Bring it on Home

Bring it on Home

“Faith incubation every night in every home.”

– The New FINK

Mission

Statement

 

Some of you know the origins of Faith Inkubators.

In September of 1993, after a dozen years as a parish pastor and after writing the “Conformation (sic!) is Dead” articles, I took a leave from salary, pension and senses, threw my wife and babies in a borrowed Winnebago and drove off to visit a with few hundred churches to find out what we could invent to fix confirmation.

Seventy five conferences came and went that year. It ended with the Melheims personally $45K in the hole on credit cards, but with an idea that there may be a better way to do confirmation. We also had 270 churches willing to ditch their model and try something new with us. A nice little living laboratory!

I asked my faithful wife, “You want to go double or nothing?” She said “yes” and we spent another year off salary and senses visiting a hundred other churches, doing conferences in 55 cities to learn what we could learn. At the end of the second year, we were $90K in the hole with a double mortgage on the house, 18 credit cards maxed out, nothing put into the pension for the second year, and 540 churches ready to help us design and test a model.

I thought to myself, “Shall I go back into the parish? How long would it take me to make up $90K on a youth pastor’s salary? What the heck! I’ll go double or nothing again! My wife concurred, said more than a bushel of prayers, and off we went again.

Now I’m not a betting man, but we doubled again to 1000 churches without doubling the debt, hired a four staff on faith, arranged for a specialized ministry call, and went out again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

It took us 12 years to design the FINK systems. It took us 12 years of learning, listening, failing, trying, tweaking, designing and redesigning our approach to make the confirmation ministry what it is today. It took 12 years of work, sweat, fun, debt, and commitment to build this marvelous national network of change agents and systems thinkers who want to change the world one family at a time. And it appears it took us 12 years to teach the ELCA to finally change their confirmation paradigm and adopt our model.

12 years to change confirmation.

Now we’re going to spend the next 12 years teaching and learning how to bring it on home.

 

Every night in Every Home

We want to recreate Christian education from a one hour a week class, into an “every night in every home” process. That’s our new mission statement that our new CEO, Brad Lynch, helped us formulate.

We’re going to spend the next 12 years turning confirmation from an adolescent experience to a cradle-to-graduation program. (An 18 year confirmation ministry run by the parents? Ruuuuuunnnnn!)

We will attempt to teach you the best of what we’ve learned over the last decade plus. We will show you ways to change parents from the drop-off parentus absconditus entities, into the primary faith teachers, mentors, guides and shepherds in their own children’s lives with the church as reinforcement – not replacement – of the parents duties.

We will attempt to help you transform your Christian education system from an artificial program to a natural process within the family.

We will a attempt to create an education reform that makes your Christian education system happen 1/8 at church and 7/8 off site with a nightly faith dialogue between parents and children.

We are designing the pieces and the processes as we speak.

Some of us are working 15 hour days right now to get ready to show it to you.

Along with more effective tools, we will unveil the results of our 30 test churches doing Bible Song, our brain-based, arts-based FINKification of upper elementary Christian education.

If you are ready to join us in rethinking your entire faith education/incubation process and ready to stop looking for Sunday School teachers and start enlisting parents to DO and BE what they once promised God they would DO and BE in baptism, we’re ready to teach you what we know.

This is going to be one heck of a spring.

Ready for our own version of the March of the Penguins?

We’re starting very soon.

(And we’re going double or nothing!)

Rich

Comments

[Trogdor]

Via con Dios man.

Dude, God bless you for your faithfulness. This is going to be a big thing in the Kingdom (anyone that can get 1000 or so churches to agree to anything is doing well).