Here are five effective ways to help parents lead their kids to God.
There are very few ways to serve others in this world that are more fun and impactful than working with children in your local church. Whether you’re a “professional” receiving a paycheck for your leadership in the children’s ministry, or a volunteer that is paid in smiles, goldfish crackers and high fives, working with kids to help them develop spiritually is simply fantastic. However, the amazing world of kid’s ministry has changed over the years and many churches realize hitting the bull’s-eye of ministry effectiveness needs to be reconsidered.
For years, effective kids ministry was all about what happened inside your church during Sunday School, kid’s church and midweek programming. If on-campus events were organized, fun and going well, folks felt successful. Now, many more churches are realizing an important truth: It’s not enough to just do well with the time we have them at church. Think about it: If kids came to everything your ministry does in a given week, you may have at most three hours per week (or less with today’s attendance patterns) to engage them in discipleship activities. This amount of time is simply not enough to adequately teach boys and girls how to love God, to hear and recognize His voice, and to learn to obey what He says. Even if your leaders knock the ball out of the park in their teaching environments every week, the culture kids live in today overwhelms them with many other messages and entertainment options to “wash away” the efforts you and your leaders have made.
The shift churches are making is to be ever more intentional about partnering with parents. To partner with parents you do have to ensure the ministry programs you are providing in your church are faithfully teaching God’s Word, but you also need to have intentional plans to position parents as the spiritual leaders of their kids. In addition to teaching kids the Gospel and how they can respond to it, it’s vital for dads and moms to see themselves as a pastor to their own children.
If you are at all like me, sometimes we know we need to do something new, or make adjustments to something we are already doing to bring new life and energy to an area of the children’s ministry.
Here are five ways to help parents lead their kids to God I hope will be helpful to you.
1. Pray—This one may seem like a given, or even a cheap way to be able to list five ways instead of only four, but it’s not. Children’s ministry leaders can get so busy doing ministry and working hard, we can sometimes forget to pray. Now, I’m not talking of the prayer of desperation children’s ministers pray at times. “Lord, pleasssssse send me more workers. Today. If not sooner.” Ever prayed that one? The prayers I’m referring to are short times set aside to seek God’s leadership about this specific topic of helping parents lead their kids. Pray for ideas, but also pray for divine appointments where God orchestrates opportunities to speak with parents about their kids’ spiritual growth.
