What does the average children’s worker look like? A few years ago we held a special service for children’s workers in the London Diocese. It provided a wonderful insight into the answer to this question. A diverse bunch turned up, including more men than perhaps you would expect. Bishop Pete Broadbent asked everyone present to put their hand up, and keep it up, if they had been doing children’s work for more than five years, then ten years, and so on… until we had a few veterans left who had over 30 years of service behind them.
Next he asked everyone who had been doing children’s work for more than 15 years to put their hands back up – and keep them up if they had agreed to do it for temporary measure. Pretty much all the hands stayed up. Almost everyone there had begun their ministry to children as a temporary measure until someone else came along to take it off them.
Have you got a long-term approach?
The problem with agreeing to take on the leadership of the Sunday school short term is that it tends to create an environment where you are surviving rather than developing. If I ask you to ‘hold the fort’, I expect a fort returned successfully defended – but I’m not expecting you to build a conservatory or pave the driveway. But let me be frank: that’s not really good enough. If we want to be part of a generation of children’s workers that increase the numbers of children in our churches then we need to change. We need to think more deeply about what we are doing.
People who are holding the fort are pragmatists. They tend to think about survival; you see it when you ask how the session went. You get replies like, ‘It was good, they listened well’ or ‘They all joined in the game’ or ‘Nobody lost a limb’. Books about children’s work tend to sell if over half their content consists of session plans; if you go to a conference or training day, there will be endless ‘how to’ sessions. Whenever we ask our children’s workers what they would like to support them in their work, the reply we usually get is, ‘Resources we can just pick up and use’.
I’m well aware that this pragmatic attitude is predominantly a symptom of children’s workers often being time-poor volunteers. We simply need to get sessions done and don’t have the opportunity to spend ages preparing and planning. We’ve all been there on Saturday evening trying to throw something together that will get us through tomorrow. But the children in our groups deserve better. Could you find just a bit more time to put into your session-planning? It will make an enormous difference.
Have you developed an overemphasis on entertainment?
You can spot a fort that is being held from a mile off. There will be soldiers on the battlements ready for an attack, rather than doing repairs. The entrance doors will be firmly shut. And how do you spot a children’s worker that is doing the same? An excessive entertainment focus is a sign that gives us away. You will notice that this isn’t dependent on the children’s worker being part of a small group of volunteer leaders. It’s possible to be a paid full-timer, have a great team and fall into the same trap, because you’re not reflecting on what you are doing. Perhaps you think you’ve made it now that you work for a church, or perhaps you’ve taken on too much.
You can see where an over-focus on entertainment comes from; we have learnt a lot about how to manage the behaviour of children and we know that there is nothing more dangerous (in behavioural terms at least!) than a bored child. So we look to make our sessions fun, fast and furious in order to rule out boredom problems. The problem with this strategy is that we can end up with sessions which are shallow and lack depth – with the children’s main experience being how funny it was when leader A (me, usually) got custard-pied rather than having encountered God.
I have increasingly moved away from telling children what a story means
Another issue with constant pace and entertainment is that it often provides the opposite to what children need to be able to encounter God. David Csinos and Rebecca Nye’s research acknowledging emergent patterns in how children’s spirituality functions has identified that children tend to need space to find God in their own way and often use that space for quiet reflection and simple ritual. This is a long way from the action-packed silliness that we often provide. Do you need to begin to provide space in your sessions so that depth and encounter with God can become a feature of your time together? There are lots of simple things you can do to introduce these ideas:
»» Candles give a focus that children seem to naturally associate with God (Research that has indicated that this is even true of children from churches that don’t usually use candles.) This could be combined with holding small wooden crosses or stones.
»» ‘Alternative’ worship and prayer stations are also very effective; see pages 34 and 35 for examples of how to use these in an all-age service context. I’ve also taken the children in my group to a small wood before and given them space to walk and find things that help them think about God on their own. The results were amazing. One child brought a brick covered in moss with worn edges and explained that he felt a bit like the brick, hard and not very attractive, but he could see how the moss and the weather had changed and softened the brick and made it beautiful. He had begun to understand how God was at work in his life, changing him.
Don’t just teach them Bible stories
I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but give me a chance. An easy way of making our programs look good is by cramming them with Bible stories – it’s important that children come to know the stories well, so we look at one every week and explain it to them. This way each week they are armed with a story and its meaning to take home. We might even then do a craft to re-enforce the teaching point and finish with a quiz to see what they have remembered. But just sometimes, do we just go through the motions? The risk is that we have groups full of children who know many, many Bible stories but those stories don’t make any difference to their lives.
In order to move away from an entertainment focus and create deeper sessions for the children we minister to, we need to allow children to think for themselves. They are able to understand and find meaning in the Bible. In fact, if we always simply tell them what it means, then they will believe us and assume that what they think is wrong if they disagree. We are the grown-ups after all. This doesn’t have to happen very often before we have established the hierarchy where children learn and adults teach. The children are then left unable to feed themselves from the Bible and unable to apply the stories that we have been teaching them in their own lives when it really matters.
I have increasingly moved away from ever really telling children what a story means – instead I want to draw them into a conversation about the story that allows them to find their own way around it. I ask the children what they think and why they think it, what strikes them as odd and if there’s any part of the story that feels like their life. We also explore how those on the fringes of the story who the Bible rarely gives voice to might have felt.
You are one of the most powerful influences on the faith of the children in your group
Jerome Berryman outlines this wonderfully in his method called Godly Play, where he seeks to give the child the story like a gift and then allow them to play with it and find God within it. He uses wondering questions like, ‘I wonder what the most important part of this story is?’ and ‘I wonder if you are in this story?’ to draw the children into deep thought about it. If you work this way, you will be amazed about the conversations you will have with your group – and how much you too will learn. So tell the story in your session without telling the children what it’s about. Then ask a few open ended questions that will help the children explore it. You are the guide to provide context and point out the features. Be prepared for a few surprising answers, so remember to always ask why the child thinks as they do; God may be using a bit of the story you’ve never really noticed before to speak into a part of the child’s life that you know nothing about. Be careful not to shut that down. With this approach, you are equipping children to be little theologians who can work on a Bible story themselves.
Are you becoming a school instead of a Christ-centred community?
Education offers so much to children’s ministry. We now know so much about learning styles, behaviour, additional needs and child development for example – and it’s provided by education sector research. But we need to ask: to what extent is this research relevant in trying to spiritually form children, rather than educate them?
If our ministry looks too much like a school then we start to communicate that academically gifted children are spiritually superior to those who are less able in that particular field. Children who can read out loud, remember a memory verse, listen well and colour in accurately become the stars of the group. Those who are less gifted struggle and feel second class.
You are not a school; you are a community. The measure of that community is how well you get on at loving one another, not whether you can remember a Bible verse. So make sure that you have sufficient time to talk to the children about their lives and pray for them, for them to serve one another as well as being served. Make sure that you praise and affirm the child who doesn’t push to the front of the biscuit line more than those who read the passage out well, because this is what the kingdom is about.
John Westerhoff says that children’s faith grows best not where their heads are full of facts, but where they are loved and belong. So, stop holding the fort and start working intentionally to make your group the best that it can be. You are there to help form hearts rather than fill brains.
Over to you…
You are one of the most powerful influences on the faith of the children in your group. The chances are that as an adult, whether they remain in the church or not, they will remember you by name. They probably won’t remember much of your syllabus, but they will remember you. We need to accept that we are not ‘just’ children’s workers, but crucial influencers in the formative years of a child’s faith. It’s my hope that we can catch the significance of this, stop thinking about enduring a session and instead focus on equipping the children in our groups for the adventures of life with God.
