You’ve most likely heard that children are the future of the church. Indeed, if there are no children, the church has no future. Many aging churches are finding themselves with only senior adults left, but they want their church to survive. A new, younger pastor might fix some things, but intentionally reaching the next generation is key to church revitalization. Youth and student ministry have a robust history in Southern Baptist and evangelical circles, and rightly so. But, if you reach the children, eventually you will also grow a thriving youth ministry, as those sweet kids grow into teenagers.
That is what happened with us. We took the long road, but we now have students in every grade.
First Baptist in Canadian, Texas, where I serve as pastor, has seen its fair share of troubles and changes, as is the case with most churches. The children’s ministry was still using programming that required many more volunteers than we had available at the time. We meant well, but we were just continuing what had always been done without being intentional. So, we tried something I would not necessarily recommend for every church: we stopped the kids programming for a year, except for Sunday School. The main positive thing that came out of this was a desire of the older members to see a children’s program again. We spent the year planning our relaunch, and were able to leverage that desire in order to recruit volunteers when we reintroduced the program.
There is no one-size-fits-all plan, either for church revitalization or children’s ministry, but here are a few things we’ve learned along our way in this journey.
Don’t Wait for a Children’s Minister
Pastors, if you are an averagesized church, you are the head of everything, including the children’s ministry. With this in mind, if you want a good children’s ministry, you must be willing to lead it. If you don’t know how, learn to! Pastoring isn’t just about Sunday morning preaching. Be willing to hop in the trenches and lead the kids, too. One of the roles of the pastor is to, “… equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12 ESV). You must be willing to raise up leaders to work with the children. Eventually, it might be something that you can entrust to someone else. But if God hasn’t provided a dedicated children’s minister, then right now might be the time that you must put in the work. I promise you, seeing kids come to Christ will be one of the biggest blessings you will ever have in ministry.
Have a Plan
Launching or re-launching a children’s ministry without a plan is like going to milk a cow without a bucket. You can be doing something, but did you really accomplish anything? Schools carefully structure children’s time for a reason. Empty time for kids is not a good thing, so you need to provide structure from the moment they arrive to when they are picked up. Have welcome games planned that coincide with the lesson. Make sure that the lesson is age-appropriate for the age group of children that you have. And if you can divide up your kids by grade groups, you can more specifically tailor your lessons for those specific groups.
Children’s ministry is not the place to “wing it.” Plan every second.
Rightsizing Your Program
For us, we needed a program that would work with the children versus volunteer ratio we had. So, we adopted a structure which transitioned from a lesson by a master teacher into a small group format. Having the main lesson taught by one person meant the other volunteers just needed to ask some follow-up questions during small group time, and this lower threshold of responsibility made it easier to recruit volunteers.
Our schedule was simple: free play outside in the church lawn, play a game (either inside or outside as a group), have a main lesson, small group time, a follow-up trivia game with buzzers, then closing. The opening games were relevant to the lesson of the night, and for our first year’s curriculum, we walked through the heroes of the Bible. This worked well for our small number of volunteers.
Rightsizing your ministry will be an ongoing task, especially as your ministry grows. Years later, as we have grown, we now have an amazing children’s minister who teaches 2nd-5th grade, while a volunteer teaches Pre-K-1st grade. They are completely split in their own age-appropriate programming once we begin. We also have a nursery for birth-3 years old, with their own programming and volunteers. Currently, we are once again rightsizing up as God keeps blessing us with more children. Growth is a wonderful problem to have, and an opportunity to reassess resources and staffing to keep up with the children God brings to your ministry.
Summer Is for Outreach
Every summer, parents are looking for a safe place for their kids to go and have fun. Your church can be that place! Children’s summer activities are a great opportunity to reach new families that your church might not have had contact with before. Here are some ideas: pizza and movie lunch, water days, trips to the community pool, trips to a trampoline park, even Vacation Bible School. These times connect you with parents, and they also give you the opportunity to get to know the kids and where they are spiritually. These families then become an easy contact point to invite on Sundays and Wednesdays, especially when you restart your midweek program in the fall.
Making the choice to focus on children’s ministry many years ago was one of the best decisions we ever made as a church. We have seen numerous young families join our church through it, but most importantly, we have seen numerous children come to faith in Jesus Christ.
