Working With Kids To Help Teens

Our staff is growing, but our office space is not, so next week I’ll be sharing an office with a coworker.  I’m okay with this transition because I’ll be sharing with our Director of Children’s Ministry Lisa who is a good friend and someone I need to be working with regularly.  In fact the last few weeks we’ve been talking about how we want the student and children’s ministry to work together, so to start we shared our visions.  For the children’s ministry the vision is for kids to pray, live and grow in Christ.  For the student ministry our vision is to build up irresistible, consistent and authentic disciples of Jesus Christ.  And I’m comfortable in saying that we both like each other’s vision, but the question comes to mind, “How can we make this happen?”  Simple:
SHARING STRATEGY
This isn’t rocket science; however, we realized that if we were going to take small children and help them to live, pray and grow in Christ to eventually become irresistible, consistent and authentic disciple of Jesus Christ that we needed a strategy.  Now, I’m not saying that we never had a strategy, it’s just that we never identified one and worked to improve it.  So why do you need a strategy?

• It helps your team know what they need to do when they walk in the door.
• It prevents your programs, events and ministries from becoming competitive entities.
• It allows your age appropriate ministries to feed off of one another.
• It helps you bring the focus of your ministry back to what’s important.

There are many other reasons to work on strategy not just in your student ministry but with your children’s ministry, but you might ask what would be an example of strategy.  Something we’ve adapted from North Point in Alpharetta, GA is the idea that we want our small groups (children’s and students) to do three things, pray together, share life together and pray for one another.  We have curriculum and content we want the kids to learn; however, we’ve seen too many times leaders trying to cram it all in because they think getting through the curriculum is the strategy.  If we want kids and teens to fulfill the vision for our ministry then we need to build the habit of prayer, especially in fellowship.
We have a bit more strategy to work on, especially when it comes to our worship environments, deeper discipleship, etc; however, we’re working on it.
So what’s your strategy?