7 Things for a Better Children and Youth Ministry - Outline

Nearly 5 years ago now I worked as a Children and Youth ministry Consultant for a Mainline church (think generally lots of older people not so many younger people). The job involved hanging out with a church for about 5 weeks and rethink how they can do children and youth ministry in their context. My friend Derek and I worked pretty hard on the process so rather than let our hard work sit on my hard drive I thought I’d post what we did here.

The process looked something like this…

1. Visioning day 1 (large group of concerned people) – Looking at what it means to do Children and Youth Ministry and to generate collect ideas about children and youth ministry.

2. Drafting mission statement (C&Y team) – then presented at church, this statemnent was related to the church vision statement and was really a way of distilling what the church was on about and wanting to do. Usefull when others might say "we need to get the sunday school back to where it was 10 years ago" we could say no what we want to do is (insert mission statement).

3. Visioning day 2 (large group of concerned people) – look at common ideas/themes, finalise a mission statement, explore possible programs or review current programs, and their ability to meet the new mission statement.

4. Draft Action plan – presented to church with mission statement for comment.

5. Finalise action plan (C&Y team)

6. Discuss training and resources to carry out action plan.

Easy huh?

Well one of the keys to get people thinking differently about Children and Youth Ministry was to look at 7 myths of Children and Youth Ministry. They were titled…

1. Numbers vs. Ratio

2. Age vs. Relationship

3. Program vs. Relationship

4. Entertainment vs. Faith Development

5. Success vs. Faithfulness

6. Isolation vs. Incorporation

7. Preconception vs. Reflection

I'll go through each of these myths over the next month or so.