Archive for 'Elementary'
Kid’s baptisms: Letting my parents drive
Posted on 11. Jun, 2009 by Kenny.
Last year I was really challenged with thinking Orange, specifically as it related to baptisms and children making decisions for Christ. See, I’ve had this baptism class thing down. I’ve been teaching it for years. Between teaching a class full of families to individual kids in my office, I could teach this thing in my sleep. Like I said yesterday, 15-20% of the kids I meet with haven’t yet made decisions for Christ. So I would usually offer an opportunity for kids to make that decision at the end of the class or right in the middle of the discussion if meeting with them one on one.
However, the night before leading my first baptism class at Gateway, I decided to re-write the class. Most of the components I’d been teaching for years stayed the same, but I added a fresh new take on the topic and added a segment I’d never done before. After I’d explained how a person becomes a Christ follower (this is done very carefully and specifically) I back off and let the parents drive. I explain that I’m going to leave the room for 15 minutes for parents and kids to discuss what they’ve heard so far. Parents are given some information with questions to ask to find out where they’re kids are and see if they’ve really made a decision to follow Christ yet. If not, parents are encouraged to pray with their kids if they’re ready. I even script out a simple prayer that parents can use to pray with their kids.
Initially I didn’t like doing this. Why? Because I’m a control freak. By letting the parents (who may have no experience doing this at all) I’m not sure if it was done right if it was really done at all. However, if I don’t let parents take the initiative here, they may not do it one their own. The cool thing is that I still have first time decisions every time I do one of these classes and it’s the parents who are praying with their kids to follow Christ. I’m a believer now. Let you parents drive!
Continue Reading
Kid’s baptisms: The exception to my personal rule
Posted on 10. Jun, 2009 by Kenny.
Okay, here I posted about my personal rule. Kids have to meet with me or a pastor before they get baptized. I just want to make sure that kids know what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. However, since coming to Gateway I’ve had to become a little more flexible. I think there is room for compromise here, I just haven’t spent enough time thinking about it. So for now, it is what it is. However, I do anticipate changes by next summer. Perhaps you have some good ideas for me to consider.
In this post I shared how Gateway does baptisms. On average we’ll have 100-125 people baptized at one of our baptism services. Of that number, about half sign up in advance or go through a class. The other half are last minute decisions or people inspired to do so during the service. I really like this. There are a lot of people who God calls their number on this day and the resulting baptism is powerful.
The only thing I don’t like about this is the number of kids who show up to be baptized without having gone through a class. We do have people available to pray with kids and I and some others who work with the kids are available to talk to kids, but it isn’t nearly as good of an experience as the baptism class. What usually ends up happening is a parent really feels inspired to be baptized and often times they decided to make it a family thing… kids and all. Other times a child may just see all the excitement going on and decide that they want to do it on that day. Therefore, we have more kids than I’m happy with getting baptized without the class.
Solutions.
One solution is to offer a post-baptism class. It would basically be the baptism class for those who were just baptized. I think it would be a good experience and it would add value to what they just did. However, I still think it would be strange for some of the kid who would come to faith at the post-baptism class. I’m also a reasonable man. I think we’d be lucky to get 20% of the families to come back to the class. I know that most of the people who come to the baptism class do becasue they think it is required.
The other solution is to just make the baptism class a requirement. I’m not sure how well that would go over, but it may end up being necessary. The baptism service is pretty amazing and so many people are making difficult decisions. There may be some caution toward saying “no” to a family where the parent or parents are struggling with the decision to do it anyway. So, we may just have to find that fine line between being intentional with how we do this for kids and being the open environment that we’ve created for people to easily make this decision if God is moving them in this direction.
What do you think?
Continue Reading
Kid’s baptisms: My personal rule
Posted on 10. Jun, 2009 by Kenny.
Children can’t be baptized until they meet with me or one of my leaders.
That’s been my rule for the last 5-6 years. Occasionally I’d stick my head in the auditorium and I’d see another pastor baptizing a child and I’d put my foot down. Turns out at my previous church, the receptionist would actually schedule baptisms each weekend. So, if someone called in to be baptized, she’d schedule them with a pastor. Once I learned this, the receptionist knew to ask if there were children and to run them through the Children’s Ministry before scheduling the baptism.
Why is this so important to me? Because if I didn’t have this rule, about 15-20% of the kids being baptized haven’t yet made decisions to follow Christ. A substantial higher number are getting baptized for the wrong reason.
How do I know this? For the past 5-6 years, I’ve met with the majority of the kids getting baptized. If I had to estimate, I’d put the number at 400-500 kids. As I’d meet with these children, 15-20% would make decisions to follow Christ while meeting with me. That alone is reason enough to require the meeting. I also ask every child why they want to be baptized. Easily 50% of children asked answer with one of the two answers:
- Because I want to go to heaven.
- Because I want Jesus to wash my sins away.
I don’t blame them. They’re kids. They can’t know if they haven’t been taught and for many of these kids, their parents don’t know enough to teach them this. For me, it’s very important that a child be a Christ Follower before getting baptized. Duh! It’s also important for me that a child know that baptism isn’t their ticket into heaven or their holy sin bath either. Not knowing cheapens the experience. Everyone should know why they’re doing what they’re doing. That’s why I stand by my rule and you should too.
Continue Reading
Kid’s baptisms
Posted on 10. Jun, 2009 by Kenny.
This Sunday we’re having baptisms at Gateway. We typically do baptisms three or four times a year. We have one of those big inflatable pools that we set up in a grassy area in front of the church and hold baptisms after the services. This Sunday we’re doing them all after our Sunday evening Deepen service.
For the last four or five years I’ve offered baptism classes. Before that, I usually met with the children and parents individually before they wanted to be baptized (this was also at churches that did baptisms every Sunday). On occasions (usually twice a year) I’d have a Kids Baptism Sunday were we would baptize 15, 20 or 30 kids in on one day. Leading up to these weekends I would hold a baptism class so that I could go through this just one or two times instead of 15, 20 or 30 times.
Now that we only do baptisms three or four times a year, I try to offer two or three baptism classes a few weeks leading up to the baptism. I want to give kids ample opportunity to be baptized. At my previous two churches my rule was that a child was not allowed to be baptized until they met with me or someone on staff. That’s a little different now at Gateway (I’ll explain later).
So, I thought I’d share a litte on how we do baptisms, specifically the pre-baptism process. So, my next 3-5 posts will be about baptism with resources, how we’ve changed them and where we feel we still need to go.
Continue Reading
The problem with Sunday small groups
Posted on 20. May, 2009 by Kenny.
I’m not being a Negative Nelly. I’m sharing the difficulties that come with these models. Yesterday I shared the difficulty with the Sunday School model. It has big enough difficulties that I’d prefer not to be at a church with Sunday School. However, the small group difficulties I’ve faced can be overcome with a little creativity.
I’ve had great success with small groups on Sunday nights or Wednesday nights. They were discipleship/growth focused. The kids were pretty consistent and all my groups had 8-12 kids. However, once I decided to launch small groups during Sunday services at Gateway, I knew I would have a problem. Kid’s attendance on Sunday is not consistent. I would be creating a small group model around irregular attendance. In addition, every week we have visitors who may or may not come back. I knew that it would only be a matter of time before my small group leaders had 50 kids on their rosters even though they only averaged 10-12 kids in attendance each week.
I’ve seen some churches tackle this in various ways.
The Holding Tank
Some create specific groups with kids assigned to the group each week. New kids get grouped in a special “holding tank.” After kids have attended the “holding tank” three times, they promote to a regular small group. What I’ve noticed many times in this situation is that the holding tank got HUGE and the small groups stayed small. It seemed awkward as many of the groups would have 4-8 kids and the holding tank would have 20-30 with only 1 or two leaders. The experience the new or irregular kids got was different from what the other kids got.
Laissez-faire
I’ve also seen some churches try to solve this problem by taking a more laissez-faire approach by changing the groups each week to ensure that no group got to big. This certainly keeps the size thing under control, but even some of the irregular kids might have a different leader each week. It’s not a bad strategy… better than the holding tank in my opinion.
Our Solution
I’m not going to take credit for it. A consultant at Fellowship One connected me with a church in Oregon that is doing this and it seemed to make the most sense to me. We divide our groups into gender/grade groups. First Grade boys are in their own group as are Third Grade girls. In some services, we might have two Second Grade boys groups because there are so many. Even a first time visitor will attend the same group they would attend if they came every week. We’ll do the best we can to make sure the leader doesn’t have more than 12 kids in his/her group, but there will likely be a mix of new, regularaly attending and irregularaly attending kids in each group. The difference is that the small group leader knows who his/her “actual” small group is. Of all the kids who attend this group, we run a report to show us which kids attend on average three out of 8 weeks. Our small group leaders know who these kids are. During the week (outside of class) these small group leaders will call or send notes to their kids. They’ll build the relationship outside of Sunday. Naturally, they’ll have a greater connection wtih these kids on Sunday, but every part of the small group on Sunday will have a similar experience. The commitment we make to parents is that if they will commit to regular attendance, they’re kids will be part of this small group (meaning the small group leader will reach out to them during the week). So, the Second Grade boys roster may have 50 kids on it, but the small group leader is only focused on 10 of them.
Details
- What about these irregular attending and new kids? The Children’s Ministry will provide follow-up for them, not the small group leaders. We can easily run the reports and send a postcard to a child on their first and second visit or even send them a card when they stop attending. Again, this can be handled administratively and we’ll empower our small group leaders to focus on the kids who are committed to the small group.
- Sound like an administrative nightmare? I don’t think it has to be. If you use a system that can run reports, just figure out what reports to run. We use Fellowship One and we have a unique way to do this that takes all the difficulty out of it. We have it set up so that regularly attending kids always check into one “room” and the new and irregularly attending kids check into another “room,” but the kids don’t see the difference. The system does it for us, so we don’t have to think about it. It’s automatic. I love automated systems. With this tool, my small group leaders can even log into Fellowship One, check their kids attendance on their own and access all their contact data. This way my small group leaders can have total ownership and they don’t have to wait on me for a report or information. I love it!
Your ideas
I know I haven’t seen everything. What are you doing? Tell me how it’s working or isn’t working. Although I’m happy with what we’ve figured out here at Gateway, it still has it flaws. Maybe you’re doing something that will help us do this better. I look forward to your comments!
Continue Reading
Elementary small groups
Posted on 20. May, 2009 by Kenny.
Yesterday I wrote about how small groups are where it is at in Children’s Ministry. I also wrote a somewhat controversial post about how Sunday School doesn’t work. So, how do you do small group?
It depends on your purpose.
Are you small groups relational based or discipleship based? Or are they both? Is the point that kids connect with a leader who can speak into their lives or is the point that the kids dive deeper into God’s word and a more personal atmosphere?
When I first started small groups, I was following Craig Jutila’s model. Although my small groups were relational (kinda unavoidable) I wanted the focus to be discipleship. I wanted the kids to go deeper. So, I created my small group program on Wednesday nights. Because I was trying to take kids to the next level, I really only wanted the kids who wanted to be there. I even charged $25 or $30 to cover their books and materials. After two years of running small groups this way, we saw more an more kids connected relationally with each other and with their leaders each year. In addition, they were growing in their faith and knowledge of the Bible.
When I moved to Gateway a year ago, it was obvious that one of the very first things I needed to do was to launch small groups in the elementary program. The parents as well as my leadership were begging for it. There were too many things to tweak and fix, so I was not about to start a Wednesday night small group program. Instead I developed a small group program for Sunday services. I don’t know if it was becasue of small groups or not, but our elementary areas grew by 20% to 30% in the last 9 months. Because our Sunday services are primarily seeker friendly, these small groups are mostly relational, not spiritually deep.
If you’re trying out figure out out how to implement a small group ministry, ask yourself these questions:
When’s the optimal time/day (during weekend services or mid-week sometime)?
What’s the purpose (relational or discipleship)?
Who’s the target audience (anyone or kids ready to take next steps)?
Oh, one last thing. This doesn’t have to be your strategy, but I’ve always created small group environments where small group leaders primarily focus on only the relationship. That means for Sunday morning small groups, we provide large group teaching or for discipleship groups there was a primary teacher and kids sat in groups with their small group leader. This means I don’t expect my small group leaders to teach a lesson. They typically just ask discussion questions and maybe lead a little activity. I’d rather have them initiating contact with their kids outside of class than preparing for a lesson. I also recognize that not all my small group leaders will be good teachers, but most of them can be a friend/mentor.
Continue Reading
Palm Sunday Baptims
Posted on 14. Apr, 2009 by Kenny.
This post is over a week late. However, I just got my hands on a video that I thought was worth showing to the CMO audience.
On Palm Sunday we had our first baptisms of the year. We do our baptisms outside, so we only do them once it starts getting warm. The day before baptisms was a very warm day, perfect for baptisms. On Palm Sunday, it got cooler and was super windy all day. I was excited that I had kids and adults to baptize for every service. However, that also meant I would be in the cold water and then in the cold wind for all three services. Yeah, it was COLD. Once the baptism were over, it took about three hours to get my body warm again.
We saw over 100 people baptized, almost 40 of them kids. Some other time I’ll share about our baptism process. For now, I’ll leave you with this video.
Continue Reading
Small Group Leader Success
Posted on 03. Apr, 2009 by Kenny.
How do you know when one of your small group leaders is doing a good job?
The evidence is usually pretty clear. The group grows. You see kids swarm around the leader when not in the kid’s building. Yeah, it’s pretty obvious. However, I saw a level of success this week that made my heart swell with pride.
On Sunday night I held a baptism class. We had about 15 kids participate with their families. At the end of the class parents fill out the required paperwork. One of the parents waved me over to their table. They asked me if it was okay if their daughter’s small group leader baptized her. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Of course it’s alright! I LOVE IT!
This small group leader in particular made a lasting spiritual impact. When giving the opportunity to choose who would baptize her, she chose her small gorup leader. That’s small group leader success.
What I’m excited about is watching this baptism happen. Hopefully the other girls from the group will get to watch/participate with what’s happening. I bet that at our next baptism, 4-5 more girls from this gorup will get baptized as well. Woo Hoo!
Continue Reading
When God works in spite of you
Posted on 19. Mar, 2009 by Kenny.
I love a good plan. Strategy and tactics, they get the blood pumping. I think that careful planning brings honor to God, but sometimes he like to mess with us and work outside of our plans. If anything, he likes to keep it interesting.
This last Sunday was an exciting day. I found out only three weeks ago that we were having a baptism on April 5th. I immediately booked our only available meeting space on Sunday morning for a baptism class. Unfortunately, I only had 10 days to promote the class. By the time Sunday rolled around, we had about eight kids registered for the 9:30 class and three for the 1:00 class. Recently I modified the format of the baptism class where I allow parents to take the lead. After I spend twenty minutes clearly explaining how one chooses to follow Christ, I leave the room and let the parents review the information and if possibly, lead their children to a decision.
I discovered after the 9:30 class that one mom led two of her children to faith and another mom led her son to faith. Amazing! At the 1:00 service, a mom had me stay after and lead her two daughters to faith. It was a beautiful day. However, it would only get more interesting.
On Sunday the 252 Basics curriculum was setting up for an invitation. Basically on Sunday the verse was, “For the Wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.” We clearly explained what this verse means. Then after the large group time, small group leaders further described how this verse impacted their lives as they shared their testimony of faith. Essentially, this week was setting us up for an invitation next Sunday.
Well, on Sunday night I ended up subbing in as a boys small group leader. After the large group time I had the opportunity to further break down the scripture verse. The service ended up letting out early, so I had to rush. We didn’t completely finish, but we did adequately set up for the big ask next week.
Then on Monday morning I was walking around campus on Monday and one of my co-workers told me how one of his volunteers was so excited about how her son came to faith the night before. “When did he come to faith?” It seems he gave his heart to Christ at church. I was a little confused. I didn’t give an invitation.
Later I emailed the mom. I congratulated her on the good news, but then asked for details. How did this happen? When did this happen? In her answer she found it odd that I was asking these questions because her son said that I was his teacher. Here’s the story:
God has been working in this nine year old boy’s heart for the last several weeks. He’d been asking poignent questions and his mom was thinking about setting up a meeting with me. Then on Sunday as I unpacked this scripture verse, every work spoke to his heart. At some point of me taking and him listening, he surrendered his life to Christ… all by himself. When his mom picked him up from the classroom, his eyes were teary eyed. The first words to his mother were, “my life changed tonight, I feel different, I received God’s gift of life!”
I got the whole story yesterday while on the phone with his mom. The genuineness of this decision has touched my heart. This last week was the set-up and the big ask is in a few days. However, God decided to side-track my plans for this nine year old boy and speak to his heart directly… in his perfect time.
It’s a great thing when your plans all come together and lives are changed; however, it’s another thing all together when God circumvents your plans to do soemthing special without your help at all.
Continue Reading
Should I play spin the bottle?
Posted on 27. Oct, 2008 by Kenny.
We’re in the middle of our Soul Revolution push as a church and so I’m creating a Soul Revolution activity for each Sunday during the 9 weeks. Normally the kids would do 3 separate activities in small groups that go along with the 252 Basics curriculum. However, right now I am writing one of those to be a Soul Revolution activity.
I’ve got one activity that is tripping me up. I want the kids to randomly select another kid in their group to encourage. Then the next kid will randomly select another kid to encourage. I really don’t want to spin a bottle, but what better “random selecting tool” is there. Simple. Cheap. But unfortunately loaded with connotations.
So, the big questions? Would you play spin the bottle? Can this activity redeem the other version or would you not touch this with a ten foot pole? Last of all, what else is a fun, easy and effortless way to randomly select kids to be encouraged?
Continue Reading
