Peter Witkowski Children's Ministry, Discipleship

There Are No Professional Kid’s Ministry Workers

no-professionalsIf we want to reach the children in our homes or at our church, we have to be with them. We have to spend time driving toy cars on the furniture, hosting tea-parties, and celebrating the good grades on their report cards. In short, we have to do life with these precious little souls.

There are no professional parents or professional kids’ ministry leaders. True and effective parenting and ministry happens via life on life. Organizing programs and showing up for Sunday morning services will not produce life change by themselves. Our Wednesday night programs are only worth the time and effort it takes to get them going each week when the Bible is being taught and relationships are being formed. Our programs should be laying a groundwork that is needed to facilitate communication, care, encouragement and reproof. Our activities are not the sum total of the Christian life.

This is the crux of New Testament ministry.

Think of the apostle Paul. He repeatedly encouraged believers, to “imitate me, just as I imitate Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1, 4:6; Phil. 3:17; Phi. 4:9; 2 Thess. 3:9). The pastoral letters clearly indicate that Paul diligently taught people the word of God. He was a great preacher. But Paul did not just preach once a week and consider his job done. No. He lived with the people he taught. He invested in them. He heard about their messy and complicated lives and showed them how the Scriptures could answer all of their problems. Paul knew the people he ministered to.

To be effective parents and kids’ ministry teachers, we must do the same thing. We must know what make our kids tick. We need to listen to their concerns, celebrate their triumphs, and note their weaknesses. We need to learn their hearts.

Moreover, we need to model the Christian faith for our children. We need to depend on God, make much of our savior, and be quick to repent of our sins. If we hope to reach the next generation with the gospel, we must be able to legitimately call our kids to follow us as we follow Christ.

If our parenting and ministry never extends beyond a prefabbed lesson, if we protect ourselves from getting to close to others, and if we turn our faith on and off each Sunday, we will be able to do many things. We may have great programs, we may have huge budgets, and we may have grand feelings of accomplishment. But we will not have reached and discipled anyone. We will not have cultivated the very relationships that facilitate gospel growth.

You and me are by definition needy. Unfortunately, the same is true of our kids. We are all needy. Such is life until Christ returns! If we get to know our kids and invest in us needy people, we know what will happen. Those sweet kids and their families will begin to consume our time, our energy and our money. (And yes, we should install boundaries to protect our families and our own spiritual lives.) We must be willing to sacrifice our lunch hour, to answer a midnight phone calls, and to redirect our movie budget to the local mission center. How else will people see the gospel in action? How else can we call people to follow us as we follow Christ?

Peter Witkowski Children's Ministry

Don’t Blow Up Your Kid’s Ministry!

mushroom-cloud-67534_1920Not to scare you but your church might be close to disaster! And here is how it starts:

Someone says, “Bob hasn’t been in church very much;” or,  “Sally has not been real involved lately;” or, “Joe seems really detached over the last few months.”

Then a deacon pipes up, “How about the kids’ ministry!”

That’s right, many well-meaning church members think that the spiritually distant, the theologically misfit, and the untrustworthy Bible thumbers should all serve in the your church’s kids’ ministry. You just stick Bob, Sally, or Joe in that classroom and boom! There goes the church!

Now, at some level, I get it.  Changing diapers is a lot less influential than leading the worship team. When Bob the nursery worker gets peed on a by a screaming baby, he will not attract all that much attention. The baby and Bob maybe briefly traumatized, but church will be ok.

However, Bob the music leader who talks about how God is sometimes the Father and sometimes the Holy Spirit between songs just introduced the church to heresy. From the stage, Bob can all but destroy his local church. I get the power differential.

I understand that we don’t want unproven people leading up front. And, I understand that we need places for men and women to develop their spiritual gifts. I am all for people testing the gifts in their children’s ministry (with lots of supervision of course). I love seeing men and women grow in their teaching and organizational skills. I always want to encourage such growth. I want our kids’ ministry to be a part of our church’s greater discipleship strategy.

But at the same time, I recognize that children are not flowers, chairs, or bulletins. Children are far more valuable and precious than the day-to-day operational tasks of the church. (Matt 19:14; Psalm 127). They are also some of the most vulnerable and susceptible people in our congregation. Children often cannot voice their concerns fully. They struggle to tell us exactly why something sounds wrong. In addition, children will often be too embarrassed to discuss why their teacher made them uncomfortable.  As the people of God, we are charged with protecting our children and keeping them safe. We are called to be a voice for the voiceless (Jer. 7:5-7).

Sticking unproven and backsliding Christians in our nursery goes against the above scriptural mandates. After all, those backsliders may not even by Christians. And if they are unredeemed sinners, they will be prone to neglecting, misleading, and even abusing our children. If we invite struggling Christians to work with our children, we are inviting disaster into our very midst.

While we should want people to prove their calling within the walls of our children’s ministries, we should never want people to prove their character by working with our children. The risk of failure is too great and our children our too important!

Thankfully, God has given the modern church tasks such as setting up chairs, directing traffic, and making coffee expressly for this reason. In my humble opinion, no one needs prove his or her faith via their church’s children’s ministry.

Stand firm!

Peter Witkowski Children's Ministry

What’s Our Kids’ Ministry Looking At?

Every painting, pencil sketch, and sculpture is a representation of something else. Even the most abstract painting composed of crazy shapes is still bound by the definitions of colors and the reality of lines, angles, and weight. Art always represents some aspect of the tangible world. And the meaning of that art work is derived through the artists from the object. The subject of the paintingpainting has a great bearing on the final result.

In much the same way, the subject of our kids’ ministry will determine what our kids’ ministry will look like. If we begin with kids, our ministry will be kid focused. We will have amazing games, crazy worship times, and adventurous summer camps. We will do anything and everything to get more kids into our church. You can almost hear the chant now, “Kids, kids, kids!”

And while I desperately want families to be returned to their place of biblical prominence within the church, I think focusing on kids will actually harm the church. If we focus on kids, we most likely will win many of them to our church. But will we win many of them to our Lord Jesus Christ?

In 1 Corinthians 1:18, Paul says that, “the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing,” Later on, Paul says that unregenerate people see the gospel as a ‘stumbling block’ and ‘foolishness'(v.23). Unredeemed kids are not going to like church. They are going to find it boring. They are going to think that the gospel is an imposition to their T.V. schedule, to their social media life, and to their sports’ career.  I have had kids tell me that, “I don’t like church” and complain that church is “lame.” And I do not think these little guys and gals are the worst sinners ever. I too preferred football and toy soldiers over Sunday school and congregational hymns.

To create a ministry that is focused on these kids, we have to reflecting their attitudes in our ministry. We have to agree that the gospel is boring and begin implementing games and music that lessen the pressures of the gospel conviction. We have to make the ministry about acceptance. We must offer grace without repentance and entertainment without conviction. If we want our kids’ ministry to represent our kids, we will have to embrace a sinners worldview.  

And if we do, we will win over our kids. We will discover that kids prefer a worship service featuring pool noodles over the one where they have sit in the pews with their parents. But we have not won these kids to Jesus. If anything, we have connected with them by saying that, “Jesus is not everything; your self-centered happiness is.”

Instead of focusing on kids, I think kids’ ministries should be focus on Christ. We need to seek to replicate the gospel in our ministries. We do this by simply proclaiming the gospel. We declare with Paul that we want our kids to only know, “Jesus Christ and him crucified.” We teach children the gospel.

Now, I am not saying that best kids’ ministry is a boring kids’ ministry.  Nor do I think we should have our children’s choir members wear robes. (Yes some churches still do that.) We can use newer songs, employ great illustrations, and lead fun crafts. Anything and everything that makes the gospel clearer should be employed. We should become all things to all people, especially our kids. But our ultimate goal is not to make our kids like church. Our ultimate goal is present the gospel, “in the demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (I Cor. 4b-5).

At the end of the day, we cannot save anyone. I do not care how creative or gifted you or your team is, none of us can open a child’s eyes. Only God can grant repentance that “lead to life” (Acts 11:18). And if we want God to work if we want to see children redeemed while in our kids’ ministries, we must avoid the temptation to employ worldly strategies that appeals to our kids’ sinful desires. We must preach the gospel, trusting God to penetrate the hearts of our kids with the light of the gospel (2 Cor. 4:6).

As with the great painters, our kids’ ministry must have a subject. What is the subject of your kids’ ministry?