Hopefully, you have seen or will soon see information about the Destination Meeting.  The Destination Meeting is actually a series of meetings beginning in June.  The purpose of the meetings is to develop the partnership between the church and the parents.  Step 1 in the process is to figure out where we, as a church, and you, as parents, want to develop in our students over the 6 years that they are in the Student Discipleship Ministry here at Fellowship Baptist Church.

Why is this important?  I shared several months ago now, that the majority of kids involved in church leave church after graduation.  We have developed great youth programs and children’s programs but we have failed to develop disciples of Jesus Christ.  I believe this is due to the current paradigm of Student Ministry in America.

My solution is to go back to the Biblical model of discipleship.  The model begins in the family then moves to the church.  The statistics and research tell us that if you remove the church or the family from a teenager’s spiritual life, it will die.  There are exceptions but for the majority, absence of one of these will mean short-term growth and discipleship rather than long-term growth and discipleship.  If you have been around me at all for the last four years you know that this is nothing new, this is what I’ve been talking about.

The difference now is how we go about it.  In the past, we, the church, have done our thing and you, the parent, have done yours.  In the best situations there have been two separate influences in your child’s spiritual life.  Our new goal is to partner with parents to work toward the same common goals.

That is what the destination meetings are about: determining where we are headed.  What do we want our teens to be able to know or do as a result of their six years in the Student Discipleship Ministry?  What experiences do you want them to have?  What do you want them to look like when they graduate?  These are the questions of Destination.  Our first meeting on June 6^th is specifically looking at the goals of the partnership between parent and church.