How do we help kids adjust to all the changes of moving to high school? Kids are going through a lot, but some churches sometimes miss the opportunities to help kids move from kids ministry (often on a Sunday morning) to a youth ministry (often on a Friday Night). Chris Jones and Annemarie Rivers from Youthworks help us think about this.
What We Discuss
- What are kids going through as they finish Year 6?
- Kids finishing kids ministries well
- Youth ministries “catching people” well
- Three key things to make sure you’re doing well
Tool Box
Al James’ Workshop from Reach Australia National Conference
174 Kids Church to Youth Ministry with Maddie and Derek
Credits
This Episode was brought to you by Youthworks
The One Thing is brought to you by Reach Australia
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Transcript
The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service.
Good day.I’m Pete Hughes and welcome to The One Thing, a podcast designed to give you one solid, practical tip for gospel centred ministry every week.
The One things brought to you by Reach Australia and we’d love to see thousands of healthy evangelistic and multiplying churches all over our country.And you know what makes a good evangelistic church?A great evangelist, the Unified Team and we have a great new programme out called the Team Development Programme.
Jump on the website, check it out.It is really a great, great programme and you will may well benefit from it.All right now, if you keep listening to the end of the podcast, if you endure a right right to the end, you’ll know that we always ask for suggestions and you’ve bought them.And the single biggest request that we’ve had is how do we help people transition from different demographics to others.
We’re going to be over the next few weeks, that’s what we’re going to be looking at.We’re going to be looking at how to move people from youth to young adults, from workers to retirees.There’s a whole bunch of different transitions that we’re looking at.But today we are looking at transitioning kids from kids ministry to youth ministry.
And today we have some guests with us from Youth Works.We’ve got Chris Jones, who I know is CJ but who is a youth ministry advisor, And I have Anne Marie Rivers, who is a kids worker.Sorry, kids Ministry advisor.I’ve got that right now, haven’t I?
Yeah.Welcome guys.Thanks Pete.Great to be here.Now we’re talking about life transitions and things like that.Have you guys been through a recent life transition?Well, yeah, my family married, got three kids.We’ve moved house recently, so that’s a bit of a transition, big up and change.
And our eldest son changed schools just over a year ago.So yeah, bunch of transitions going on.Yeah, yeah.Yeah, Yeah.Emory, have you been through any transitions of late or you things have been pretty stable in your life?Well one transition has been my eldest son has finished school so he’s actually at uni now and I still can’t believe I’m that old or that he is.
But it’s been a big transition, actually, to learning how to parent an adult.A young adult, isn’t it just yes, I know that feeling and I do feel for you in that whole thing, but.Thank you.Yeah.There are big transitions and there are big transitions to life.But for now you press play on another episode of the One Thing Helping kids transition to youth.
Today’s podcast is brought to you by Youth Works.Youth Works is a Christian, non for profit organisation based in Sydney.They seek to equip and empower every church to run effective youth and children’s ministries.They collaborate with local churches, schools and organisations to orientate young people for life in Christ.
Find out Morehead to youthworks.net and now back to the podcast.All right, the Bible doesn’t really think in terms of categories of youth ministry or kids ministry.It’s often kids and parents.
What should we be thinking about this?I mean, why should we be thinking about youth ministry and kids ministry at all?So, Joe.Yeah, it’s, it’s a really good question.And and you’re right, the Bible doesn’t talk about kids ministry or youth ministry.In the Bible, we just see the church, the the body of believers meeting together.
But what we do see there is actually the Bible speaks really clearly of young people being part of the body of Christ.And so we see that right throughout in the Old Testament.You know, passages like Deuteronomy 6 are really helpful for us in thinking about the importance of God’s people passing on their faith to the next generation.
And we we see that consistently throughout the Old Testament.And then in the New Testament, young people are very much considered as as part of the body of Christ.We see young people having having key roles.Timothy, for example, we, we don’t know he’s age, but he was a young person who had a significant position of leadership within the church.
And so young people are very much part of the body of Christ.And so the question then, I guess for us today is how do we, how do we best raise mature disciples of Jesus who are young people, right?We don’t want to wait until they’re old enough for that.
We actually want to want to start that process while while they are kids, while they are youth.And how do we best do that?Well, age appropriate, a developmentally appropriate ministry structures can actually help us to do that really well.But we also need to be careful there.
We need to be careful that when we do that in our churches, we’re not siloing off kids ministry or youth ministry as an end in themselves that that have somehow become really disconnected from from the rest of our ministry structures.And so I think I would want to say that that a really effective kids ministry or a really effective youth ministry is actually one that’s highly integrated with the bigger picture structures and and pathways of the whole church.
That’s really helpful just to just to think that kids and youth, it’s about disciple making.Yeah.I think sometimes we just lose sight of that because the kids are off somewhere else or the youth are off on Friday nights and we’re just not seeing it.But it is actually an important part of disciple making.Now we we want to talk particularly about moving kids who particularly year six moving into high school and that that’s there’s there’s so many changes.
There’s the change of schooling, there’s a hormonal changes.Anne Marie put us in the shoes of a year six kid.What?What are all the changes that are taking place there?Well, yes, spot on.There is just so much going on there and I think one thing that’s worth remembering is just that every child is different.
And so kids will experience all of these changes at some point, but it will look different in each family and even birth order effects how how kids experience this change like moving from year six to year seven particularly is that because?
If they’ve got an older sibling, they’ve seen someone do that so they know what’s going to happen.Whereas if they’re the first born, I’m the first born, so I had to break the ice for everyone else.It’s just a bit harder for them.Is that what you mean?Yeah, that’s right.And I think it it’s both ways too.Like for that first born, it’s they’re the first ones doing it.
So unless they have cousins or other family friends that they’ve seen, but also the parents.So the parents haven’t done it before.And so you’ve got a different level of anxiety perhaps.You know, there’s always guilt in parenting.There’s a lot going on for parents as well As for kids.Yeah.And so like, like you mentioned, there’s the hormone changes, the changes in their body.
There’s also a lot going on in their brain.So it’s basically during these years, the brain just culls a whole lot and restructures a whole lot.And that just means things are really changing in the way they perceive the world, the way they experience things, what’s important to them.
And even it does in a sense feel like you’ve got a toddler again as they start high school, like you might remember when your kids are younger, they don’t necessarily eat everything in their lunch box during Kindi.And it’s the same in year seven actually.Oh really?
Send them to school and they come back with full lunch boxes because they’re so busy just processing and interacting and learning new interactions and doing new things and thinking new thoughts and meeting new people that they forget to eat.So it really is, in a sense another another stage of childhood that’s like the toddler years all over again.
And this generation they’ve got on top of everything else, they’re sort of part of that COVID generation, aren’t they?Because they were really only just starting primary.So although they were sort of early in school when COVID hit.And has that affected their social interactions, do you think?I think so, although it’s hard to pin that down to any specific data yet.
I’m sure we’ll have some as the years pass.But yeah, the kids in year six this year were in year two in 2020 during the first of the COVID lockdowns.And I think, I mean, the usual thing that we would think of is the social interactions.They’ve had less social interactions, less practise interacting with lots of different people.
And I think that is a big impact.But also they’ve had less time
