions around.

• Do you hear what I hear?

Have volunteers write out actual scenarios of conflict between students and parents (omitting real names) and distribute them to all of the groups. However, the outcome of the actual scenario should not be included. Each group discusses the important ‘facts' of the scenario and what the outcome should be and why. At the end of the meeting all of the groups will come together, the scenario will be read and each group will briefly discuss what they felt was important and why, as well as their proposed outcome and why. The coordinator will then help them to process as a group what the other groups said and how that reveals their values. This activity will help each age group to begin to understand what is important to the other age groups, and why.

• A mile in my shoes

The lecture would talk about the ways that we understand discipline. Each group would receive a ‘crime' and would decide on a ‘punishment', however they must decide on it from the point of view of the opposite age group (i.e. parents must think like students, and vice versa). The groups will then discuss their decisions with the other groups. This coordinator will then help them to understand how their proposed ‘punishment' reveals how they think the other age group thinks. This activity helps the groups to understand how they perceive the thought processes of the other age group.

• Fishbowl

This style of conversation should not be implemented until later in the project. A circle of students is formed on the inside and a circle of parents is formed around them. The students are given a discussion to talk about while the parents are only allowed to listen. The same thing is done the next week, or during that session, but with the parents on the inside and the students on the outside. It is very important that parents are not in the same fishbowl as their students. This activity gives the age groups to actually listen to the other group, and for the speaking group to be honest with the listening group with out the fear of being interrupted or corrected by them.

• How to get from New York to Paris

Each family is broken down into groups of two and are given driving directions from one place to another. They must then work as a team to tell the other half of their family where they are going and how to get there, but they can't use words of sounds. After the first group is successful, then the second group will receive another set of driving directions and they must do the same thing. It is a long game of charades that will teach the families patience and cooperation.

• Green eggs and Ham

Each family will break into students and parents and they will receive a list of categories of favorites and least favorites. However, these should be obscure and random categories such as ‘favorite type of grass', ‘favorite planet', ‘least favorite shoe', ‘least favorite Disney Princess', etc. The groups must then work together to come up with an answer for each category for the other people in their family (i.e. students work together against their parents). They will be given a time limit, and when the limit is up they go over one answer at a time to see how many are correct. The purpose isn't to show who knows who the least, because that would probably cause strife, but to help them to think critically about the tastes and desires of the other people in their family.

• You did what!?

Have each age group discuss the story of Jesus ‘ditching' his family as a boy, and discuss what they would have done in that situation as both Jesus and his parents. Have them discuss what was going through the mind of Jesus as he left his parents to go to the Temple. Each group should also discuss what they would do if they had the opportunity to ‘ditch' their family, and why. This activity takes a harmless look at the obvious friction between parents and students in the life of Jesus.

The entire goal of this project is to help families begin to understand each other and to reopen the lines of communication with in the family. Every project meeting should be geared towards meeting that goal, and must recognize that each family is unique and will grow in different ways and in different times. Each activity should be a creative way that students and parents can learn to be honest with each other and to understand the other members of their families. Over time these activities should begin to help the families learn to communicate better outside of the project meetings by equipping them with ‘tools' for healthy and effective communication. The project should cause as little friction as possible, but it is also important to remember that friction and healthy disagreement is an important part of communication. In fact, it is very likely that the attempt to suppress friction and disagreements is one of the primary contributing factors to students feeling unable to communicate with their parents.

One of the special activities that a meeting should be set aside to do is a ‘letter from the other side'. This would be a letter that each student would write to his or her parents and each parent would write to their students. There would be one letter written to each parent, and one letter written to each student. This letter is meant as a synthesis of what has been discussed within the age groups, the fishbowls, and the family groups, and giving them an opportunity to express their own thoughts to the people who really need to hear what they have to say. Because of the nature of this activity, the letter(s) should be written in one meeting time and would take the majority of the time. Also, everyone should be told about it several weeks before so that they are able to process what they are thinking and have an easier time writing the letter. Some students and parents might be too uncomfortable writing a letter to their family members. If this is the case, it might be a good idea to write a practice letter several meetings before. This ‘practice letter' would not be read by anyone other than the write, and would allow them the time to become comfortable with sharing their thoughts and feelings with their family.

Outside of the regular project meetings, it is important to encourage the families to participate in activities together. These activities could be anything from spending intentional time together doing an activity that they all enjoy at least once a week or doing a bible study as a family before they go to bed or before school in the morning. It is encouraged that these activities should not begin until the third of fourth meeting so that the students and parents will have already had time to process the skills of good communication and understanding. As an ending activity to this project, it is suggested that the participating families attend a Family Retreat or Family Mission Trip in order to step into a different setting with a spiritual emphasis.

Facing Reality

While I whole-heartedly believe in the potential of this project, there are many limitations that must be recognized in it. All churches are different and all families are different. The sad reality is that while all families need to communicate better and all churches need their families to be stronger, some churches will not support this project because of what it suggests about the church and the amount of time that it may potentially require. Also, many families will not or cannot participate because of the time that it requires, or even the honesty and vulnerability that it demands. Even families who want to participate may not be able to because of previous obligations or family arrangements; it might be too difficult to find a baby sitter for the small children who can't participate in the project; unchangeable work schedules may interfere; a family crisis might arise; the family may be moving soon and do not want to commit to the project; or the students schedule is simply too full of other activities. It is simply a reality that many families either cannot or will not participate in the project.

As mentioned above, the specific developmental hurdles that the participants are facing must also be considered. The difficulty that early adolescents have with interpreting and articulating their feelings has been mentioned above. Another serious developmental hurdle that must be recognized and considered is the lack of discernment and empathy in many adolescents. Without portraying adolescents as cruel and unthinking it must be recognized that the development of a third-person perspective, which enables them to consider scenarios from a different perspective, has simply not begun. While many of the activities recommended above require the participants to consider things from a third-person perspective, it is important that the project coordinator and leaders are patient with the students. These activities will be difficult for them, but can also play a crucial role in developing this third-person perspective that is at the heart of discernment.

It must also be recognized that the concept of ‘family' has changed over time and has a very flexible definition. Should a family only be considered a mother, father and children or could it be a child living with their second uncle? This project recognizes a family as a group of people who live together and share a bond. This allows plenty of space for single parents and mixed families. It is very important that these families and parents feel that they have an equal say in the conversations that take place. This should be encouraged in the very first introductory meeting, and should be maintained by the vocabulary of the coordinator, the conversations, and the presenters/lecturers. In his article "Parent Ministry Outside the Lines: Single Parents and Blended Families", Marv Penner discusses the importance of appropriate ministry to single parents and blended families. It is a great resource of ideas and should be consulted as a reference when working specifically with single parents and mixed families among ‘traditional' families.

Another serious problem that the project may deal with is families or participants that break the confidence of the group. Because of the sensitive nature of the group there is no way to decide ahead of time how a situation like this should be handled, but the coordinator should use extreme caution and do their absolute best not to set up more communication barriers in the family in trying to resolve a conflict. It is important that the commitment to confidence is in place to foster safety and honesty, and that breaking this commitment will simply be working against the goals of the project. If a participant is continually breaking the commitment to confidence and is having a negative effect on the overall success of the group, it might be necessary to ask them to step out of the project and to reconsider participating in the next project.

The Family Communication Project is simply a tool to help families reconnect through healthy and effective communication and understanding. It will certainly be a difficult and long process. One author equated family ministry to Chinese bamboo; when you plant it you wouldn't see any thing but a little stem for four to five years because a massive root system is developing below the ground. However, in the forth or fifth year, the bamboo will grow over 80 feet in one year. Any ministry requires longevity, and this project is no different.

 

Citations

¹ Killinger, 211
² Justice, 15
³ Devries Worshipping, 22
⁴ Ibid., 85
⁵ Clark, 110
⁶ Strommen, 52
⁷ Killinger, 214
⁸ Strommen, 113
⁹ Justice, 24
¹⁰ Strommen, 47

 

Works Cited

Clark, Chap. Hurt: Inside the World of Today's Teenagers. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005.

Devries, Mark. Family Based Youth Ministry: Reaching the Been-There, Done-That Generation. Downers Grove: InterVarsity P, 1994.

Devries, Mike. "Worshipping At the Altar of Me: the Role of Parents in Kids' Spiritual Formation." YouthWorker Journal Mar. 2003: 20-23. 

Justice, Mike. It Takes a Family to Raise a Youth Ministry: Developing an Effective Strategy for Serving Families. Kansas City: Beacon Hill P, 1998. 

Killinger, John. The Loneliness of Children. New York: The Vanguard P, 1980. 

Penner, Marv. "Parent Ministry Outside the Lines: Single Parents and Blended Families." YouthWorker Journal Mar. 2003: 34-39. 

Strommen, Merton P. Five Cries of Youth. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Harper & Row, 1988.