Having just completed a holiday club in the Easter holidays, and in a season when many are running, or preparing to run holiday clubs, I’d like to share some thoughts which I’ve pondered over the last few years on what, in my experience, I’ve found holiday clubs might and might not achieve and consider what an alternative effective outreach event could look like.
Holiday clubs I have been involved with have tended to mainly attract churched families, with up to a third having no church affiliation. These clubs have been great times for churched children to have three to five days of learning about God which can solidify their understanding or help them piece together God’s big story perhaps for the first time.
At times, these holiday clubs have also raised the profile of the church as a place which welcomes children, potentially attracting families who already have some background or interest in the Christian faith but hadn’t yet taken the step of attending church.
Some consider that the appeal of inexpensive childcare is an effective way to reach families with no or little interest in faith, but I’m not convinced. So in August 2014, while I was working at Christchurch Cockfosters, I led an experiment to see if we could develop a new form of outreach. Here are some reasons why started to think differently:
1. It is difficult to measure the long-term impact holiday clubs have on the lives of children, but we realised that even when the children showed great interest, without parents being supportive, it was less likely they would have opportunity to continue exploring faith. It is difficult to try and build relationships with parents and speak about faith with them in the short amount of contact time available during pick up and drop off, especially as the parents and team are focused on a particular task. Inviting children to church needs to be part of a bigger conversation with parents about why faith is the best thing we can offer children, since our community no longer believes that attending church is a worthwhile thing for children to do as it did a few decades back. From many of the families who came to holiday clubs, this is what we heard: ‘Thank you so much for taking care of our kids, they loved it. We’ll see you again next year.’
2. Everybody would like a bigger team for these events, but what if we could shift the team’s energies away from managing children or the programme towards building relationships and talking to people about faith.
3. While a holiday club meets the need of childcare during the holidays, how could we encourage families to spend more time together?
4. There now seems to be many options of clubs for primary school-aged children during the summer, but those with pre-school children find there is little on offer for them. Families attending holiday clubs were requesting things for their younger children and on other weeks of the holiday.
So, if starting with a blank page, an effective outreach to unchurched families should:
- have opportunities for repeated, meaningful contact with parents and their children
- communicate to parents and children why the Christian faith is valuable and attractive
- have enough team and church members available to talk to guests
- clearly promote regular church activities
- be designed for families and children of all ages.
This is what we came up with: We decided to transform our church hall, which often remains empty during the summer holidays, into Ancient Egypt throughout all of August, so that families could visit and hear about the Christian faith through the story of Moses. We opened on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10am to 2pm, where there was craft, play equipment, table football and a bouncy castle for people to enjoy throughout the session. We also scheduled two activities each day to suit pre-schoolers or primary school aged children, which we would use to tell the story of Moses and talk about faith.
We were really encouraged by this experience. Having it available throughout the summer holidays meant more families were able to attend, we had repeated contact with some new families. It gathered momentum as we progressed through August and the number of visitors were spread out, which allowed deeper relationships to be built. As an additional bonus, it provided a way of for church families to keep in touch through the long break. For a closer look at what we did visit christchurchcockfosters.co.uk.
I still think holiday clubs have a role to play, but they cannot be our sole means of outreach to the community, otherwise I fear we will missing out on reaching those who are completely unchurched – parents who have never heard the message of the Bible or attended church. Though there are many different possibilities for what the outreach event could look like, I hope these principles for reaching unchurched families are helpful in shaping what we do going forward.
Ashley Nichols is Children’s Minister at St James’ Muswell Hill.
Image: The Giza Necropolis by Johanna Loock, used under Creative Commons licence.