7 Seeing What Others Can’t—Yet: Clarifying Your Vision
Seeing What
Others Can’t—Yet
Clarifying Your Vision
Given the seeming importance of retaining youth for most religious groups in the United States it is striking how haphazardly most congregations go about it.
I like to cook, and I’m just adventurous enough that I don’t mind trying something new, even when I’m expecting company. The result can be absolutely amazing or a total disaster. I’ve experienced both!
I have tried recipes from old cookbooks, recipes handwritten by my grandmother, recipes found on the Internet, and those shared by friends. When I first started cooking, I would measure and remeasure, and then double check all the ingredients to be sure that I wasn’t making a mistake.
I’m not as cautious now. Cooking now flows more naturally. But one nonnegotiable for me is a picture of the dish I’m preparing. I won’t even start a recipe or even consider buying a cookbook that doesn’t have a photo of every recipe, even if every single step is listed in detail.
Creating Visioning Documents
It’s human nature to want to see what we are working toward before we start. A view of the finish line is critical for any sprinter. The cap and gown is an important picture for high school freshmen. A picture of our goal—even if it is merely mental—makes us all perform better.
If building our children’s ministry were something we could do alone, we could hold a vague picture in our minds of our kids grown up, without their diaper bags, runny noses, and skinned knees. We could imagine them as growing, faith-filled teens stopping by to give us a hug the week they get their driver’s licenses.
But regardless of our church’s size or the number of kids in our ministries, we can never do this alone. And we need our team working with the same picture in mind.
For us, the picture comes in the form of carefully defined and clearly communicated visioning documents, including
1.a mission statement
2.measurable three-year goals
3.a statement of values
4.a ministry management chart
The mission statement. Many churches we work with can produce a mission statement (when prompted) for their children’s ministry. Often that mission was drafted by one person sitting alone in their office, and almost no one (including the author) knows what it says.
Ministry Architects prefers to engage an invested group of parents, volunteers, and church leaders who will passionately wrestle to get the vision right. Because even if your sentence structure is sound and your word choice is perfect, without the buy-in of a team, your mission statement will typically lack the staying power needed to weather the to-be-expected changes of a dynamic ministry.
A simple Internet search will yield a wide variety of processes for creating a mission statement. For our purposes, though, there are three critical questions that your mission statement must answer.
1.What do we want to produce? Or, what is our impact? (Example: disciples, servants, good citizens)
2.How will we produce these results and create impact? (Example: through teaching, loving)
3.Who will be impacted through the ministry? (Examples: members, neighbors, all the little children of the world)
Once your team has wrestled with these questions and settled on the answers as a group, you can then focus on crafting a statement that clearly communicates who you are, who you are reaching, and what your ministry hopes to produce through all its efforts.
Once constructed, your mission statement should be communicated, celebrated, and referred to regularly as a touchstone. When I was leading a children’s ministry, it was not uncommon for us to begin each of our staff meetings by reciting the mission statement in unison from memory.
If you regularly embed this language into your leadership meetings, the statement will become the measuring stick you use for assessing each program and event on your ministry calendar. As your ministry grows and changes, your mission statement will be a constant that ensures consistency and focus.
Your mission statement is a picture to keep in front of you and your team—some even hang it on the wall! The following are a couple of examples:
The children’s ministry of [name of church] exists to embrace, engage, and educate families of the church and community so the children will become lifelong followers of Christ.
The children’s ministry of [name of church] has fun, grows together, learns about God and faith, and makes the world a better place.
Three-year goals. Whoever said, “A goal is a dream with a deadline” was right. Our lives are driven by deadlines. So much so, in fact, that I challenge you to name a day in your last month without a deadline that directed at least some of your behavior.
Like a lot of people, I’d like to be healthier. The strategy for being “healthier” is not rocket science—drink more water, exercise, stop eating junk food. But healthy can be hard to measure. So I’ve tried to put a few specific deadlines to my dream of better health. I measure things such as calories consumed and calories burned, or servings of fruits and vegetables eaten.
Having talked about goals with lots of ministry people over the years, I know that you might be thinking, Why does everything have to be measurable? Some things just can’t be measured. And you would be right.
Not everything is measurable, but if we want to make real—not just imaginary—progress, we need to measure a few things. In fact, of the four visioning documents outlined in this chapter, only one—three-year goals—is even remotely measurable.
Most churches want to foster lots of thriving, biblically literate, fun, compassionate little Christ-followers. It’s a wonderful dream! Remember, the difference between a dream and a goal is that a goal can be measured and comes with a deadline attached.
To get your wheels turning with goal setting for your children’s ministry, the following are sample questions in different areas of your ministry that might lead you to setting specific measurable goals:
1.How many personal contacts would we like to make with parents of children this year?
2.How many nonparent, nonrotating volunteers would we like to have serving in our children’s ministry?
3.How many children would we like to participate in a mission or service project in the coming year?
4.How many parent programs would we like to sponsor in the upcoming year, and how many different parents would we like to see participate?
5.How many children would we like to see assisting in worship leadership on an average week?
We recommend that every children’s ministry draft three-year goals and one-year benchmarks. Here are a few guidelines that can help in that process:
1.Your three-year goals need to be enough of a stretch to feel inspiring, like they are too big to accomplish this week or even this year.
2.Your one-year benchmarks should feel like a significant, attainable step toward your goal.
3.At the end of each year, you will evaluate your progress toward reaching your one-year benchmarks and set new three-year goals and one-year benchmarks accordingly. (I’ve included a sample goals and benchmarks document in appendix B.)
4.Remember that your goals and benchmarks will give you the target but not the strategy for achieving them. Naming your goals and benchmarks gives your team a starting point for developing a series of game plans to beta test and iterate the process of achieving your goals.
Make no mistake. People will judge the effectiveness of your children’s ministry by some standard. If you and your children’s ministry team do not name the targets clearly, people will make up their own fuzzy and incorrect targets. Goal-setting allows you and your children’s ministry leaders to determine exactly how the ministry will be evaluated.
And when a parent or an enthusiastic advice-giver approaches you with an idea for a new program, your goals will give you an objective filter for determining whether to pursue the new initiative. The ministry can be freed up from a pattern of stops and starts and unbridled distractions that so easily bottleneck your ministry (and your calendar!).
Your goals will likely turn out a little bit like my kitchen adventures. You’ll experience absolutely amazing results and a few total flops. A mission statement and goals put a “recipe picture” right in front of you to help you keep the end in mind as you work the process of cooking up your ministry.
Values: guardians of the ministry. A set of written values protect the climate of our ministries. Here’s what I mean: I used to work in a bank. We always had a security guard onsite. I never once saw any of the security officers stop anyone from doing anything. In fact, it looked like a pretty easy job. They wore their police officer uniform (all of them were off-duty police officers) and stood in a visible part of the building. Occasionally, they would take walks around the bank, making sure their presence was noticed, and then they would head back to their regular post.
No one ever talked about what they did for us. We just knew they were there and that they would share a laugh with us occasionally. Banks have learned that having a security guard present and visible is enough to deter the vast majority of undesirable events from happening. It took me a while to realize it, but now it’s clear that our security guards’ primary job at the bank was not to deal with bank robbers. Their presence created and reinforced a climate of safety for customers and employees alike, and deterred the behaviors the bank wished to prevent.
The values of your ministry work in the same way. Keep them visible and their very presence can protect your ministry from developing a negative or destructive culture. Sometimes we say that values define the spirit in which we accomplish our goals.
Here’s another way to look at values from a more personal level. One of the goals my husband and I have for our children is that they get to school on time each morning. As a young person, I struggled with being punctual, and I really want my boys to be in the habit of waking up on time to get where they need to be without feeling rushed. I can’t tell you how important it was for me to make sure they got to school on time.
Sometimes, in my passion to accomplish this goal, I spoke to my kids in ways that I would never want them to speak to me. I would start out gently enough. But eventually, after a few failed attempts I would find myself standing in the doorway of their bedroom, squawking, “Get up! You’re never gonna make it on time! You’ve got to get out of bed, right this minute! Do not go back to sleep!”
In a saner moment (after realizing that my passionate commitment to punctuality wasn’t working so well), I realized (repeatedly, I’m embarrassed to say) I was ignoring our values in an effort to achieve our goal. No one wants to start the day being screamed at. So I started to experiment.
I would head upstairs with a cell phone in hand cued with either a fun dance song or a funny YouTube video sure to make the boys laugh. More often than not, they would wake up laughing. The goal we wanted to accomplish—my boys getting out the door in plenty of time—was important, but not so important that it was worth violating the spirit we want for our family.
Sure, it’s not always perfect. More easily than I’d like, I fall into old patterns that ignore our values. But the values are there to reorient me to the kind of family we’d like to be.
Values—like compassion and generosity, like playfulness and Christ-centeredness—guard the spirit of our ministries. Sometimes you may need to balance values that might appear to be contradictory. For example, the value of “fun” might look lazy and undisciplined, but adding a value like “responsibility” or “leaving places better than we found them” can help you strike the right balance with your values statement.
Keeping your ministry values in front of your parents, leaders, and kids can protect the kind of climate you’d love to see in your ministry. You can post them in classrooms, add them to your email signature or letterhead, or mention them in your volunteer trainings. As you post these “guardians of the ministry” as sentries throughout your ministry, you’ll come much closer to ensuring that the spirit and culture of every program, event, and meeting consistently reflects these values. (I’ve included sample values statements for a children’s ministry in appendix C.)
Organizational chart. The final visioning document you’ll need is an organizational chart that defines who is responsible for which parts of the ministry, who connects with one another, and who picks up the slack if one person or group is unable to complete their responsibilities.
I know. You didn’t go into ministry to sit in your office and draw organizational charts and define reporting structures and responsibilities. I get it. But if this piece doesn’t get done, you’ll wind up spending exponentially more hours doing things you like even less!
Let me explain. As we’ll address in 
Writing down the structure generates accountability—both for you and for your team. When titles and responsibilities are mapped out, it soon becomes clear who is carrying too much and who could take on a little more. A good organizational chart is not a static document you create and revisit every five years or so. Reviewing it in black and white every quarter will automatically highlight the needs and opportunities for expanding your team or reassigning some of the larger load-bearing tasks of the ministry.
In Luke 14:28, Jesus warns us to count the cost when taking on a project. If you’re like me, you would much rather jump into an exciting new initiative than stop to take stock of how the new initiative fits into the overall design of our ministry (and whether you can afford the time, money, and attention it will require).
We just might find ourselves managing our stress levels better if we matched each new idea with not only a new budget line but also an adjustment to our organizational chart. Like you, I want to say yes to great ideas. But I also know that not every good idea can feasibly happen today. Revisiting the organizational chart provides an excuse to push the pause button before saying the enthusiastic yes!
The unexpected happens in every church. There will be times when a decision gets handed down, and we have to paste together the resources to make a program or project happen. But even in this situation, you can check in with your organizational chart, count the cost, and make the changes necessary to get you through the roll out of the new project without a hernia!
In these unexpected situations (which are to be expected in any church), you may find the need to
1.ask for more help by perhaps hiring temporary staff, borrowing volunteers from a different pool, or gaining assistance from staff members outside of your department
2.suggest some modifications to the new program or event to increase the quality or reduce the urgency
3.consider scaling back current programs or initiatives to make room for taking on the new project
The time you spend working through the details building your organizational chart, including staff and volunteer roles, will pay you back many times over in time, not to mention provide peace and clarity. I’ve included two sample children’s ministry organizational charts (see “Sample Organizational Chart 1” and “Sample Organizational Chart 2”) in our online resources (ivpress.com/sustainable-children-s-ministry.com).
Once you’ve got your four visioning documents drafted, you’ll want to take the time to gather feedback and input from an even wider spectrum of stakeholders—parents, staff, church leadership. It is not uncommon for the back-and-forth process of gathering input and redrafting the documents to go through multiple revisions and take a month or more. Don’t get discouraged. This back and forth is all part of the process and what makes your vision stick.
If you find yourself needing help navigating the complexities of developing your visioning documents, we’re here to help. Just email us at [email protected].
Creating a Christian Formation Plan
Core competencies: hitting the bull’s eye. Each fall, as my kids begin a new school year, I get invited to a curriculum meeting for parents. In that meeting, optimistic and energized teachers get a twinkle in their eyes as they review the core competencies of, for example, third-grade math. My eyes glaze over long before we get to multiplication tables.
But what these teachers are doing is important to their success as teachers and essential to my child’s success as a third grader. Whether or not my third grader will be promoted to fourth grade entirely depends on whether he masters the core competencies identified for his particular year of school. Being clear about these core competencies aligns us all—parent, teacher, student, school—around the target we are all aiming for in the coming year.
Why is it, then, that when it comes to Christian education, we almost always fail to project desired ends for our children? We can do a lot to get kids in the door. (Have I mentioned how much I love bubble machines?) And we’ll talk about these in 
Most children’s ministers will tell you that the main learning objective is some vague version of “teaching the kids about Jesus.” But if we desire to hit the bull’s eye of faith development in our ministry, we’ll need to narrow our aim. “Teaching kids about Jesus” is a pretty wide target. However, I am sure that within that overall target, you can easily name a few more specifics. When we name and communicate our targets, our parents, children, volunteers, and church begin aiming at a clear bull’s eye.
Here are the questions to ask: If a child is given the privilege of going through your children’s ministry from birth to the end of their elementary years,
What core concepts have they mastered?
What core relationships have they formed?
What core experiences have they had?
What core practices are they now living out?
To break this process down a bit more, here are four questions to help you start naming your core competencies:
1.Core concepts: What does a graduate of our children’s program know
⚪ about Jesus?
⚪ about themselves?
⚪ about others?
⚪ about the Bible?
2.Core relationships: Which people does a graduate of our children’s program know?
⚪ leaders in the church
⚪ adults who have served in the children’s ministry
⚪ peers
⚪ youth
⚪ younger children
⚪ those of a different race or socioeconomic background
3.Core practices: What does a graduate of our children’s program do differently?
⚪ What are their daily habits?
⚪ What do they do in relation to the church?
⚪ What do they do in relation to others?
4.Core connections: What does a graduate of our children’s program feel
⚪ about the church?
⚪ about God?
⚪ about themselves and others?
Putting it into practice. Coming up with your list of core competencies is no small task, but finalizing that list is only the beginning. You’ve merely identified the bull’s eye. Next, we’ll need to decide what tools and methods we will use to hit it. (I’ve put together a sample list of core competencies in appendix D.)
Step 1. Choose a curriculum resource (or resources). The most important tool you will use is your curriculum. You will want to choose something that fits most closely the culture and theology of your church. No curriculum is going to perfectly fit your context, space, and theology, but you will likely be able to find three or four that you feel comfortable with. Choosing a curriculum can be a daunting task, but once you have your list of core competencies, you have a measuring stick that will help you to evaluate different options.
A couple of other questions will help you to narrow your choices when it comes to choosing curriculum.
1.Do you want to use a curriculum with video elements, or would you rather avoid screens in your ministry?
2.Do you want something downloadable that you can edit before you give to your volunteers?
3.Do you want to follow a lectionary or church calendar?
If you have a children’s ministry committee, you might want to get their input in this process, especially if some of them are teachers who will have to live with whatever curriculum option you choose. You may have one person evaluating for content and another looking at the activities, and maybe another comparing the curriculum to overall church culture. You might even think of other dimensions to evaluate curriculum by. When you enlist a group in this process, you gain buy-in for a final decision. If questions or concerns about the curriculum come up later, you know that the rightness or wrongness of this decision doesn’t rest solely on you. For tips that will help you begin choosing curriculum, see “Tips for Choosing Curriculum,” included in our online resources (ivpress .com/sustainable-children-s-ministry.com).
Step 2. Set your calendar. Once you’ve chosen your curriculum, you can begin to schedule your lessons. What’s nice about most published children’s ministry curricula is that they are already loosely tied to the calendar. Most of the time, they are divided by quarter or season. This works great, because important seasons such as Christmas and Lent are already built into the schedule.
Most churches have a date for beginning Sunday school in the late summer or fall. It is great to celebrate kids starting a new grade in school and sometimes new Sunday school classes. That doesn’t mean that you have to stop programming in the summer, although lots of churches modify their programming in some way over the summer. Timing the launch of your fall program with the launch of school makes sense.
Many families will have returned from vacation and are ready to reengage at church. Some sort of parent orientation or kick-off event in the fall can remind parents how the process works, alert them to any changes, let them know what you’ll be teaching, and serve to articulate why being regularly involved can be so important for their children.
Once you have chosen your fall launch date, assign your first lesson to that date. Most of the time, you will be able to follow the lessons in the order they come to you from the curriculum. But there’s a good chance there will be holidays and few unique events in your church or community that you’ll need to work around. Scheduling your curriculum, week by week, at the beginning of the year will save you time later in the year, and you’ll avoid that last-minute panic when your curriculum runs out and you don’t have a plan for a particular week.
You might even want to color code your calendar, with each color representing a different item on your list of competencies. As you are planning your year, you will be able to clearly see what is being emphasized each week in each age group.
Step 3. Schedule milestones. Once you’ve chosen a curriculum that meets most of your core competencies and mapped it out on a calendar, it’s time to schedule your milestone events. Milestones are once-in-a-lifetime celebration events that help children mark important points on their spiritual journey. Milestones have several defining characteristics:
1.They only happen once.
2.They are intergenerational events designed to affirm a child’s identity in Christ and affirm their connection to the church.
3.There is a connection point for parents to be involved.
4.They include a ritual or tradition of some kind.
5.Usually a gift is given to the child, along with food to celebrate the milestone.
For most churches, baptism is a universally celebrated milestone. Whether your church is one who baptizes infants or baptizes later in faith development, baptism ordinarily meets all the criteria of a milestone.
The presentation of Bibles to children is another milestone most churches are familiar with. I love this milestone. It says to the child that they are ready to own their own Bible, reading to understand it for themselves. This milestone works best when children are recognized within the context of worship by their congregation as mature enough to begin reading the Bible on their own. Ordinarily, parents want to be present for this event.
You can see how this meets the criteria for a milestone:
1.A one-time event. Though the children may get many Bibles during their life, there is only one first-time Bible from their church family in recognition of their growing ability to know God for themselves.
2.An intergenerational event that affirms a child’s identity in Christ and their connection to the church. The gathered congregation communicates to each child that he or she belongs in this community and that he or she is ready to take the next step in knowing and loving God.
3.A connection point for parents. Presenting the Bible in worship gives parents, even those outside the church, the chance to be reminded of and to embrace their own role in the faith formation of their children.
4.A ritual or tradition. Children traditionally have their names called, come to the front, and often receive a spoken blessing or prayer of some kind from the church’s leadership. Perhaps a good example of this in the form of a yearly tradition would be a “Blessing of the Backpacks,” which might happen before the start of each school year.
5.A gift. The Bible serves as a visible reminder of having reached the next step in their faith journey.
6.Food. Most churches have a reception following worship to celebrate and honor the children who have received their Bibles.
Many churches also offer a Bible 101 workshop for these children and their parents. This is a great time for parents to be involved with their children as they begin to own their faith and develop the habit of reading the Bible on their own.
Here are a few other milestones you might want to consider incorporating into your Christian formation plan:
kindergarten graduation
graduating from children’s church and participating in worship
rite of passage from children’s ministry into youth group
I’m sure you can think of others. However, you don’t want to have too many milestone events. The fewer you have, and the more you celebrate them, the more special they will be to the families of your church.
I know these power tools may feel a bit overwhelming—until you’ve gotten them in place. But hopefully, the step-by-step descriptions we’ve provided will give you the freedom to create and use these tools at your own pace. In the long run, the power tools will help you stay on a clear course toward your mission and get you ahead of the game in planning so you can focus on the next most important item on your list.