children, children, children

Today in children's church, one of our first graders raised her hand and said "My cat is in heat." This was right after a discussion of the Prodigal Son, and I still don't know how the two became connected in her mind. I tried not to laugh and failed miserably....

One of the struggles within my job right now is figuring out how to work with these kids. They're all sweet kids, but having K-5 all together in children's church is a struggle. The older ones are very perceptive and able to have some great conversations, but the kindergarteners are in a world of their own and can barely sit still. Some of the kids can barely listen to instructions, and are full of energy. There's nothing wrong with energy, but how do you get them to effectively channel that energy into whatever activity they're doing? Then there's the boy who loves to just leave the room, or the moody girl who will start pouting for various reasons and refuse to participate, or the ones that will blatantly disobey you.

One thing I hope to implement soon is narrowing the age group to K-2 or K-3. Older children should be able to be in the full service, reinforcing for both themselves and the congregation that they are an important part of the church and should participate as such.

As it stands now...we all leave halfway through the service. We typically start with a mini-service all together, where we sing a song or two, a few help read scripture, and a very SHORT discussion about the story. Then we split them up for activities, which has been a huge help. I usually take on the younger ones, trying to keep them active while reinforcing the idea of whatever the story is. This splitting has helped SO MUCH in being able to engage the kids where they are.

But, the new struggle has been extra manpower. Ideally, you want two people with each group. Currently, we have the children's minister, his wife, myself, and another girl who won't be as available after the first of the year. Yup, the same people every week. Which is good for building relationships with the kids and having them develop respect for you. But it's also frustrating at times, and can hold potential for burnout. We tried to recruit some help from the congregation to try and organize a rotation, and got no response. Since my home church has a huge children's ministry with a lot of lay help, this lack of help is kinda new for me, something I'm adjusting to and figuring out how to work with.

There's also a serious lack of quality material out there for these kids, resulting in us writing our own thing for every week. This program is not babysitting; we're trying to minister to and teach these kids! But so much of the curriculum out there just doesn't work well for us. We like to line things up with whatever the theme of the service is, to make a fluid transition and (hopefully) encourage them to pay more attention in "big church." But, this also limits how much help we can get, since we're making up our own curriculum week by week and can't just hand a book to people. We're slowly developing a good system for this, so we have more consistent expectations for the kids and they have a better sense of what it's about and what the boundaries are. Our children's ministry is gaining momentum, and I'm just hoping that we'll be able to keep up with it.