3 Beyond Goldfish and Bubble Machines: A Different Way of Doing Children’s Ministry

Beyond Goldfish and Bubble Machines

A Different Way of Doing

Children’s Ministry

Put first things first and second things are thrown in. Put second things first and you lose both first and second things.

The words easy and adventure seldom travel together.

I can get downright giddy over the fun things we get to do in children’s ministry. I can still remember the feeling I had when I got to purchase my first bubble machine for our preschool classrooms. I knew how excited our kids would be to walk into their class and into a cloud of bubbles.

In children’s ministry there is no end to the games, crafts, and decorations. On Easter Sunday one year, we had life-size bunnies and duckies in costume. What’s not to love about a job with life-size bunnies and duckies? It’s just one of the perks of being in a ministry that uses every avenue imaginable to connect with kids in order to create the opportunity to introduce them to Jesus.

Often though, these creative ideas become the thing that parents and children remember about our ministry. And it is easy for these wow moments to be seen as the measuring stick for evaluating the success of our children’s ministries. Everybody loves a little excitement and splash. But after a few laps around the children’s ministry block, it doesn’t take long to realize that many of these unforgettable moments are only the icing on a very complex cake.

Maybe you’re like me—born with a sweet tooth. Maybe you’ve been known to eat dessert first every now and then. When I see a cake without icing, honestly, I feel a little sad deep down inside. You might have guessed it: yes, my favorite part of any cake is the icing.

So in honor of my sweet-toothed comrades, I give you a few fun facts about icing:

Sure, every now and then, I might want a single bite of leftover icing from the frosting bowl. But even I don’t want more than a bite without something to go with it.

During my first go-round on a children’s ministry staff, I’m embarrassed to admit that I spent the vast majority of my time on the icing parts of ministry. We had centerpieces on every table at every event, balloon arches, life-sized cutouts, and more themed T-shirts than I care to count!

But behind the scenes, I was constantly battling a whirlwind of chaos. Like trying to form a cake out of nothing but frosting, I found myself left with nothing but a sweet, sticky blob where I wanted a solid, sustainable ministry. I longed to build a grounded, healthy ministry, one that would stand the test of time without wearing out staff, volunteers, and parents. Without knowing what it was, I felt a hollowness about what we were doing. And I was exhausted and unsatisfied.

The Dance Floor

I knew I needed something more foundational to anchor my work. I was tired of my ministry being ruled more by the whirlwind of activities than by any clear direction. Something clicked for me when I read this parable of the dance floor from Mark DeVries.

Years of preparation had made her movements effortless, her turns seamless, her leaps weightless. A dancer of unparalleled talent, she mesmerized the crowd with her skill, but even more with her passion. Her countenance proclaimed in no uncertain terms that she was made for this moment.

But she would finish much sooner than anyone expected. Coming down from an arching leap, she landed with a jolting crack, her foot driving its way through the rotting wood of the floor, her body twisted in pain, her leg bent in places it was not made to bend. She was pulled from the stage, wondering if she would ever dance again.

The master of ceremonies dismissively apologized, “Inexperience does this to a dancer.”

But no one repaired the floor. And then, as if nothing had happened, the next performer was introduced. The crowd responded with a smattering of applause but with no one attending to the dance floor, the audience knew that the new dancer would also find her performance ending prematurely with a disappointing, perhaps tragic, conclusion.

When I first read this parable, I found myself in tears. These were not the little misty-eyed, lump-in-the-throat tears, but big, boo-hooing, salty, sobbing, running-down-my-face kind of tears. I can be a little dramatic, I know.

But something about that story resonated deeply with me. I could hear the bone crack when the dancer fell. I could feel the break in her leg, because I too have been broken in ministry more than once.

I had dreamed of becoming a children’s ministry “dancer” since I was a little girl. I wanted kids to know Jesus in the ways I had come to know him as a child. It seemed, though, that each time I began this ministry dance, I’d find myself on a cracked, broken, or rotting floor. I longed to do this work so badly, so, even knowing the risk, I’d keep going out on the dance floor again and again.

I would dance, full-out, until suddenly, as if out of nowhere, “Crack!” The floor would give way and something deep in my soul would break. I would hear the voices of judgment (including my own): “She must not have cared enough.” “She just didn’t have the right experience.” “If she had really done her homework . . .”

How many times I considered myself unfit for the dance, thinking that the secret was to spend more time sharpening my own dancing skills and collecting a few more creative ideas. But my skills, admittedly incomplete, were not the problem. The problem was a rotting dance floor, which I totally ignored. Spending more time practicing my dancing skills could never solve the problem.

A Tale of Two Children’s Pastors

Meet Amy. She loves Jesus, and she loves kids. She has been leading a children’s ministry at her own church for over seven years, running at full speed ever since she can remember.

Her motto is, “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” Often referred to as the Energizer Bunny, Amy does whatever is required to get the job done. She remembers each volunteer’s name and the names of their children after just one meeting. The church marvels at how much she has stored away in that ultraquick, filled-to-the-gills brain of hers.

Today, Amy is putting out the latest children’s ministry fire. This week, she is dealing with volunteer and equipment issues. Volunteers are consistently inconsistent. For the last three weeks, one of the third grade Sunday school teachers has been MIA, without having given any notice. Amy spends most of her time dealing (quite efficiently) with some level of crisis.

While Amy hopes that the teacher is all right, her real concern is how she is going to replace this teacher for Sunday. At the same time, rumor has it that the kindergarten teachers have gone off the curriculum rails and are teaching whatever comes to mind. In the preschool class the video projector hasn’t been working for a couple of weeks. Amy just found out about the projector this morning when a curt text arrived from a frustrated volunteer asking why the children’s ministry can’t get their act together with one simple projector.

Amy is thinking to herself, How in the world can I fix a problem if I don’t even know about it? Amy rarely slows down long enough to take care of herself (“Who’s got time?” she argues) or to tend to the multiple piles of paper on her desk. Her dream is that one day programs will run smoothly, volunteers will be responsible, she will get to enjoy a quiet Saturday night with her family, and get to bed before midnight.

Now, I want you to meet Catie. For the past five and a half years Catie has led a children’s ministry across town from Amy. She has been hoping to meet Amy for lunch, but every time they had something on the calendar, Amy cancelled at the last minute with a frantic apology and a promise to make it up to Catie.

This week, Catie is planning the details for her volunteer training event for the next quarter. Specifically, she is working on creative ways of honoring her preschool volunteer coordinator as the Volunteer of the Year.

Her ministry isn’t without its challenges, of course. Every Sunday, a regular volunteer gets sick or calls in with an unforeseen emergency. When it happens, Catie smiles and says, “Honey, that’s what substitutes are for!” Catie’s husband marvels at how consistently she is able to do her job with so many curve balls thrown at her and still come home with a smile on her face.

Every Tuesday, Catie does a walk through of each of her Sunday school classrooms, gathering individual incident report forms, classroom needs forms, and lesson feedback reports. She then heads to the kitchen, pours a cup of coffee, and settles into her office, enjoying her coffee as she reads through Sunday’s paperwork and crafts her to-do list for the rest of the week.

In addition to planning her volunteer event, today Catie will make some recruiting calls, parent calls, and ask her supply coordinator to order craft supplies for the next quarter. Before Catie leaves for the day, she will complete a maintenance request to check the projector lightbulbs in the preschool rooms. At 4:45, Catie will head out to the door to watch her son play baseball.

While Amy and Catie are fictional characters, I’ll bet you may have met at least one of them. Their stories reveal the difference between the all-too-common, do-it-yourself children’s director managing all the details of ministry herself and the rare children’s minister who builds and utilizes solid systems to manage her ministry.

I know what you’re thinking. When you’re dealing with an endless parade of immediate and urgent concerns, it’s all you can do to react appropriately to those isolated incidents. It just feels more direct to do it yourself, right?

If you’re like me, I’ll bet you’ve heard these words come out of your mouth: “I would love to have time to work on bigger issues, but there are too many urgent demands screaming for my attention right now!”

I spent many years playing the role of Amy. In my Amy days, I would look at my different lesson plans for Sunday on Friday morning and make my shopping list for that afternoon.

On more weeks than I care to remember, I would find myself wandering around Target looking for something that couldn’t be easily found in a regular big box store. Panic would set in.

Of course, these were the days before smartphones. You couldn’t google anything. Siri wasn’t around to answer my pressing question: Where am I going to get flash paper at the last minute?

I would get out the old yellow phone book, call around, and drive around until I found the magic store, which, of course, was closed on Friday night. I would drag myself into a house full of hungry people wondering what was taking dinner so long.

Eventually, I started making baby steps. Tired of the last-minute weekend scramble, I developed a plan for gathering all the fun supplies that did not involve a Friday night road trip to the magic store! Eventually, God blessed me with a volunteer who loved managing the supply piece (as long as I would promise never to ask her to teach).

More and more, I tried to live by the philosophy “Only do what only I can do.” I found a friend gifted at editing curriculum, and she would look at each lesson and decide which of the suggested activities would best fit our church, facilities, budget, and kids. She would make a list of needed supplies. She would give me a month’s worth of supply needs at a time, a month in advance, giving us at least four weeks to purchase, borrow, or find what we needed for any given Sunday.

Sure, there was a down side. This plan required more work on the front end. Switching gears from reacting to today’s demands to thinking and planning more long term was hard. Living in a state of perpetual urgency was liberating at one level. I seldom had to think. By nature, I like to solve problems quickly and move on. That means I like to solve problems myself   !

While it may have been easier in the short term just to deal with the immediate crises and get them off of my plate, in the long run, those same issues kept coming back and hijacking my schedule. I was living in the land I call “Short-term easy. Long-term hard.”

As I have given myself the luxury of building systems, so many of the chronic, recurring urgencies have faded into the background. Let’s call that “Short-term hard. Long-term easy.” It’s not rocket science, but it is hard work!

Both Amy and Catie had issues with video projectors. Amy was completely unaware for weeks that this was a problem. If part of the lesson she provided to volunteers included a video segment, there is no telling how long those volunteers may have been supplementing the lesson on the fly (and how quickly their frustration was growing, along with their mistrust of Amy’s leadership).

Catie built a system that allowed volunteers to report when something was broken and implemented a preventative maintenance plan as well. A feedback form for classroom needs, along with properly trained volunteers, resulted in simple problems being solved before frustration had a chance to fester.

You’ll remember that Catie also had a substitution system in place. She recognized the nature of family chaos and understood that life can dish out plenty of surprises to volunteers on a Sunday morning.

Why Systems Matter

Jesus said that his desire was that our “fruit . . . will last” (John 15:16). It wouldn’t be a stretch to translate those words, “that our fruit should be sustainable.” The right systems, like a good fence in a garden, can offer the kind of protection any ministry will need to thrive.

Up to this point, you’ve heard me use the word systems often. I’ve talked about the foundation of a ministry and some of the key processes. In the next chapters, we’ll define what we mean when we talk about taking a systems approach to children’s ministry.

↑ Back to top