Lots of stuff in my head

Legacy now has 8 Katrina families that we are helping with furniture and household essentials. 3 are almost complete, 1 is in progress and 4 are just getting started. This has been a great experience working to mobilize Legacy around all of this. The two biggest things I've seen are these:

1) The faith community in our city is getting a reputation for truly caring about people and doing whatever it takes to help.

2) Members of the body of Christ can do so much. I've just been a coordinator. The real work has been done by the church members who have each volunteered to be a "champion" for one of the Katrina families and those who have donated money and delivered lots of great donated furniture. People are capable of much when the need is pressing and great. I think that the challenge coming out of Katrina is how to inspire these immensely capable people to give this much and serve others this much when we are finished with hurricane recovery and are back to only having people's eternal relationship with God at stake.

Other thinking these days...

How does a children's ministry in a barbaric "mission outpost" look as opposed to a children's mininstry in an institutional/educational church or a "seeker" church? How does the church partner with parents to teach kids how to be risk-taking, radically obedient Christ-followers?

What does a church do when it's body of missional Christ-followers is strong but relatively small and it finds itself in an infrastructure of buildings and staff that is large? Do you vision-cast the heck out of downsizing and then move to a rental facility and be prepared to send staff back into the marketplace--not to go look for a bigger church to work in... but to continue on at the church--simply getting income somewhere else? Or do you count on growing the church and expanding people's faithfulness in giving? I know one thing to do is pray.

What should my own LifeGroup do to get back on track? Meeting on the weekend doesn't seem to be working because people are so often out of town. Moving back to Tuesday night would mean childcare problems. I'm wondering about having a LifeGroup made up of families. When you meet it's families - parents and kids all in the room together working on how each familiy can be barbaric... how they as a family can spend money in a Godly way... how they as a family and as individuals spend time with God... etc...etc... It would be very different, and I don't have my head around how the "curriculum" would look... but I'm intrigued. Then, you could have he guys of the group and the girls of the group meet separately at two different times of the week (or even every other week) for deeper adult discussion and accountability.

Anyone have any thoughts?