Top 10 List for Children's Ministry - Part 1

Last weekend, we had our biannual Children's Ministry Orientation. It's a time when all our CM leaders, paid and volunteer, gather for a dose of refreshing vision casting, fellowship, prayer and ministry specific training. It's always an awesome time together.

One aspect of the meeting is our ever growing list of important things to know and do as a member of our CM team. Last summer it was called, Wayne's Top 10 Things to Know, our current list is Top 27 Ingredients for a Delicious Children's Ministry. Casey, the assistant children's pastor, Brandon, our intern, and myself get a little stir crazy cooped up in our small office.

Anyways, I wanted to share our list with you here on Children's Ministry 101 in a few parts. Hopefully some of it will be helpful to you and your ministry.

Top 10 List for Children's Ministry - Part 1

1. Prayer. An essential, vital, can't make it without it, aspect of EVERY children's ministry. We can never pray enough, and we can never encourage our team's to pray too much.
2. Growth. Not numerical, but personal growth. We often say, "You can't give what you don't have." Spiritual growth is necessary as we pour spiritually into those around us.
3. Tell us stories. We love hearing stories of transformation taking place in our kids, so we encourage our leaders to tell us and send us an email of stories they hear.
   
4. Be informative. All of our CM leadership are mouthpieces of our church. And so they are encouraged to be as informed as possible about the children's ministry and our church in general. Our job as children's pastors is to give them the info in easy to understand bits.
5. Continuing Ed. We highly encourage our leaders to further their knowledge about CM and spiritual matters. We provide a weekly email with CM and church-wide info, provide relevant articles about CM, encourage our leaders to attend local CM conferences (we try to cover some portion of the cost), provide two orientations a year and are always on the lookout for relevant books for them to read.
6. Be flexible. No, we don't offer Bible yoga classes, but we do want our leaders to be flexible about their serving role; always looking for areas of need and helping out in the moment, willing to change at the last minute if the time requires it.
   
7. Feedback. We do want to hear from our leaders. They are the "hands and feet" of our ministry, seeing things that we sometimes miss. We have an open door policy. Not every suggestion we're able to act on, but everything brought to our attention will be heard and thought through.
8. Free advertising. Our leaders know they are free advertising for the CM so it's vital for them to be positive when talking about the CM. Smile, tell good stories, have the "back" of the CM.
   
9. Recruiters. Whatever word you use, recruiting, attracting, blah blah blah, our leaders, paid and volunteer, are the single greatest recruiting force we have at our hands. Planting the seed that they are needed to pray for more volunteers and talk to their sphere of influence about joining the team is a necessity. We tell our team to think in terms of replacing themselves this year with someone they've asked to join the team.
10. Membership. At our church, membership is mandatory if a person is leading other people. To us it shows that they are on board with the vision of the church

That's 10, I've got a bunch more for another post. Let me know what you think, I always look forward to your comments.

Wayne