How do you set up your kids service in church? Do you, or your Kid’s Pastor, give as much attention to your kids service as you would your adult service? As I took on our Kids Ministry at my church, I realized that most of the time the kids were sat in front of a movie, given some snacks, and would play a game here and there. This sounds fine for the first couple of weeks, but eventually the kids get bored, tune out, start acting up and the volunteers find themselves simply being babysitters.
After visiting some other churches and watching them do great Kids Ministry, I realized how much of a disservice we were doing not only to our kids, but to our families. I caught the vision quickly that by developing a dynamic, fun, exciting, kids ministry you set up these children to love going to church and succeed spiritually.
Here is how we set up our time for 5 years old through 5th grade for a 75 minute service:
Free Time / Game Room
This lasts about 15 minutes with the sole purpose of connecting with their peers and making new friends. This also allows for those kids whose family is running late not to miss any of the service.
Worship
We then immediately start out with worship for about 7-10 minutes. The beginning worship is always energizing, lots of dancing, lots of jumping, and we utilize our church youth to help the kids with fun motions throughout.
Announcements
We break our worship up half way through to take up offering, introduce any new series, go over any rules, and welcome new people. After praying, we roll back into worship again.
Bible Story (normally video based)
As soon as the worship ends we immediately play a Bible Story. This usually lasts about 4-5 minutes and sets the foundation for our lesson, something we can refer back to during our teaching, and provides a different type of media to keep it interesting.
Teaching
During the teaching, we mix it up with object lessons, volunteers from the crowd, and silly skits that get the kids laughing and engaged all the way through. The teaching, though, is centered around the biblical lessons and builds on what they just learned in the Bible story. We write our own lessons for church but there are also many resources for Kids Curriculum available.
Small Group
After the teaching we take time to break into small groups of about 10 kids each. We split them based on ages and have appropriate questions for each group. This allows them to apply the lesson from the day to their lives and we have found this is where kids will open up personally about their home or school life.
Game
After prayer, we gather back into our big group again and play a game until it’s time for parents to pick up.
Every week we are talking about what to teach the kids, what songs we should learn, how to best explain Biblical truths to our kids in digestible ways, all the while preparing them for the next stage of their lives. We focus on getting them ready for Youth so that our Youth Pastor has a solid foundation on which to build and to not have to start from scratch. It is our hope that these kids will continue to go to church and grow spiritually the older they get!
Great tip about integrating games into Sunday school. I need to put my kids into church. I just want them to have a strong scriptural understanding.