2) Give genuine love and care to the children
Once moms and dads know the environment is safe, they want to know you care about their kids.
It may sound obvious to say that loving the kids is important, but you can’t take that for granted when recruiting volunteers to serve in kid’s ministry.
Let me be candid, a little too often, and sometimes with a degree of desperation, churches are just looking for warm bodies to help out.
I understand the pressure to recruit volunteers, but you should not settle for “just anyone” with kids.
Pray for and select volunteers who genuinely love the kids! It’s easy to see the difference.
These are the volunteers that know the kids names, talk to the kids, sit on the floor if appropriate, pray for the kids, greet the parents, you get the idea.
3) Provide consistent and quality training.
After diligent recruiting, excellent training is needed.
In fact, recruiting and training are the two core skills for anyone who carries responsibility for your vibrant children’s ministry.
High quality, ongoing, and consistent training is a non-negotiable for your volunteer children’s ministry team.
Your training opportunities should be at convenient dates and times for the volunteers and don’t hesitate to do some of your training online through videos. You don’t have to highly produce it. Short clips with your iPhone work great.
Make your training events relevant, practical, enjoyable. Be ready to greet your team with some good coffee and snacks and be exceptionally well prepared.
Your volunteers deserve the best. Train them well and encourage them often.
Note: Always start with background checks in the recruiting / training process.
4) Teach Jesus as Savior.
Safety, love, and training are all preparation for the purpose of children’s ministry – teaching kids about the love of God.
The central purpose of ministry to children is leading them toward a personal relationship with Jesus, knowing how much He loves them, and what the Bible teaches. Timing matters, don’t push them, but make God’s love clear by your words and actions.
Few things are more exciting than seeing a child begin to understand and embrace God’s love.
It’s a rewarding challenge to teach profound theological truth in a way that a child can clearly and quickly understand.
For example, forgiveness. Kids know when they do something wrong or disobey mom or dad. They know what that feels like and how their parents respond with discipline and love.
Forgiveness is a profound truth that kids get when you teach it in a way that they can relate to and understand.
For a child to know that Jesus loves them, forgives them, and yet wants them to behave with kindness to others, etc., makes it all worthwhile.
From there, you can build a basic curriculum that covers the broader scope of the biblical teaching that kids need.
5) Make it a lot of fun!
Everyone loves to have fun, and kids need to have fun. It’s vital to see smiles on the faces of parents, kids, and volunteers.
Play and laughter is a natural part of being a child and needs to be included in a vibrant children’s ministry.
It’s not only OK to enjoy the experience, but it’s also key to your success.
If you have a safe environment, love for the kids, quality training, and teach about Jesus, then you are set to add all the fun you can.
Be creative and enjoy the time you have with the kids!
If you evaluate your children’s ministry on a scale of 1 – 7 for each of the five areas, how would you do?
Which element do you need to improve first?
No children’s ministry is perfect, but all can be improved a little at a time.
I highly encourage you to do your very best in children’s ministry, and you’ll be glad you did?
This article about a vibrant children’s ministry originally appeared here.
