Kids Church meeting
1/8/18
Present: Lyn, Joel, Josh, Rhiannon, Bec, Karen, Jane, Ian, Sam
Read 1 John 1:5-2:11
We want our kids to know and love Jesus and part of that is being aware of their sin and turning back to him. That is what we’ll be focusing on this Sunday.
New Curriculum - Kidswise
Developed by Sandy Galea whom Lyn, Karen and Dianne heard speak at the children’s ministry conference in Sydney they attended in May.
Goes along with the sermon series
- All age talk in the service
- All start together: memory verse, revision poster (main point of each week), sometimes group teaching.
- Split into 2 groups
- (Juniors) Story, chat, pray, craft, play
- (Seniors) Games, bible time, prayer, craft/activity
Leaders
- We are going to call all who help at kids church, leaders, because we value you all, the kids don’t know the difference & we all want to be leading and modelling Jesus to them
- Currently Lyn, Karen & Dianne share all the teaching and preparation. We would love a few more to do this so that we can share the load a bit more and split into 3 groups so we can do more age focused teaching.
- The person preparing the teaching will text the other leaders by Sunday morning outlining what will occur that week and what help is needed etc.
- 5th person is on call if we have more kids (the ratios are slightly complicated, Lyn will let them know as we go out to kids church if we need them). If they’re not needed downstairs, we need them to sit in the lunch room to direct any children to come up to their parents or the toilet. But we don’t take them to the toilet and kids can’t stay out the back without their parent. Great thing about the lunch room is you can still hear and see the sermon (if you don’t speak).
Things that are going well
- Kids Church Sunday
- Kids are enjoying themselves
- Monthly Kids Church updates
Things that we can improve are going well
- Behavioural issues – Our strategy is to warn the child that if they keep behaving that way you will send them back to their parents. If they continue to misbehave then follow through with the consequences but tell them that they have ‘chosen to continue to misbehave and go back to their parents’.
- If we find there are certain kids who genuinely struggle with the current format then we should be thinking of other ways of teaching them (possibly a separate more active group)
Dream big! Ideas for children’s and youth ministry
Here we brainstormed ideas including;
- Weekly after school kids club
- School Holidays Kids Club
- Starting a Youth Group (particularly aimed at the age group our current older kids church kids are)
- Outings with families to enjoy time together (both formally organised by church and organically happening when families initiate this themselves)
- Advertising what we do to see if we can attract more families
There was a balance discussed with these ideas between being united with other churches (or Christian groups aka Riverbend) and trying to ensure we are not competing with them by both organising events at different times or by doing these things together. Yet at the same time there was an emphasis that folk have brought their families to the Anglican Church for a reason and so we do want to be doing things on our own as well. Ultimately we want to be creating a space which the children feel like they own and that gives them confidence to be inviting their own friends along.
How can we partner with families better?
- Including in the monthly updates a series of questions that parents can ask their children to guide discussion (instead of just saying ‘how was kids church’ you could ask what they learnt about the topic of the week etc)
- Organising outings to have fun together
The meeting closed at 8pm in prayer.
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