Here are some suggestions for how your place of worship can help parents connect, relieve family stress and build a wider sense of community for families:

• Create a church-sponsored family-support center providing childcare, family social activities, and parent counseling. If possible, offer co-operative childcare, which requires parent-involvement and encourages parent connections.
• Offer church-sponsored family retreats or trips. For example, Coast Hills sponsors an annual ski trip for 20-30 families.
• Provide baby-sitting so parents can attend services. Care can be extended into the morning, freeing parents for a quiet breakfast together. Some churches offer Parents' Morning Out programs one morning during the week.
• Support church-based and community-based programs for young fathers and single mothers.
• Offer marriage-maintenance classes to members of the congregation and to the community.
• Provide parenting programs to current parents and to young people - especially boys and young men - before they become parents.
• Create a family-to-family missions, or family clusters of six to ten families. Parents can adopt fellow parents as sisters and brothers; children can adopt each other as cousins. Some family clusters meet together for years, with older members coming back for a visit.
• Reach out to parents and children beyond your neighborhoods by teaming up with suburban or inner-city congregations to sponsor programs for abused and runaway children, the homeless, and other families in need.
• Start a children's inoculation center staffed by volunteer doctors and nurses from the congregation.
• Offer childcare and preschool programs of improved quality. Provide community leadership in creating public-private consortiums that open new child-care centers and create loan and investment funds for childcare.
• Partner with businesses and financial institutions to offer low-cost mortgages for families unable to obtain bank loans.
• Offer mentoring and tutoring programs - especially for at-risk children facing stiffened promotion standards. Also, create community help centers for parents and children who need help with the college application process.
• Sponsor teen centers and after-school programs.
• Support programs for abused and runaway children, the homeless, and other families in need.
• Enlist older members of the congregation to share their talents and services with young parents and children.
• Host "alternative gift fairs" that focus on the needs of children in the wider community.
• And add to this list with your own ideas.