Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

One of the hardest parts of serving in Children’s ministry is never getting to go to service. Some pastors require their kids’ leaders to attend the adult service, but those are rare. Other kidmin pastors have figured out how to attend somewhat regularly, but it's not the same as before they became a leader.

Part of the problem comes from the complexity of kidmin. It’s more than just one service. For comparison, the adult service may have at least 2 paid staff members or more working that one 75 minute service providing worship, announcements, a message, guest relations, lights, sound and more. A children’s ministry service has all of those things as well, usually with one paid staff, sometimes all volunteers.

Granted it’s on smaller scale, but it still takes a lot of people, planning, and resources. In addition, the kids’ pastor frequently has more to worry about than just one room. It is not unusual for them to manage elementary, preschool, and nursery, each with multiple rooms, more volunteers, tech, and different lessons.

It's a lot to keep up with and to take time off to go to service can be tough. It’s like asking the starting quarterback to sit out all or part of a game. It can be done, but it's not easy.

However, I believe that you can only serve out of your overflow. It’s important that you as a kids leader feed yourself so that you can give all you can to those you serve. But how do you do that? How do you attend service and still make sure everything that has to be managed is managed?

I'm not perfect, and when I stepped out of kidmin last year, I was still working on it. However, I was successful at the church before where I saw the following process work.

5 steps to Attending Service

1. Develop and maintain a personal devotional life

The truth is, getting to go to service is really hard and you most likely won’t be able to go every week. So, you need to make sure you feed yourself. You’re in leadership now, and you can’t sit in service and worship and pray and listen to a message. You’re going to have to figure out how to do that on your own.

If you’ve been in kidmin for any length of time, you’ve probably worked out your system, but here’s the one I’ve developed over my years in ministry.

1. Listen to at least one sermon a week

There are a couple of pastors I listen to every week on podcasts. Whether it’s in the car or on a run, the first thing I listen to on Monday morning is a sermon.

It doesn’t really matter who you listen to as long as they speak to your soul. I would strongly suggest that you listen to your own pastor’s sermon if it’s available. If you want to know their heart, they’re expressing it on Sunday, and you’re probably missing it.

2. Read the Bible daily and pray

One of the best ways to stay with God is to dive daily into his Word. Reading the Bible is a spiritual practice every believer should follow, but you especially. Sermon prep doesn’t count either. I strongly suggest you find a Bible reading plan and stick to it. You won’t see a difference immediately but over the years, you can look back and see the growth.

Similar to Bible reading is prayer. Paul said to pray continuously, but you should have regular time you spend in communication with God. It can be a part of your Bible reading time or another time. Whatever it is, you have to be intentional. Otherwise, you’ll look up and realize you haven’t really prayed in months.

3. Journal once a week

This is a relatively new practice for me because in general, I hate journaling. However, I’ve found taking time to write out my thoughts has been therapeutic and clarifying. I find myself babbling less as I pray-write as I’m drawn to focus on each handwritten word.

4. Take a sabbath

Before ministry, taking a sabbath was relatively easy. Sabbath was Sunday. You spent the morning in worship and serving and then you most likely rested the rest of the day as you prepared for the next week.

However in ministry, Sunday is a work day. That's hard for non-ministry people to wrap their heads around. I always get weird looks when I tell people I work weekends. But you do.

This is harder if you're a volunteer or bi-vocational, but you need to find a day throughout your week to rest, recharge, and worship. It's one of the 10 Commandments. We should follow it.

2. Split up your job

At my first church, kids’ service was basically the David Reneau show. I did everything including running sound from the stage. I didn’t trust anyone to take a segment of the service and I loved the spotlight even if on a good day there were only 30 kids between the ages of 6 and 12.

But then my aunt got sick with terminal cancer. After a long battle, the family was called in to say goodbye. I had to abruptly leave for a week including Sunday. Thankfully, I had great volunteers who picked up the slack, but I knew something had to change.

When I came back, I started to give away segments of the service. I still held onto the Bible story and sermon for years, but I gladly gave away worship, tech, games, and announcements.

Take some time and write out each of your Sunday morning responsibilities. Then put a blank next to each one. Right now, your name will go on each of those blanks, but eventually you’ll want to put other names in those blanks, so the responsibility doesn’t rest solely on you. You can read more about building your volunteer structure here.

3. Develop other leaders

No one is great at everything, including you. There are people in your church and probably in your ministry that can do that one segment better than you. And even if they can’t, that doesn’t mean they can’t get better. I like what Jim Wideman said to me once.

"Someone let you sorry all over a group of kids, you need to return the favor."

Now that you’ve split up the jobs, it’s time to develop other leaders and volunteers to take those jobs and own them. You don’t have to pick out the set list every week. You don’t have to make the presentation slides. You don’t have to run check-in, welcome guests, lead worship, prepare and teach small groups, teach the Bible story. Other people can do that.

There’s a lot I can say here, but you can follow this simple 5 step model for training other people to do what you do,

I do. You watch.
I do. You help.
You do. I help.
You do. I watch.
You do. Someone else watches.

Between each stage you’re talking about what went well and what didn’t. Also, depending on the complexity of the task, the time between each step will vary.

Your job as the leader is not to do the service. Your job is to train the lay leaders to do it. That’s what being a leader is.

4. Give it away

Once you’ve developed your leaders, it’s time to give it away. There’s a difference between delegating and dumping.

Dumping is taking a task and telling your volunteer to do it with little guidance or support. Then you walk away and trust it can be done.

That’s not delegation.

Delegation is training the person in the task you want to complete, providing feedback at each step and then making sure they have the resources necessary to complete the job you’ve given them.

Nevertheless, I’ve seen other leaders, myself included, make the opposite mistake of dumping and never actually give it away. They ask the volunteer to do the job and when it’s not done the way they want or in the time they think it should take, they take over and push the volunteer out of the way.

That’s a surefire way of running people off. Which leads us to my last point.

5. Trust your team

One of the hardest parts of going to service is trust. You have to trust that the team you’ve trained will maintain the same standards that happen when you’re there. You have to trust they can solve problems when they inevitably arise. You have to trust that everything is going to be ok.

It’s not easy. I’ve sat in service with my phone in my hand jerking every time I think there’s a vibration. I’ve left service to walk the halls and see how everything is going. I’ve texted other volunteers to see how the leader I left in charge is doing.

Part of trust is letting go and letting them lead. You trained them. You prayed with them and for them. Leave it in God’s hands so you can focus on the one we’re doing all this for in the first place.

Don’t get so busy doing the work of the ministry that you forget who you’re doing it for. Because one day you won’t be the kids’ pastor. You’ll just be you. God knew you and called you before you started. He still knows you when your calling is over. Make sure you know him even better when all this is over.

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