Lead Well

Maybe you’ve seen this. You have a fifth or sixth grader completely checked out. They may have been engaged a few years before, but it’s getting close to their time to move on, and they have senioritis all of sudden. You thought it was only for 12th graders, but now you see it in 12-year-olds. But what do you do? Do you encourage them to engage? Talk to their parents? Let them move on to youth? In my first ministry, this problem was rampant. I was the fourth kids pastor for those sixth graders, and they were over it. They didn’t care and a few of them did whatever the wanted causing major distractions. Putting a discipline plan in place helped a little, but it didn’t solve the problem. That’s when I decided to begin a kids leadership team. We still had Sunday School, so for the ones who came, I’d teach a little about the Bible, and then train them how to run sound, lead worship, and do puppets. They helped me make videos to remind kids of the rules and to go to the bathroom...

Photo by Liam Shaw on Unsplash I’m not a worship leader, but somehow, I’ve led worship in front of kids and now youth for over 14 years. I can carry a tune, but my rhythm needs help. I can move fairly well, but dancing was never my forte. When leading in kidmin most of that doesn’t matter, because they’re learning too. Don’t get me wrong, the musical part of your service needs to be done with excellence, but sometimes passion and energy outweighs talent. Over the years, I’ve worked hard to get better and am forever thankful to people like Yancy and Orange Kids Music for helping me. It seems to me there are two extremes in children’s worship. Either it’s silly, fun songs with little biblical truth or serious theological filled songs that kids barely understand. We have to find something in the middle that’s fun, exciting, and theologically sound. Ultimately, we need to create an environment that leads kids into the presence of God where he can do His work. With that in mind her...

Photo by Miguel A Amutio on Unsplash It’s so exciting when you first start in ministry. There’s so much passion and energy, and you just can’t wait to get in with the kids or youth and change lives. But if you’ve been in ministry for more than a year, you have to know that not everything moves as fast as you thought they would. There’s a famous quote that says, “We overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in a decade.” Ministry is a marathon, not a sprint.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash I recently saw a post on a Facebook group asking how many volunteers they need for 30-40 kids. It was really a question about ratios, which are very important, but having the correct room ratio may not be enough when thinking about the right number of volunteers. I’ve written about this before , but when I first started in kidmin, you could have called my Sunday morning service the David Reneau show. I led worship, told the Bible story, managed check-in and sound, pretty much every element of the service I had a hand in or was running it. I had a few volunteers relegated to crowd control, but not many more because, why? I was doing all of it, why did I need more people to sit with kids and keep behavior under control. I was running the ministry in what is called a maintenance structure. I needed to set up the ministry for growth. If I wanted to take the ministry to the next level, then I needed the structure to support it. One tool you’ll need b...

Photo by Adam Winger on Unsplash One of the biggest questions I see in the Kidmin world is what curriculum do we use? Which one is better? 252Kids ? High Voltage ? Bible Engagement ? Open Church ? Write your own? The curriculum options out there are endless, and you can spend a lot of time, energy, and money trying to find the right one for your ministry. I’ve tested a lot of curriculums over the years and even tried to write my own. It’s a daunting task. I searched for over a year once, and all I really wanted was someone to tell me which one to do. Fortunately, no one did, and I’m not going to tell you which one either. However, I will give you four questions to help narrow it down and pick a curriculum that works best for your church and ministry.