Restarting a disciple-making children’s ministry

Help kids respond and grow in faith through your children’s ministry with these questions.

We’re meeting together again! It’s wonderful to be welcoming children and families back to church gatherings, seeing them enjoy being with friends and enthusiastically participate in our programs.

However, it does look different and many of us are still trying to work out how exactly we will be able to do ministry in this new COVID-impacted world.  

How do we manage space? What do we clean and how often? It’s an ongoing juggle of implementing new procedures and keeping up to date as requirements change, and then putting it all in a plan that is communicated to parents and leaders.

This stuff needs to be done and it is an important way that we love each other during this time. But even as we rightly put time into working out those details, let’s make sure we also put time into the part of our gatherings that is eternally important – making disciples.

I like using the phrase ‘making disciples’ because it includes the idea of both sharing the gospel with someone for the first time and bringing them to Christ, as well as ongoing growth in faith. This is helpful in children’s ministry because it can be hard to know exactly where kids are in their understanding and trust of the gospel.

One of the beautiful truths is that we begin in the gospel and go on in it. As Paul writes to the believers in Colossae,

“So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.” - Colossians 2:6-7

Clearly proclaiming the gospel message to children so they might respond and grow in faith is what children’s ministry is all about. As we plan for our ministries to resume, let’s keep this focus central. Here are a few questions to help you:

Are there opportunities for children to respond to the gospel message?

There are a few things that need to be in place for this to happen: the gospel message needs to be clearly shared and a response invited. This needs to happen fairly regularly, if not every week, as children’s experience of time is different from ours (remember how long it used to be between birthdays?).

Also, sometimes in our desire to avoid pressuring children, we fail to give any choice at all. Let’s not fall off either end of that continuum, never seeking to push children toward a desired response but also not going so far the other way that we never give them an opportunity.

This is not about finishing a lesson on Moses and the first Passover and then tacking on a Two Ways to Live presentation to the end. It’s about seeing gospel truths and ‘threads’ in every part of the Bible and drawing these out, to help children see that this is a story unlike any other and also one where they play a part.

We often talk about ‘every passage pointing to Jesus’ and that is right. The problem is that most of us don’t spend enough time thinking about how to teach this well and helping the children see those beautiful gospel threads for themselves. For example, the first Passover story is rich with imagery of Jesus’ sacrificial death for us that children are capable of discovering with thoughtful guidance.

Do your children hear that being a Christian is more than just knowing about Jesus and coming to church?

Another danger is that the gospel is assumed but never explained. We can talk about being followers of Jesus but do we clearly explain what that means? Just as we so easily fall back into thinking that we need to earn our salvation, we sometimes unintentionally communicate that it’s all about church attendance and knowing the right answers.

Part of addressing this danger is spending real time showing how the Bible changes how we think, speak, feel and act every day. Perhaps it’s not super obvious how the first Passover story changes the way we live today so we need to put some thought into how to apply it well.

This is one area where having leaders serving over longer periods with children can really pay off. Leaders can share their own faith stories as trust and familiarity grows. Leaders can model responding to the word of God through their stories of obedience, sin, repentance, growing understanding and so on.

Are there opportunities for children to exercise their growing faith?

Like a muscle, faith grows as it is used. Programs can sometimes unwittingly promote a consumer-like participation where leaders do all the work. But how much better is it when children are encouraged to exercise their faith by having a go at leading prayer, teaching each other, serving each other in little and big ways.

For example, it’s great when leaders share personal stories, as mentioned already. But let’s also invite the children to share their stories. It will probably take time for children to learn how to do this helpfully, but as leaders model this and provide opportunities for children to share, they may start to open up. It might be the answer to a question in a small group, a drawing or a few half-finished sentences while cartwheeling. We need to give children the opportunity to express and exercise their growing faith and pay attention when they do.

Now is a great time to be prayerfully looking at the list of children in your ministries. How are you going with seeking to make disciples of this lovable bunch?

It is ultimately God’s work but in his amazing grace and mercy, he can use us. C. S. Lewis once wrote,

‘Put first things first and second things are thrown in. Put second things first and you lose both first and second things.’

Let’s keep first things first in our children’s ministries.