5 Things I Hate about Children’s Ministry

#1 The Irrelevant Children’s Minister

#2 The “One-Man Show” Children’s Minister

#3 The Children’s Minister that Ignores Early Childhood

#4 The “Jump on my Sinking Ship” Children’s Minister

#5. The Ungrateful Children’s Minister

I’ve saved my most Hate for the final one in this series.  I have no time in my life to listen to another ungrateful Children’s Pastor.  In a way, this quality is mixed into to the four previous roles on my hate list.  The Irrelevant Children’s Minister is ungrateful for the time others have spent to help him be more relevant, the One-Man Show Children’s Minster is unknowingly ungrateful for the talented people that surround him, the Early Childhood Ignoring Children’s Pastor is ungrateful for the opportunity to influence kids under six, and the Sinking Ship Syndrome is really just a symptom of a heart of ungratefulness.

As Children’s Pastors we should live a life of gratefulness towards three groups of people.

#1. Our Pastors:  You can call them your boss if it makes you more comfortable, but for me they’re both my boss and my pastor.  I’m grateful that I have been given the opportunity by my superiors to serve the families in my church.  I’m grateful that they keep so many things from me, and allow me to work within one area of the church.  I’m grateful for a paycheck that allows me to take care of my family, and I’m thankful for their obedience to God’s calling in their life.  I know that it is difficult at times to work our own passions into the passions of our leaders, but it’s worth it and it’s more than honorable to live our lives to fulfill our pastor’s vision for the city you live in.

#2. Our Parents:  Are you kidding me?  I’ve met so many Children’s Pastors that forget this simple truth.  Parent’s are under no obligation to bring their children to you. You would be well served to NEVER forget this fact.  It is a supreme privilege to spend time with other people’s kids, and the moment you forget it then you’re on the road to ungratefulness.  Have you taken time recently to thank your parents?  You’ll be amazed at how much more willing parents will be to grow in their roles as spiritual leaders in the home when you approach them with an attitude of gratefulness.  Test me, and see if you can change the attitude of your parents by expressing some thankfulness every once in a while.

#3 Our Volunteers:  I have the best volunteers that can be found anywhere in the world.  If you don’t believe me than you must have some great volunteers yourself!  Take the time to tell those that serve alongside you how thankful you are for them.  Don’t only notice their impact when they’re gone; notice it when they’re standing right next to you.  I personally take time each week to write thank-you notes to 3 people.  It’s not much, but it helps me keep a grateful attitude for those that serve with me; and provides some much needed encouragement to a great group of servants at my church.

Take ungratefulness seriously, and fight against the attitude of forgetting what others mean for what you do.  Be thankful, and be thankful on purpose!

5 Things I Hate about Children’s Ministry

#1 The Irrelevant Children’s Minister

#2 The “One-Man Show” Children’s Minister

#3 The Children’s Minister that Ignores Early Childhood

#4 The “Jump on my Sinking Ship” Children’s Minister

You know this guy, right?  He’s the Children’s Pastor that is always telling everyone how terrible everything is.  He’s lamenting the lack of volunteers, the lack of parental involvement, the lack of support from senior church leadership, the small classrooms, and the overall apathy towards the next generation.  Then they’ll ask you to get involved and volunteer!  They’re telling everyone that their ship is sinking and going down like a boulder, but asking you to jump on board!  It’s a wonder that anyone ever signs up to help out.

I’m not a big fan of stage announcements for Children’s Ministry volunteers/workers/leaders (or whatever you call them at your church.)  Stage announcements just don’t work, and even if you do drag a few guilty parties into your ministry with a “Sinking Ship” announcement they will never work out long-term.  I do believe in the power of the ask, just not from a sinking ship mentality.  If you’re this CP, then let’s do some self evaluation.  If you can answer YES to any of these questions then we might have a problem:

• Do you lament the lack of volunteers with anyone besides your spouse?
• Do you voice worries to current volunteers about why more people don’t volunteer?
• Have you ever stood in front of a group of people and said something to this effect?

“Somebody needs to step up and serve the kids in this church, because there just isn’t enough help currently!”

• Do people avoid you when you walk by them in the hallway?

If you answered yes to any of these questions then it’s time for us to talk.  Go ahead and sit down for this one, because you need help.  I’ve been where you are.  In a previous life at a previous church I once let it leak that I had 150+ kids in Elementary services with myself and one other worker (AKA: The Doorman.)  Was I scared of being alone with that many kids?  YES!  Was it necessary to scare everyone else?  NO!  Over time I learned to manage the Children’s Ministry at my church like we had every position fully staffed.  I wrote job descriptions for positions I had never had people for, and started letting people join our team.  Yes, I used the phrase “letting people join.”  (BTW -If you’ve never read “Volunteers that Stick” by Jim Wideman then you should!)

Get off that sinking ship, and start casting up some sails for everyone to see.  Make your burdened ship appear lighter than it actually is, and watch people catch your vision.  There are times for your senior leadership to make appeals towards service to your congregation, but be careful not to identify yourself as the sinking ship!

5 Things I Hate about Children’s Ministry

#1 The Irrelevant Children’s Minister

#2 The “One-Man Show” Children’s Minister

#3 The Children’s Minister that Ignores Early Childhood

My official title at Trinity Church is as the “Pastor of Children’s Ministry.”  If you ask people at my church what I do, they’d say that I “work with the kids.”  If you asked specifically which age I work with, I bet 9 out of 10 people would say that I work with Elementary age kids.  I do indeed work with Elementary kids, however Elementary age kids only make up half of the kids I work with each weekend.  Is this true at your church?

#3 on my Hate List today is the Children’s Pastor that ignores all the Nursery, Preschoolers, and Kindergartners at their church.  By ignore I mean that they don’t program specifically with preschoolers in mind, they don’t spend budget monies on preschoolers, and they leave preschoolers out of all special events.  These CP’s spend 99% of their time spiritually developing grade school students, and then hire a part-time childcare worker to prepare the expanded nursery areas.  I’ve seen churches call everything under 1st grade, “Nursery.”  They then buy ample supplies of goldfish crackers, cans of Lysol, and wet wipes and call it a ministry of the church.

“So let that be a lesson to one and to all; a person is a person, no matter how small.”      -Horton Hears a Who

Kids are kids, whether they’re 6 months old or 10 years old.  We should be striving to make all areas of ministry to kids as excellent as humanely possible.  We have scientific proof that kids are absorbing their environments from the very first days of life, and I think as a church we should always work to direct kids towards Christ…no matter what age they are.

Where do we start?  It starts with nursery workers that pray and teach children to make God the center of their lives.  Did you catch that?  Nursery workers that see their jobs as leaders, and not childcare providers.  It will take time, and for me it’s a continual changing situation, but it will prove to be worth it in the end.   As the kids grow, we expand what is taught to them.  Building on each lesson, week after week, and month after month of physical and spiritual development.

In fact, if you want children in Elementary school to seek the things of God, then reach them from the earliest age. There is no excuse in our world now, as we live in a day and time that has some fantastic material for this age group.  I encourage you to check out Elevate Jr., First Look, and the plethora of other great material out there by publishing companies in Christendom.  The leaders in churches around the world are awakening to the trend of pointing kids to Christ from the earliest of ages, and it’s time you jumped on the band wagon.

Spend the time necessary to see if your nursery and early childhood areas are really reaching kid with the Gospel of Jesus.  Don’t be tricked into spending all your energy and time on the “Face” of your ministry, and instead work to reach all the kids in your church.  Always be on guard against the Babysitting mindset of Early Childhood ministry.  It’s not just childcare, it’s foundational care.  Starting laying the groundwork for kids to find Christ as clearly as possible.

5 Things I Hate about Children’s Ministry

#1 The Irrelevant Children’s Minister

#2 The “One-Man Show” Children’s Minister

One of the faults of many churches is looking for that one super dynamic Children’s Pastor.  They are looking for the person that is talented enough to keep the attention of 100+ kids for an hour or more, and do it all by himself!  What a skill!  I am one of those people gifted with the skill of keeping a child’s attention for long periods of time, and can plan and program an hour long service with the best of them.  (I’ve even done those 3 hour services at times in my life!)

The problem with this is that it alienates others from leadership, and sets up a ministry to fail when the “One Man” leaves for another opportunity.  And trust me, I see it all the time in small churches and large churches.  The “One Man Show” type of ministry is a foolproof way to fail.  I suggest that if you’re looking for a way to build your Children’s Ministry that you begin to spread the one man show into as many men and women as possible.  Why not have a 5 man show, or a 10 man show, or a 20 man show?

The temptation if you’re the One Man is to keep it that way as a form of job security.  If this is you, then you should be ashamed of yourself!  If you’re always the man in front and on the stage performing, you can begin to take on a Diva-like quality to your leadership.  If you’re always hogging the spotlight, you will begin to feel like the most important person in your ministry.  And the moment you think you’re the most important thing you have going in your ministry is the moment you have officially lost any leadership influence in your church.  You will resist the opportunities to spread the attention, and eventually you’ll be leading a weak group of “yes-men” that just pave the way for your grand stage entrance.

I can remember a few months ago I had a special person (aka: “Influential in my church”) come observe our Children’s Ministry experience for Elementary students.  It was not setup this way, but on this certain weekend I had absolutely ZERO involvement on the stage for that morning.  I watched with pride as my wonderful team of volunteers led 100% of the elements for all three services on a Sunday morning.  And do you know what our special guest had to say when they left?   They marveled at the team we had in place that worked so wonderfully from the stage.

With the exception of a few weekends, I have now turned over most all stage elements to new people.  Some of them are in training mode and get better every week, and some are more talented than I’ve ever been in my life.  I’ve found people funnier than me, people that sing better than me, and of course the person WAY more cool than I am in front of kids.  Believe it or not, it’s possible to find these people in your church too!  If you think they’re not there, then you’re just not looking.  Look harder, they’re there somewhere…

Don’t be that person running the “One Man Show.”  Instead, be a leader of talented people all working together to change the Kingdom of God one child at a time!

5 Things I Hate about Children’s Ministry

#1 The Irrelevant Children’s Minister

When I started doing Children’s Ministry I had a 18 month old son, and my wife was expecting our 2nd son.  I remember seeing environments designed for kids, that my own 18 month old wouldn’t have played in.  I can remember thinking that someone was missing the mark. I thought, when did nurseries become so irrelevant to 18 month olds?  Did they not know what was popular?  Did they have no idea of recent educational trends for 18 month olds?  I was a parent that had a keen understanding of this age group, yet the churches we would visit weren’t meeting the needs for my own kids.   The danger is that everyone cared terribly for my kids, they had just become irrelevant over time.  Slowly, slowly, slowly over the years they had lost a grasp of what was reaching kids “in-the-moment.”

In Elementary environments I see it all the time.  It’s the Children’s Pastor that force feeds what he thinks is funny to kids that don’t laugh at his jokes.  It’s the CP that plans for a circa 1983 Children’s service to kids that live in 2009.  It’s the CP that refuses to check his email, respond to a text message, or put pictures of kids on the Internet.  It’s the CP that thinks puppets talking to the ceiling behind a lime green bed sheet held up between two wooden chairs is “cutting edge.”  You might think, that doesn’t exist…but it does.  I meet Children’s Pastors all the time that never read books, and refuse to accept that kids multimedia needs are changing.

But you know what happens to Children’s Ministries like this?  They eventually stop bringing in new kids.  And a church with now new kids, has no new families.  And a church with no new families, is dead.  And Children’s Pastors at dead churches are officially irrelevant.  Don’t be that person!

So if you’re that guy (or girl) struggling with irrelevance, what should you do?  For starters get yourself back in the game.  Talk to kids with an ear to listen.  Find out what they watch, what they listen to, what they do, and what they like.  If you have kids at home, then you have a built-in research assistant.  If you don’t then you’ll have to get more creative.  Subscribe to K Magazine, read Kenny’s Blog, pick up any book by Jim Wideman and learn, learn, learn, learn.  Never stop learning.  When you’ve sponged up all that you can about how to reach kids, parents, and families together; then you’re well on your way to avoiding irrelevance.