I can’t begin to tell you how incredibly excited I am. In fact, I’m so excited that I’m joining in on a little blog tour leading up to the opening day of registration. To find out more about that blog tour, you can check out this link:
Over the week, I’ll be posting a series of posts in a hope to convey how Orange, as a strategy and as a conference, has shaped and reshaped the way I serve and minister to families. I’ll be walking through the following topics this week:
Tuesday: There is No “I” in Orange: Why Orange shouldn’t be a solo experience
Wednesday: Out of Left Field: The thing I learned at Orange that I never saw coming
Thursday: Dreaming in Orange: Simple ways that we’ve become a more Orange church (and you can too!)
Friday: Orange Tour LIVE: Glenkirk is hosting the Orange Tour THIS Friday!
Get the Tools Needed for Effective Family Ministry
Hundreds of regional church leaders will gather in the Los Angeles area on Friday, September 23 for The Orange Tour, an exciting series of one-day events across the nation created to equip and inspire attendees. This fourth stop on the tour will be packed with practical ideas, move teams toward a unified strategy and provide easy-to-implement suggestions for partnering with parents. Speakers Reggie Joiner and Sue Miller will focus on the nine core insights to shaping the next generation’s worldview.
Designed to be an interactive gathering of church leaders from specific geographic regions, the Orange Tour’s relaxed environment provides each leader with the chance to network with other leaders in their area. The relationships formed here can become an invaluable tool to help build stronger ministries.
The Orange Tour is perfect for every member of a ministry team—preschool, children’s, student ministry and senior pastors. The speakers they’ll hear from, the training they’ll receive, and the community that develops provides an excellent environment for growth. This gathering is also a great opportunity to get ministry-specific questions answered from our Orange Leaders, Orange Coaches, and fellow ministry leaders who have the same or similar experiences.
Information shared through the tour stems from the Orange Strategy, a pioneering concept that believes parents, as partners with church leadership, create the most impacting center of influence for children and teenagers. “Thinking Orange” blends two vital, yet often unconnected worlds to reshape the current ministry model.
The Orange Tour Los Angeles stop will be held at Glenkirk Church in Glendora. Registration is $59, including lunch, if registered on or by September 9, after which the price increases to $69. The one-day training opportunity can either be considered a stand-alone event or as a precursor to The Orange Conference, the 4,000-plus national event, which will be held April 25-27, 2012, in Atlanta. For more information about The Orange Tour, please visit http://www.OrangeTour.org, email tour@rethinkgroup.org or call 678-845-7168.
—-
I can’t begin to express how thrilled I am that our team and our church is hosting the West Coast stop on the Orange Tour this Fall. I’d love to connect with those of you out here in California and the surrounding states if you’re able to make it to this event – drop me a line via facebook, twitter or in the comments section and I’ll make it a point to create time for us to talk shop and hang out while you’re here.
I’ve even added a link at the right of my blog for you to register – it’s that simple.
(Here’s a picture from our morning session on the first day of Middle School VBS Leader training)
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, keeping the Kingdom in mind (and not just your own castle) is essential to lasting, effective and sustainable ministry.
As I wrote earlier this week, we spend a week each summer training hundreds of middle school and high school students in preparation for their work at our annual Vacation Bible School. By opening the invitation to serve at VBS to all students in and around our community (we even have a couple that fly in from out of state to serve on our student leadership team), we find ourselves with an interesting mix of students. The majority of students serving at VBS do not call our church their “home church”. In fact, many have no church affiliation at all – they’re serving because they like kids and a friend invited them. For many, it’s that simple.
During our training, we give our students a chance to commit or recommit their lives to following Jesus. It’s been a conviction of mine that we give students a chance to own their faith in a new and fresh way before 1,000 little kids come onto our church campus to hear about God and the call that has been placed on their lives.
However, our staff has struggled with the follow up aspect of these decisions. For years, we’ve followed up with parents and children’s pastors who have campers making decision to follow Jesus during VBS. I spend the week after VBS calling local churches who were listed at the “home church” for campers who make commitments at our camp. Yet, we’ve never done that with our students – until this year.
For the last week, our Jr High guy, Scott Boss, has been contacting the nearly 40 churches who have students serving at our VBS this year. He’s inviting the youth staff and ministry teams from those churches to come alongside us at our Saturday training event in order to connect with and pray for the students serving on our campus next week.
This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while for a couple reasons.
Jesus is bigger than OUR building
By making these calls, and inviting other youth pastors onto our campus to help own what’s taking place here, we’re sending a message to our community – following Jesus and being a part of the Church has nothing to do with what building you meet in. Jesus’ Church is bigger than any one building, denomination or church staff. Our facilities might be hosting this event, but we don’t own it. Jesus does.
Maybe other churches might try it
I know that kids from families who attend our church attend other church programs in town. Odds are, some of the kids from our congregation have made important faith-commitments at the programs of other churches. Yet, I’ve never received a call or email about it from another church in town.
I do know that “evangelism teams” from other churches have shown up at the houses of some of our kids and invited them to their church the following Sunday. My guess is, if other churches are coordinating a follow-up process that includes door-to-door visitation, they could probably find the time to send me an email.
Because a lot of church’s senior pastors grade their kids and youth programs on attendance numbers, I can totally understand why return attendance would be something that children’s ministry teams would want to invest in. However, I’m not convinced that partnering with other churches would hurt attendance – I’ve only experienced it fostering a community and posture that encourages the growth of a ministry. With that said, maybe we’ll see other churches try it out.
We’ll let you know how our little experiment goes.
But, bigger than that, I love the Church-at-Large when it has a mission. Recently, our Senior Pastor (http://pastorjamesmiller.com/) reminded our church that it’s our mission to storm the gates of Hell to seek and save the lost.
I’m a real believer in the Gospel having real life implications now and that eternity isn’t a train that’s coming… it’s already upon us. With that in mind, I get chills thinking about the work that can be done when God’s people rally in creative ways to give people hope in a lost and broken world.
An organization doing amazing things, that you may have never heard of, is called Cargo of Dreams.
When our pastor heard about Cargo of Dreams, he came running to our team and told us that we needed to find a way to get involved in the work they’re doing to bring the Gospel to lost and hurting people around the globe.
The basic premise is this:
Your church buys a giant cargo shipping container (pictured above).
Your church transforms that container into a ministry environment.
CofD then ships that building on a boat to the other side of the world to impact lives in the name of Jesus.
The project our church is a part of is a multi-phase initiative to build a preschool for kids in South Africa who currently gather under a large tree. I know, I know… what kind of a preschool can meet in a container?!
A church in Salem, OR is building phase one… and it looks a little something like this:
Once we’ve finished phase 2, our container will be shipped to South Africa and placed across from the container that will already in place. We’ll then send a team of families who will construct a roof to connect the two containers to create a fully operational preschool in a community that is aching to care for the little ones in their township.
Having a hard time seeing that picture in your mind? Here’s a rough draft of what that might look like…
The church, when it cares about lost and hurting people, is an amazing testament to the love and hope that we have in our Savior.
Want to get involved or have questions about this AMAZING project?
Send me a message via the comments section and I’ll connect with you.
Coming out of the Christmas season, our church took a look at leadership during a sermon series titled, “We Three Kings.”
The “three kings” we studied weren’t the kings we normally hear about around the holidays – instead, we looked at the leadership styles of the first three kings of Israel… Saul, David and Solomon.
As much as it was a study on leadership, it also gave us a chance to talk about the legacy we leave behind. Saul is known as a king who put his own desires and timing in front of God’s. That is his legacy. David was a hero in victory and had some epic failures… all the while, he was a man after God’s own heart. That is his legacy. Solomon valued wisdom more than anything else, stock piling riches, wives and power… and inevitably setting up the kingdom to be divided and conquered. That is his legacy.
We all have a legacy we’re leaving behind. In fact, we’re already the continuation of the lives of those who came before us. The question I want to leave you with is this – who’s legacy are you proud to be a part of?
For the last couple of years, our kids’ ministries have used February as a time to help families in our church and in our community focus on caring for the needs of others. Rather than simply doing a token Valentine’s day craft, we take an entire month to look at what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. Let me share a couple things we’ve done over the last few Februarys in our ministries.
Partnering with local Public Schools
We’ve partnered with a local public school district to raise funds, supplies and awareness for a program in our community that reaches at-risk kids. As a church, we have a strong relationship with the surrounding school districts – I was only a little surprised when I was approached last year with the idea of coming alongside a program that gives children who are struggling in school (socially and/or academically) a space to let go of their worries and connect with a few caring adults through creative play. We asked the program for a list of toys needed to make the year a success and gave out the list to families on Sunday mornings. Families were encouraged to bring in new and slightly used toys to give to this program – they were also encouraged to pray, as a family, for the kids who would be ministered to through their donations. It was a fairly simple idea and a great way for families to serve other kids in the community through giving.
Partnering with Local Food Pantries
We’re blessed to be a part of a church that created and launched a food pantry that is now large enough that it operates as it’s own non-profit organization. Because of the partnership that already exists between the pantry and ourselves, we are able to find out what the most immediate needs are in terms of food donations – it’s a list of those needs that we’ve passed on to families during the month of February for them to rally around and donate toward as they talk about what it means to truly care for others in the community. It’s a blessing to watch children and families drop food into the shopping carts we set out to collect donations – one mom even bragged to me that the donations she brought in were all free to her because of her savvy use of coupons. Very cool.
Partnering with Our Families
One of the things I totally LOVE about the resources we use on Sunday mornings at our church is that our families are being equipped to live out “loving their neighbors” in their own homes, schools and neighborhoods. I dig watching our kids learn about being KIND to others all month long and hearing stories from parents who tell me that their kids are actually putting our Sunday morning lessons into practice. It’s been neat watching our kids learn to love those who live outside of their homes and down the street from them – it’s been a cool experience as I’ve watched the rubber meet the road in how they’re dealing with the people who live down the hall from them. Loving your neighbor is bigger than caring for the people in your own house, that’s for sure. However, our brothers, sisters and parents provide great practice for us to show God’s love toward others – and February is a great month to reinforce that idea.
—-
Those are just a few of the ways that we’ve decided to leverage a month where the world around us is elevating the idea of “love” in order to teach kids and their families to care for others in their home and in their community. If your church or your family has taken a different approach to this concept, you can share your thoughts below in the comments area – we’d love to hear from you!
I throw my hands up in the air sometimes
Saying AYO
Gotta let go
I wanna celebrate and live my life
Saying AYO
Baby, let’s go
‘Cause we gon’ rock this club
We gon’ go all night
We gon’ light it up
Like it’s dynamite
Cause I told you once
Now I told you twice
We gon’ light it up
Like it’s dynamite
Here’s a quick relevancy test: are those lyrics familiar to you? Chances are, they’re familiar to the kids in the community you live in. More on that in just a moment.
Today’s post wraps up a series on Kids’ Worship: Where we’ve been, what our transition looked like, where we are today… and today’s post will cover some dreams I have for the future of kids’ worship in our ministry.
Student Led Worship
Since our transition (from something to nothing and back to something), I’ve been the primary worship leader for our kids on Sunday mornings. On the occasion that I’m out of town or sick, our church’s worship director has taken time out of his busy Sunday to come over and lead worship for our kids.
One of my hopes for the coming year is that I shift away from being the worship leader in our Elementary environment and that we get to a place where the youth in our church are leading our kids in worship. We’re in the midst of raising up multiple teams who can do this well – I hope to see this transition happen before the end of this school year. Two thoughts behind this move:
1) Kids love seeing high school students in leadership roles. If guys on our high school football team can rock out for Jesus on a Sunday morning, it gives our kids the freedom to join in – their coolness factor isn’t on the line (because, let’s be honest, singing along to a lady or old guy with a CD player can be a sure way to embarrass a kids in front of their visiting friend).
2) When students take leadership roles in your church’s ministries, they grow in their faith and in their commitment to the Church. I truly believe that high school students learn more about their faith by serving than they do by spending a Sunday morning in Bible studies. Call me crazy.
Kid Owned Experiences
For our church, Sunday is the road IN to our community and the Faith. Sunday mornings at Glenkirk are meant to provide space for people, young and old, to ASK “who is Jesus?” in their lives. With that in mind, we always want to think about our first time visitors when programming our kids’ worship time on a Sunday… because we know we’ll have them. We also recognize that our kids need a place where they feel welcomed if they’re going to welcome others.
That’s what led to our great idea that then lead to the card you see at the top of our post. We started thinking – “how cool would it be if kids had significant input on the Sunday morning experience?” If kids knew that they had influence over the way a Sunday morning looked, maybe they’d be more likely to attend regularly, invite friends, and get involved during the time they spend with us.
Good ideas often lead to new experiments, which (more often than not) lead to failures. The cool thing is – failures can allow us to learn how to succeed in the future… if we try to learn from them.
Our idea was this: What if, as a first step into giving kids ownership over a Sunday morning, we allowed kids the ability to choose what songs we sing during our worship time? So, we developed a card that kids could fill out for song requests. In fact, we might even use their song suggestions in our worship service at 11:11am (kids begin that service with their parents in church for community worship before being dismissed to programming). As soon as I announced the new change, one 1st grade girl ran to the stage to pick one up… I had hardly finished my sentence and she had taken the card to the back of the room to begin writing furiously with a purple crayon.
I was excited when she brought it back to me at the end of the morning… and I knew that I had to share it with you. It was too classic to let it slide (at the same time, I realized that I had to provide SOME context to the post – hence the series on Kids’ Worship).
I clearly didn’t set the parameters well – our great idea wasn’t defined well enough for the kids to understand what we were going for. Instead, multiple cards were turned in with song requests for our worship team to perform cover songs. The cards are helping me shape some of the music we play through our sound system during pre-service activities (creating a welcoming environment includes being intentional about the music playing in the room when children arrive)… but, that’s about it.
So, we’ll go back to the drawing board on that one and try to figure out other ways to get our kids actively involved in owning their Sunday morning experience. If you have ideas or suggestions you’ve seen work in your context, feel free to post them below in the comments section.
That wraps up my initial thoughts on this series. Shaping our Sunday mornings is still in process and I love getting input from parents and other kidmin leaders across the country (though, you get bonus points if you live on the West Coast).
You’re going to laugh when you see what inspired this series of posts.
But, that’s something I’ll share on Monday.
Today, I want to give you a glimpse into where we’re at with kids’ worship at our church and the impact our shift has made on our camp experience as well as the massive VBS that we run in the summer.
Sunday Mornings: Keeping it Simple
One of the best things about killing off music on Sunday mornings was that it allowed us to rebuild intentionally. We were able to make singing fun again and slowly begin to shape what worship looked like for our kids because of that. On a typical Sunday, the music time our kids experience doesn’t look incredibly different from the back of the room than most kids’ program out there. But, the view I get from up front every weekend is amazing – our kids actually worship Jesus through singing. It rocks.
A typical Sunday looks like this:
I do a typical welcome from the front of the room, introduce myself and give any quick announcements we might have. This allows kids to transition from coming into the room to finding a seat and looking forward. It also gives our small group leaders time to find a seat in the midst of the kids.
We then launch into singing with two fast/fun songs. One of those songs always has a teaching element to it – whether that’s because it’s a Bible verse set to song, has a theme that ties into the morning, or anything else I can leverage to make that song mean something to the kids. The other fast song is simply joyful. We reinforce two ideas with this set up – a) the words to songs matter and b) singing songs at church can be FUN and even feel like a mini rock concert.
We always wrap up our time of worship with a song that our kids might hear if they went to church w/ their parents or if their family listens to CCM around the house. As an introduction, I always talk about thinking through the words to the song and I’ll teach through any tough words that might be in the lyircs (God of Wonders, for example, is a favorite for our kids… but the word “Tabernacle” means nothing to a second grade girl. So, I talk through the words we’re about to sing before we sing them). I’ll tell you something – it took a year of teaching kids that singing songs at church can be fun and that the words to the songs we sing matter before I even started adding a third song to our rotation.
Nothing I just wrote should be revolutionary by any means. However, being intentional about the songs we sing and the way we made our transition has changed the way our kids worship in song. Our kids are just as likely to sing along to Fee’s “Glory to God, Forever” when it plays on our Sunday morning mix as they will to “Fireflies” by Owl City (that’s right, Owl City is on our Sunday morning mix… I’d hope you’re not offended by that). What’s even cooler is the impact this shift has had on worship in other settings.
Leading the pack at VBS
Our VBS is abnormally large. The picture about is a picture of about 1/5 of the room we host our worship time in. But, that’s not the point of this aside. Rather, the atmosphere of worship at VBS has changed dramatically since we overhauled our Sunday morning worship. VBS at our church was once a place where kids just sang along to songs. If a kid was engaged in the music, they probably were from a different church in town. In fact, kids visiting church for the first time at VBS would have assumed that our kids were visitors too – they took no ownership over that time and really only enjoyed the fact that they could be loud in the church’s sanctuary without getting in trouble.
We live in a different reality now. Half the songs we sing at VBS are songs you’d hear if you visited our church’s modern worship service on a Sunday morning – and our kids LOVE the time they get to spend in worship. We run one of the most visitor-friendly VBS programs I know of (over half of the 1200 kids and students in attendance this last year have no church home on Sunday mornings), and yet our kids create such a cool environment by singing their hearts out during the song portion of the morning that their friends join right in.
Living it out “up the mountain”
Twice a year, our kids make the trip up the mountain to camp at Forest Home (www.foresthome.org). I circle back to talking about camp because this is the place where I first got the sense that our kids didn’t understand worshiping God in song. And, by “got the sense”, I mean to say that our kids napped and cracked jokes during worship the first time I took our kids there 4 years ago.
As you can see in the picture above, our kids aren’t those kids anymore. Instead, we’re the obnoxious church that jumps up on stage to lead everyone in crazy camp songs. Our leaders (each cabin has an adult leader, assisted by a high energy high school or college age assistant) struggle to sing louder than our campers. One of the things I love about Forest Home is that I get a set list of songs they’ll be singing at camp that I can teach our kids before we head up – our kids already have the songs in their heads by the time we get up there so that everything that happens is an expression of their hearts. For us, what happens at camp is an amplified version of what happens on Sunday mornings – I’m thrilled to say that it’s amplified enthusiasm rather than what was once amplified boredom.
Where we’re heading
I’m excited to say that I’m happy with where we’re at these days in the arena of kids’ worship. However, I still know we have areas we can grow in. Monday’s post will talk through my hopes and dreams for the future of kids’ worship at our church. I’ll actually lead in with a bit of a Fail that recently happened as we continue to try to make our worship experience more interactive and kid-lead.
“Starting Simple” talked about the first steps in our process in re-teaching kids how to worship God through singing… and kind of hinted at how Video Curriculum can hurt your ministry if your team isn’t actually facilitating what’s going on in the room:
Let me set up the videos above. As in, if you watch them first, you’ll be watching them out of context.
For those of you unfamiliar with video curriculum, many ministries in the last decade have moved to leveraging multimedia when it comes to the Sunday school arena. Video curriculum gives you lots of options – many even come with pre-packaged worship sets that you and your kids can sing along with… no music skills required. A little over 4 years ago, that was an attractive selling point to our church – a church in a leadership transition with a history of good kids’ programs. So, imagine you’re a 4th grade boy visiting our church for the first time on a Sunday because your friend invited you. You walk into the large group space a few minutes late and see a bunch of kids staring at a giant screen in a dark room and the above video is going.
Now… go ahead, watch the videos.
There are churches that have a group of kids’ ministry leaders who can pull off singing along to songs like what you see above. The team sells it, they teach the songs beforehand to the kids and they pull it off. We didn’t have that team of leaders.
And so… our kids sat there. Staring at the screen while my heart was breaking.
If you’ve been following along with this series, you know that a few years ago, the kids in the elementary ministry programs at our church were having a hard time engaging in the time of the morning we would spend singing songs. So, we killed singing on Sunday mornings in an effort to re-teach our kids about worship.
It wasn’t a popular move, but sometimes deciding to do nothing is better than just doing something out of habit.
Now, fast-forward a bunch of months and you’d find us at a point where I was ready to bring music back to the kids on Sundays… I just had to figure out where to start.
Worship should be joyful
The first thing I felt like we needed to teach the kids at our church was that singing songs at church can be fun. For many, this isn’t a new concept. But, for kids who had experienced karaoke worship to songs that they had never heard before, making worship a joyful experience was a priority. Understanding that there’s a difference between joyful songs and silly songs was an important thing for our team to understand during this transition.
Having only served in ministry on the West Coast, I can’t make an assumption about kids in the rest of the country… but, I can tell you this – if I would have stood in front of our kids and started singing “Father Abraham”, “He’s got the whole world”, or “Kumbaya” on a Sunday morning, my kids would have stormed the stage and punched me in the throat. We’re talking about 4th and 5th graders who already think that singing at church is lame – if I reinforce the stereotype, we’re doomed. In the same way, if I simply found a “better” video curriculum to sing along with, our kids might have flashbacks to the experiences I was trying to distance them from. Again, this isn’t to say that certain songs are bad or that video curriculum is deficient – we just needed to go a different direction.
Doing what isn’t easy
While I was on staff at Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena, CA, I worked with a guy named Tim Scheidler. The way I lead large group teaching is a result of working alongside Tim for years. I remember a Sunday sometime around Thanksgiving that Tim was out of town and it was my job to lead worship for the morning. I bombed. It was then and there that I decided that I needed to learn an instrument well enough to lead worship. However, I didn’t put the time and effort in until years later when I realized that the ministry I was leading needed to make a shift in worship and that I was going to need to lead our team through it.
(If I could go back and coach myself on one thing, this might be the thing that I’d make myself work on… having the ability to play an instrument in your ministry tool belt is pretty invaluable)
So, I learned how to play a guitar. I wasn’t great overnight – it took a ton of time to figure out what I was doing. But, I decided to put in the effort to do what was important for the future of our ministry. Down the road, I fully planned on passing off worship leading to others in our ministry. But, at the time, I felt like I needed to be able to model for them where we were going.
Starting Simple
So, the Sunday came when I was ready to bring music back. We were beginning a series on the Fruit of the Spirit (I used the natural transition of a series to introduce something “new”) and I wanted to pick a sort of “theme song” that would carry us through the next 5 weeks. I also wanted to pick a song that was joyful and that was newish to the majority of our kids (remember, I wanted to distance myself from the idea that music at church was a) only for little kids and/or b) lame).
So, I picked this song… or at least my own version of it that I picked up from my buddy, Tim, while at Lake Ave.
The Fruit of the Spirit song is goofy enough to be fun, interactive (we let the kids “pick” the next fruit we’re going to sing about… and we only do 3 fruits to keep the song shortish), our kids didn’t already know it, it elevated the main teaching during the series, and it’s a song that I could play on my guitar. I had slides on the big screen that listed out the words and, because I wasn’t singing along to a recording, I could take pauses to teach kids the next part of the song before we just threw it at them.
After that series, I began to work a second song into the morning. I tried to choose one song that would elevate the morning’s message and another song that would be fun to rock out to (think “Every Move I Make” or my buddy Eric Shouse’s version of “Superhero“.
We did a whole year of just two songs, reinforcing the idea that worship in song can be a joyful experience. Tomorrow’s post will catch us up to speed with where we’re at today, with Friday’s post wrapping things up with some thoughts on where we’re heading.
—-
During this blog series, I continue to receive comments, facebook messages, DMs on twitter and emails from others in kids’ ministry who have found themselves in similar situations. Part of why I wanted to blog this transition is because I think a lot of us have faced this very problem – especially in terms of elementary programs and ministries.
I’m also hearing that the ideas behind our transition are bigger than just kids’ worship on Sunday mornings. I totally agree! If your ministry has been through transitions that you’ve written about, feel free to post links in the comments section. We only learn from each other when we stop lurking in the shadows of blogs and start actually sharing ideas and dreams with each other.
Have you ever had to change something, but didn’t know where to start?
That’s where I found myself a few years ago when the kids at the church I began working at didn’t know how to worship God in song. They knew how to sing along to stuff they liked… but watching them try to sing along to songs at church was kind of like bad karaoke.
So… my solution: don’t sing. Seriously, for a few months, we just stopped singing on Sundays. That might sound a little harsh, so let me explain the 3 core values that led me to that decision.
Value # 1: Relationships matter more than programs
I didn’t inherit a program without volunteers already in place, so I knew that any changes I brought about could result in massive amounts of hurt feelings if those decisions seemed like personal attacks. With that in mind, I knew that any large changes might hurt future relationships with my volunteer team. In fact, just writing out this process is taking me hours longer than I initially thought it would because I don’t think that the team that was in place was doing anything wrong. They were doing the best job they knew how to do… and I didn’t want to be the young guy who came in with guns blazing, hitting their hearts in the crossfire. With that value guiding my process, I knew that I’d have to make this transition carefully and that there’d have to be a few extra steps involved.
Value # 2: Singing is not the same as Worship
Worship in song is one way that we express our hearts to God… but it’s not the only way we worship God. So, when we decided to get rid of singing on Sunday mornings for a season, we made sure to talk with our kids about other ways that we worship Jesus – through prayer, through service, through caring for others. By doing this, we were able to distance our kids from thinking that singing at church meant pseudo-singing along to dvd’s and we used the transition as a teaching moment. Our team wasn’t taking away our kids’ ability to worship… we were actually teaching them about worship in the midst of the transition.
Value # 3: Nothing is better than something
This isn’t a rule, it’s a value of mine. Values influence decisions, but they don’t force them. There are plenty of times when other values overrule this one – for example, running youth programs for the last few months has taught me a thing or two about learning as I go along. There are times when you start something before it’s where you want it to be and you shape it as you go along. However, in this case, I decided that not singing on Sundays was better than teaching the kids that going through the motions is okay. When navigating transitions in a new place, I always try to use baby steps. Our first baby step was getting rid of singing on Sundays. Our next baby step was making singing fun again… but, that’s a post for tomorrow.
—-
During this blog series, I’ve already received comments, facebook messages, DMs on twitter and emails from others in kids’ ministry who have found themselves in similar situations. Part of why I wanted to blog this transition is because I think a lot of us have faced this very problem – especially in terms of elementary programs and ministries.
If you are currently in a spot where the kids in your ministry don’t know how to worship in song, please know that you’re not alone. There is a kidmin community that exists to support you and speak into your world – don’t be afraid to send a message to me or others in our field to ask for advice. Though your situation has unique aspects to it, it’s always good to bounce ideas off of friends who’ve been down similar paths – at the end of the day, we need to be about building the Kingdom not just our own little castles.
The views expressed on this blog are those of Anthony Prince.
Occasionally the views expressed belong to guest contributors.
Ministry Architects is not in any way responsible and does not necessarily endorse the opinions and content expressed on this website.
West Coast CM 