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3 Amazing Kidmin Websites to Bookmark

Posted by Jeff McClung on February 25, 2012 in Media

ChildrensMinistryVault.com - Just came across this website a few days ago while working on my Easter message. It’s got great lesson plans and object lessons for lots of different kind of Bible stories. Many of them include instructional videos to show you HOW to pull it off.

MoreThanPuppets.com - Steve Adams, the Children’s Pastor at Saddleback Church just launched his blog this week. Steve is an in-the-trenches Children’s Ministry veteran of over 20 years. If you’ve ever heard Steve you know he’s the real deal. You’ll be doing yourself and your Children’s Ministry a HUGE favor by subscribing to his free blog today.

SteveSpanglarScience.com - Not really a Kids’ Ministry specific website, but Steve has got LOADS of cool science stuff that would make great object lessons for any kidmin lesson. Some of them are a bit more work, but they will BLOW your kids away.

What amazing websites have you come across? Post them in the comments below.

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10 Commitments of a Kidmin That’s More Than Babysitting, Pt 2

Posted by Jeff McClung on February 21, 2012 in Kidmin

Last week I talked about the first five commitments of a kidmin that’s more than babysitting. I got a lot of positive feedback about them (at the risk of tooting my own horn, which is difficult, especially since my car is currently in the shop).

So it seemed only fitting to wrap up the series with the second half. Otherwise it would just be the “5 Commitments of a Kidmin That’s More Than Babysitting” and that just doesn’t have as much pizazz as 10, don’t you think?

So here they are:

6. Align with adults
If your adults have a killer weekend service targeted to seekers, make sure your kidmin weekend service is awesome for those seekers kids. If your adults are in small groups, plug your kids into small groups with other kids. If your adults can volunteer for a ministry, create opportunities for your kids to serve. This shows that you’re a team player, which senior pastors love. It also gets everyone at your church on the same page. And it shows your Kidmin is ready to be taken seriously in the life of the church.

7. Do more than just the weekend
If all you do is the weekend it really makes sense that people would only consider your Kids’ Ministry as just babysitting. Provide outreach opportunities as entry-point events for kids to bring their Not-Yet-Christian friends to church. Develop yearly programs that kids and parents can attend and serve at together. Establish discipleship-oriented classes to teach kids how to use their Bible. Don’t let kids grow up thinking that church is just that thing they sometimes do on the weekend.

Click here for 8 tips to help plan your Kidmin calendar.

8. Have margin in your calendar
As important as it is to do more than just the weekend, don’t go overboard. It’s better to do a few things really well then a lot of things badly. Remember your Kidmin Calendar affects more than simply you and the kids. It implicates their parents by default because they’re the ones who have to act as chauffeur and broker for everything their kids do. Going light on the extracurriculars will ensure happy parents, who actually WANT to bring their kids to your stuff.

9. Over communicate
Had a kid accept Christ? Brag about it at your next team meeting. Had a record attendance last weekend? Email the staff to share how God is growing the Children’s Ministry. Have a volunteer who went above and beyond? Point them out at your next volunteer gathering and spotlight them to your senior pastor. Good things are happening in your Kidmin. Don’t be shy about letting people know it.

10. Are sometimes about babysitting
Let’s be honest about this one. Sometimes we do provide babysitting services, and that’s OK. Maybe it’s watching the kids for your worship team’s practice each week. Or watching parents kids so they can attend their recovery group or ministry team meeting. It may even mean watching the senior pastor’s kids so he can make hospital visits. There’s nothing wrong with being “just” babysitting here. We’re enabling the church to succeed with the work of the gospel. And that is always more than babysitting.

What would you add or change about these 10 commitments?

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10 Commitments of a Kidmin That’s More Than Babysitting, Pt 1

Posted by Jeff McClung on February 14, 2012 in Kidmin

As a Kidmin Leader of 15 years I cringe whenever someone refers to Children’s Ministry as childcare in much the same way most people cringe whenever chalk is dragged along the chalkboard, when your finger slams agains a door, or whenever MTV announces another season of Jersey Shore. It’s just how I’m wired-up.

But sometimes I think we bring it on ourselves.

How we run our Children’s Ministries shapes people’s perceptions of them. If there’s nothing to suggest there’s more than just dropping kids off and picking them up, why should people think we’re more than just babysitting?

If you’re reading this you know better (or are a really caring family member or friend whose trying to boast my blog stats, in which case I thank you. Remind me to take you out to lunch). But how do we change the babysitting perception that causes people to check-out of what God’s called us to do?

I’m glad you asked.

Over the years I’ve observed lots of Children’s Ministries. The ones that are really serious about growing God’s Kingdom by ministering to kids, the ones that aren’t messing around, the ones that are more than babysitting all make these 10 commitments:

1. Never beg for help
Failing to make this commitment is the number 1 mistake I see Kids’ Ministries make. To be fair, I get why most don’t really commit here. There’s lots of needs and not a lot of workers. That’s fair. I’ve been there. We all have. But begging never really got any of us anywhere long-term, has it? If we’re honest we all know this to be true. What begging REALLY does is give others the impression we’re captaining the Titanic and need people to plug holes. Nobody wants to do that.

2. Cater to guys
Let’s be upfront about this one: Children’s Ministry is predominetly filled with women. Nothing wrong with that. The problem, though, is when everything from the fonts on flyers to the color of the volunteer shirts (and everything in between) is picked soley with ladies in mind. At most churches it’s hard to distinguish between the Children’s Ministry and the Women’s Ministry. No straight guy wants to be a part of that. If you want to get more guys on your team (and I’ve yet to meet a Kidmin that didn’t) then you’ve got to look at everything you do from a guy’s point of view (3D glasses can help with this).

3. Have a process made of programs, not programs that make the process
Most Children’s Ministries are know for their VBS and Halloween Programs. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these kinds of programs. The tension comes in when the ministry revolves around supporting these programs (sacred cows) rather than the programs working to support the vision of the ministry. If you’re main reason for holding on to one of these sacred cows is “We’ve always done it that way!” Then you’ve got a problem. Isaiah 8:11 (NLT) says, “The LORD has given me a strong warning not to think like everyone else does.” It may be time to hold a BBQ at your church for some of these sacred cows.

4. Program for more than just kids
Having a Children’s Ministry that’s more than babysitting is about the kids. It’s also about more than only kids too. You need to have a plan for how you’re going to engage and add value to parents. Click here for 7 practical ways you can start doing this.

5. Have leaders who know when to say no
This goes hand in hand with #3. We can’t be everything to everyone. We need to have clear boundaries that stem from our purpose and vision. We need to say no to lots of good things to say yes to the few great things that are in our wheel house. Bottom Line: You can’t make everyone happy, so stop trying.

I’ll cover the other 5 next week. In the meantime I’d love to hear from you. What would you add or change about this list?

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The Thing You Need To Know About Complete Strangers

Posted by Jeff McClung on January 30, 2012 in Leadership

They may be a complete strangers to you, but you may not be to them.

A few weeks ago our Family Pastor and I were at Ontario Airport. We were headed from California to Colorado to interview someone for a spot that’s open at our church.

As we finished going through security (which is about as much fun as when the dentist accidentally cuts into your gums while trying to clean your teeth, making his instrument feel like the white-hot blade of a 19th century Samurai from Feudal Japan) a man walked up to us and asked if we worked at High Desert Church. We told him we did.

He went on to explain how he thought we looked familiar, that he knew our Senior Pastor, and had been attending our church for years. We chatted for a few minutes, then left to catch our flight. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.

Or so we thought.

The next day we were at our hotel in Colorado, having breakfast, and getting ready to head to the airport to board our flight back to California. As one of the kitchen staff was taking our plates he asked us if we worked at High Desert Church. We told him we did.

He went on to explain how he thought we looked familiar. It turns out he had moved to Colorado not long ago from the High Desert and was looking for a new church. We talked for a little bit, gave him our contact info, and told him we would try to help him find a new church.

Ever since these two encounters I’ve been thinking how small the world has become. How what we do at home people hundreds, even thousands of miles away can know about. Just because we don’t know someone doesn’t mean they don’t know us.

It’s a good reminder to keep us in check. Not in a “Big Brother is Watching” kind of way, but more in a “My ‘secrets’ may not be so secret” kind of way. I should probably be more thoughtful about my words and actions. I know this is true of me. And I think it’s probably true of you from time to time too.

Have you ever bumped into someone who knew you but you had no idea who they were? Did you come clean or did you try to fake it? What happened afterwards?

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2 Things That Everything In Your Life Needs

Posted by Jeff McClung on January 10, 2012 in Leadership

Last month we threw a Christmas Party for the Volunteers in our Children’s Ministry. These are great people who serve all year long mentoring kids in our community. They work hard and do what they do on top of their jobs, families, and other commitments.

We were going to meet up at the church and bus everyone down to Alto Loma, which is about 40 minutes from where we’re at in Victorville. Alto Loma has a few neighborhoods with Main Street Electrical Parade style Christmas lights covering the landscape. It’s like stepping into another dimension. The people who live there spend half the year getting ready for Christmas.

Our staff was excited to take out volunteers and their families to experience this. We put together a great event, filled with games and prizes to give away on the bus ride down, snacks and drinks while they toured the sights, and a few short Christmas movies to watch on the ride back. Everything we wanted to do was coming together, except for one thing.

It was scheduled to rain, with a chance of snow, all day Monday when we were planning to go down the pass to Alto Loma.

We had charter buses already chartered. We had games, prizes, and refreshments ready to go for hundreds of people. The linchpin to our plan, visiting Alto Loma, now stood a really good chance of falling through.

When I saw the weather report Saturday morning I started making calls to my staff immediately. We still wanted to do something for our volunteers but how in the world were we supposed to throw something together so soon? We already had weekend services to get ready for leaving only a couple of hours on Monday to really work on it. So we made a bold decision.

We told our volunteers, who were also worried about the weather report, that we would still have something for them and their families at the church on Monday, rain, shine or snow, even though we had no idea what it would be.

We met Monday morning and started working on Plan B. By the end of our meeting I think we ended up with Plan G.

We decided to have everyone meet in the chapel. We set up all of our food and drinks there, along with a few last-minute Christmas decorations (thankfully it was already pretty decorated for Christmas as it was, so we didn’t have a lot to do there). Everyone had some time to mingle and hang out with some Christmas music playing in the background. Then we loaded everyone up on our buses (did I mention that our deposit was non-refundable?) and, instead of going down to Alto Loma, we simply bused around our local community and enjoyed some of the lights there.

We did some of our bus games and gave away some cool prizes along the way. The lights around our area weren’t half as good as the ones we would have seen in Alto Loma, but some of them were pretty cool. When we got back to church we watched “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and called it a night. Even thought things didn’t go the way we wanted them to, everyone still seemed to have a good time.

This little snafu was a great reminder to me of two assets that everything in our lives need:

1. Planning
Our staff had a great plan in place. We used this planning form that has taken me years to perfect. It’s got spots for pretty much everything you’ll need to think through for an event. It even has a spot to help you think through what to do if it gets rained out which, ironically, I overlooked. But sometimes a good plan, no matter how good it is, is not enough. Every good plan needs…

2. Flexibility
I hadn’t planned on rain. That’s a detail I definitely should have thought more about with our outdoor winter event. No question there. Truth be told, though, no matter how well you plan for something there’s always something else that will happen, requiring some kind of change in what you want to do. Always. It seems to be an immutable law of life that none of us can ever fully escape.

And that’s OK. As hard as it was for us going through it, we still had fun and came out of it better on the other side. It wasn’t easy, but great things in life never are.

As you think about what you have going on in your life right now, it’s always good to go into it with a plan. It would be irresponsible not to. But leave some space for something to go wrong, because it probably will.

Being willing to flex when life happens to your plans will help you relax and have more fun during the process.

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