How to facilitate a father/son gathering in your church
We talked last time about getting the vision and heart right. Let’s talk about where to start, vital roles and other vital details. Remember, as you read, consider how these ideas might apply to the dads in your church. If you find these tips helpful, this is just a snippet of our Church Leader Survival Guide.
The four survival tips for helping church leaders engage dads are:
#1 Preparing for the journey: getting the vision and the heart right.
#2 Before you embark:where to start, what roles you’ll need and some other details you need to know before actually starting.
#3 Setting sail: everything from room setup, how to train other leaders and other vital details to get right.
#4 Keeping the journey going: once you start, be ready to know when you’ll break, when you’ll return and how you’ll keep the journey going.
Have an eye toward disciple-making.
While there are no firm rules on the makeup of the groups, we want to help you get dads into a small group for discipling.
Ideally, you will have the following building blocks:
- Group Facilitator – if you’ll host multiple tables in a room, you’ll want a Group Facilitator. This person helps the group discussion get moving, but he’s not a teacher or lecturer. He’s merely a facilitator to help the Table Leaders know what to do.
- Table Leader(s) – these dads will be at the tables and will serve to keep the discussion on track. They’ll take queues from the Group Facilitator. We suggest you have one Table Leader for every five fathers in the group (1:5 ratio). This will mean each Table Leader has a group of about 10 to12 fathers and sons.
- Fathers and Sons – these are the men and the boys being discipled who sit around these tables in larger group settings.
This should be an ideal setting for guys with various levels of time in the faith or at the fatherhood helm to mix with and learn from each other. Some guys will step in and lead quickly, and others just need to be encouraged to jump into the game.
Starting small.
If we hear one thing from dads over and over, it’s this: “I’m too busy.” Now, we often realize our busyness is of our own making. In that light, what the dad’s really saying is he has taken on too much and has trouble prioritizing.
To help him see this, we want to give him some “quick wins” with his sons. This is why the six-week format (or six sessions, delivered on some other timeframe) has worked so well for Manhood Journey. Men can usually commit to six weeks amidst a busy schedule and stick to it.
However, over time, we hope you can “string together” successive Bible studies and reengage dads and sons for years to come. Our framework and approach to engage dads will make that possible, but let’s start small and get dads a “W” up on the board.
The numbers game.
The base building block of the group is “the table.” While you’re free to set up your room however it makes sense for your group, for purposes of illustration, let’s assume you’re using round tables of 10 for these meetings.
At a table, you might have:
- 4 to 5 dads with their sons
- Odds are, one dad will bring 2 sons
- A designated Table Leader (one of the dads)
- Total of 10 fathers and sons
We recommend one Table Leader for every five dads you expect to have.
As you probably know, you hardly ever get 100 percent of your people to show up for any particular event, and Manhood Journey groups are no different. In fact, we normally find that if you invite 10 dads, you’ll net about five. Everything from the night of the week to family dynamics to busy schedules will converge to have you bat about .500 when inviting your dads, so plan accordingly.
Here’s how a typical church with 200 weekly attendees might play out:
- You might have about 70 dads in your church
- Only about 35 of them will have sons between the ages of 8 and 18
- About one-third to one-half of those will attend
- Therefore, you’ll have about 3 to 4 tables of fathers and sons
- You’ll need one Facilitator and 3 to 4 Table Leaders for your study
Manhood Journey groups have launched in churches of a couple hundred, and they’ve launched at large churches running over 10,000. It can work in any context. You may want to scale your number of Table Leaders down or up as needed.
Have additional questions? Visit our page for helping Church Leaders engage dads.
This post is the second in a series of 4 survival tips for helping church leaders engage dads. Read the first in this series here, “Get the vision and the heart right.”
 | Kent Evans is the Co-founder and Executive Director of Manhood Journey. He is married to April, his wife of 22 years and has five sons ranging from ages 4 to 20. He is the author of Wise Guys: Unlocking Hidden Wisdom from the Men Around You. Learn More » |
More on Church Leadership and Administration
- Eight essentials for guest-friendly church bulletins (by Thom Rainer)
- Eleven observations about church transfer growth (by Thom Rainer)
- A multicultural church avoids intracultural leadership (by Bob Whitesel)
- 5 church communication resolutions (by Mark MacDonald)
