[0:00]
I'm Sandy, I've been married to Ray for 29 years. We've been church planting 23 years. What I'm going to talk to you about is children's ministry. Now whether you're sort of established in children's ministry or whether you want to begin a children's ministry doesn't really matter where you are in terms of your history. Hopefully the things and the principles that I'll look at today will be helpful. Because some of these things I actually didn't really stop and consider until about 8, 10 years

[0:30]
into doing children's ministry. And I think I did the things that most people go to first but did the things that I really should have done last. So some of the things like casting the vision, I really didn't grasp the importance of that. I knew what my vision was but casting the vision to my team and beyond. I didn't really grasp until I was about 8 to 10 years into doing children's ministry. So I want you to stop and think for a moment in terms of your own faith story at what age you came to Christ. So how many of you came to Christ under the age of 12? How many of you came to Christ between 13 and 18?

[1:18]
Okay, and the rest of you. So probably that's we're pretty much on the statistics, which is in Australia, America and the UK, 75% of people come to Christ under the age of 18. So in terms of reflecting on children's ministry and youth ministry, it is such a mission field that most people hear the gospel under the age of 18 and that's when they respond to the gospel. I'm not sure what's going to be the statistics in the next 50 years but at present that's what we have in Australia.

[1:54]
So it's interesting to think that that's when people are coming to Christ, that's what age they are. So it's interesting to stop and think as pastors of churches how much time and thought goes into thinking through both your children's and youth ministry. Because just in terms of expecting to see people becoming Christians, that's the age where you'll see the most amount of conversion growth. What I want you to do for about five minutes is look at that first page and stop and think if you had a blank slate, you're just about to start a brand new church plan, where would you put your time and energy into?

[2:38]
So it tells you to do three things. One is put ticks next to four areas that are the most important areas for you to get right before you begin. So say you're going to start a church plan and you want to start a children's ministry and you're going to start in two months time. What would be the four areas that you would stop and think through before you actually began the ministry? Then I want you to put crosses next to the four areas that will cause you the most amount of stress and conflict if not handled well.

[3:09]
So think about which of the areas that are going to cause you grief and then put a little hashtag next to the area that will continue to be a struggle no matter how big and strong with your ministry is small or big. There's one area of children's ministry that will continue to be a thorn in your side or in the side of the children's worker, the children's ministry of your church. So if you could do that for five minutes and then we'll come back.

[3:42]
Okay, we'll ask for your feedback which area do you think is going to cause you grief in children's ministry no matter if you're a church who've got five kids or a church that's got five thousand kids which area is going to cause you grief no matter what size you are. Yeah, but you can actually get that under control. There's one area that is always going to be in flux. It's always going to be in flux. Management of children, although good children's worker will put things into place and it's interesting children's workers are not stressed when children misbehaved.

[4:16]
So I've just run a children's ministry a mission for kids. We had 222 kids, two thirds of them were non church and we got some major behavioral issues that are happening. If your children's ministry person is around pegging around whole, who's coordinating it, misbehavior of kids will not cause them undue stress. I think cause them a little bit of stress, but eventually they'll actually learn how to manage kids. It's one of the things that you grow and develop in as a children's minister.

[4:46]
The thing that causes me most amount of stress was this thing called pro-presenter which was a technical thing that if I didn't have somebody who knew how to do it would mark up our presentations, but technology causes me stress. But children's ministers, they generally make round pegs and round holes and they get energized by kids and kids who are misbehaving can cause them a bit of stress, but usually they can eventually learn how to manage kids' stress and behavior. The thing that's going to cause your children's minister the most amount of stress and the thing that they're going to come to you as the senior pastor is leadership all the time.

[5:21]
No matter if you're a big church or a little church, you're always going to need leaders. If your children's ministry is growing, it's going to need leaders. You've got children's ministries predominantly run by females and females have limited times in their life where they can serve in children's ministry because they're in between pregnancies and things like that. So it's interesting that I talk with church planters and they, the issue is leadership and I talk with somebody like Curie or Bruce and they're all my peers in Sydney who are running massive children's ministries and the issue is always the same.

[5:58]
They're always talking about leadership, how to actually raise up leaders, how to recruit leaders, how to actually what to expect of leaders and you're always looking for leaders. So it's quite interesting in our staff when you actually look at the staff and the teams of people under them say, for example, our youth pastor, he's about 30 people who are directly under him in leadership. You've got our person who does it like growth groups. He is a staff member, has about 40 people who are directly 40 to 50 who are directly under him who he's training.

[6:34]
I, as the children's worker, have 90 people directly under me. That's my weekly teams that doesn't include my holiday teams, that doesn't include my mission teams. So I have effectively 250 people who at some stage in the year are under me in terms of children's ministry. So your children's minister proportionally will have the most amount of leaders under them than any other staff member. And so the issue of leadership is huge for them.

[7:05]
Okay. Right. So if you had to choose the four areas to actually stop and sort of work out where to actually begin, one of those things would be, obviously health and safety. You need to actually put those things into place because your reputation as a church is built. If you, if you have a major accident where a child is hurt or if you have a breach of trust where an adult has abused a child that can destroy a church.

[7:36]
So you need to put those things into place. But I don't actually want to start there. I actually want to start with the whole area of vision. Like Ray said, you need to have a clear picture of what your ministry is all about. And it's just as important that each ministry within your church has a clear vision. So you need to work out what it is, what it would say, shared picture of what you want to see happening in the lives of children.

[8:10]
And you need to articulate it. You need to condenser and put it in a sentence that people can remember. And that is just easy for them to capture. We simply are on about transforming kids lives through Jesus Christ to the glory of God. So our vision for children's ministry is basically we're looking at kids ministry and we're looking at the transformation that we want to see God, we expect God to do in the lives of children.

[8:41]
So transformation is simply looking at kids coming to faith in Christ, that conversion change, as well as kids growing and maturity. So we expect to see kids come to Christ and then we expect to see growth and maturity. We want kids to be fully functioning members of the church family. So if that is our vision, then we have an expectation to once they come to Christ, we have an expectation of them growing in Godliness. We have an expectation to identify the gifts that God has given that child.

[9:13]
And we have an expectation of them serving the body of Christ and using those gifts and encouraging one another. If you have no vision, then everything that you do will reflect that. So if there's people who have no idea, no shared understanding of where we're going in our ministry, then you won't move in that direction. So basically a vision needs to be articulated and communicated.

[9:46]
So we actually not only communicate it to the leadership who we invite to come and share that vision. So the children's workers that we invite to come on to our school ministry, the workers that we invite to come on to our kids club, which is an outreach ministry on a Friday. The people who are involved in our weekly playtime ministry, they're all recruited to this shared picture of what we want to see God doing in the lives of our kids.

[10:17]
We need to communicate that vision to our leadership team. We need to communicate it to the parents of the kids. And we also need to communicate it to the kids. It's very, very important that this vision is for everyone in the church beginning with the leadership, not ending there. It needs to be across the board in terms of parents. It needs to be even wider than the parents. The community, the entire community needs to see that that is our shared vision, our shared passion for what we want to see happening in the lives of kids.

[10:54]
And we need kids to capture that vision. So we need to communicate this vision. So how do we do it? Well, one of the ways that we do it at our church is that we put it everywhere. It's on all of our pamphlets. It's on our news bulletin. It's on our bulletin newsletters that we send out once a term. So we have our vision statement on everything that we send home for parents to read. We also have produced little business cards for the kids.

[11:28]
So the kids have a business card with our vision statement. And for the kids, you know, transforming kids lives through Jesus Christ to the glory of God. We've got this little chant, the chant goes like this. I'm going to say the first part of the line and then you're going to shout back the rest over. Okay. We want to see. Change by. Change through. Change through. So kids may know. And the kids all go, how great God is and they punch the air.

[11:58]
We have probably three or four times a year. We give the business cards out. The kids chant it as they go into children's church. Sometimes they've chanted it as they've gone out from the service after the kids talk in the service. And they'll chant it out. We've done it as a presentation at the end of the year. So at the end of our year last year, we had a celebration day and we got all the kids chanting our vision. We want our kids to actually capture the vision because kids impact kids. They impact other kids as they share the gospel and they impact other kids as they grow in God libous as they've caught the understanding that it is through reading the Bible that I'm going to actually get to know God better.

[12:41]
It is through that I have an impact on you as I pray my prayers out loud. As I tell stories about how I've struggled to share the gospel at school, I will impact another child in my grade as they hear those stories been told. So we want the kids as well as the parents as well as the whole church community as well as the leadership to actually capture this vision for children's ministry. Because if they don't know what it is, then there's this sort of we're not really sure what we're doing and what direction we're going.

[13:13]
The great thing about is once you've actually understood what it is that you're on about is that it actually helps you to filter all your decision making through that vision. So every and children's ministry is fraught with massive amounts of decisions. There's a lot of detailing children's ministry. And so what it does is it helps you to work out what are the big decisions and how does this vision help us to work out the answer to this particular question or issue that we have in children's ministry.

[13:44]
Now you need to communicate that vision. So that vision needs to be communicated, not just written down, you need to actually write it down, you need to communicate it like race been saying through stories. Now there's basically three questions that you've got to ask of yourself in terms of communicating this vision. One, do people see you living out that vision? So do people see that vision being lived out in your lives?

[14:18]
So as I share my passion with my leaders as I share my passion of seeing kids come to faith in Christ and growing Christ with the parents, as I share that passion to the broader church community, I'm helping them to see what that passion looks like, what's actually happening. So for example, the other day I got this letter. I went to a four day kids club and this is one of the ladies that she wrote this letter.

[14:54]
Hi Sandy and Maggie, Maggie is my other part time children's worker. Once again, thanks so much for all that you and your wonderful team have done this week. The kids are so much fun and are already looking forward to next year. I want to share with you the conversation we had with Riel last night for your encouragement. When we came home in the car, she told us that during the week she had decided that she wanted to become Jesus friend, Riel's six. And one day she was going to be with him in heaven. We talked with her some more and she said that earlier in the day she had prayed with her group and said that she wanted to trust Jesus.

[15:27]
When we got home, Wayne and I sat down with her on the bed and asked her to read the prayer from the little booklet that she had been given and then prayed with her. She read the prayer with her and then encouraged her to pray using her own words to God. She prayed such a heartfelt and beautiful prayer. She asked God to forgive her. Her sins, then she asked if she could be God's friend and go to be with him one day in heaven. She thanked Jesus for dying on the cross for her. Wow, I don't think there is any greater joy in life than seeing your own kids decide to embrace the faith that you have shared with them from the youngest of days.

[16:02]
It was very special moment for us as parents. I am not sure who Riel's leader was this week because you please pass on this so that they too may be encouraged to see the way that God has used them this week. We are so very grateful to be in a church where kids ministry is taken so seriously and our kids are encouraged and supported to be disciples of Christ. What do I do with a letter like that? I ask her for her permission and I share it. Unfortunately, I've actually been sick for three weeks and I haven't shared that letter but that will go out next week.

[16:34]
Now, who do I share that with? I share it one with the senior pastor because she has given me permission to actually share that story. So I share it with Ray and then he can actually use that to share it with the wider congregation. I also share it with every person in my children's ministry team. So that will have there will be an email that will go out to the 95 people who were on that particular mission team for that particular week. It will also go to the 89 people who were on the regular teaching teams.

[17:06]
So all of those people will get a specific email about that. I send those out by encouraging emails probably every three weeks. I'll get some story that has fed back to me in one part of the ministry. So what happens in play time gets celebrated all through children's ministry. So last year we had a woman who was invited into a nominal normal's home and she was able to share the gospel. It was a birthday party. These bengal dishly families had come into our play time.

[17:37]
It was the first time they've ever invited. She's actually Lebanese but a husband sang by sex. And so first time they've ever invited anyone who was not a bengal dishy into their home. They got invited to go to this birthday party. And in the middle of the birthday party they turned to her husband and said, and what do you do? And he said, well, I teach Christian studies in a local Christian school. And then they had a wonderful conversation about things of God as a result. Do I keep that story to myself?

[18:08]
No, I celebrate that by sharing that with everyone. So that what happens in play time gets in all the other children's ministry get to celebrate and be encouraged by that. It's interesting once you actually have a create a culture of encouragement, then you find that people, like I remember at the beginning end of term one, I was on my way out of the evening service and two people were standing at the door and said, you can't go, you can't go. And I said, why?

[18:38]
And they said, we've got to tell you what's just happened. And one of them, she was a trainee last year with me in scripture ministry. And she had a group of year six girls who were absolutely painful last year. And she just had a terrible, terrible time with this group of girls. But in term four, we invited all these girls to come to the youth group. And she took one of her kids who was one of the most painful kids decided to come to youth group. Now she's actually then taken them on and been there later with them in year seven.

[19:11]
And this girl has a non-church, comes through scripture, gone to youth group. And then for the first time turned up at evening service. She'd never stepped foot inside of a church building before this. And she was sitting next to her leader and we were having, sharing the Lord's suffer together. And this stuff got passed by her and she said, what's this? She'd never said it before she thought, what's this strange custom? You're eating bread and you're drinking, what is it that you're doing?

[19:41]
And her leader said, well, she'll remember what Jesus did for us when he died. And she goes, you know, I believe that now. And it was their first time that she was able to express that she'd actually come to faith in Christ in the middle of a Lord's suffer in her service. So this leader was absolutely over the moon that this child had come to faith. And the other leader, she stopped me because somebody in her group this morning asked a question that was just a set of discussion going off that was just so encouraging in her small group.

[20:15]
So once you actually have that culture of encouragement, you'll find that leaders want to share what God is doing in their particular area of ministry. And that will have an absolutely flowing on effect. See, the vision needs to be lived out. They need to see it being lived out in your life and they need to see it being lived out in the lives of those around them. And it actually creates a celebration of the vision. People can see what's actually happening.

[20:47]
You need to also, once you've actually understood this, you actually then recruit to the vision. Now, I don't know how most of you go about recruiting or how you've seen recruiting being done, but children's workers are very good at guilt and very good at bribery, particularly in small churches. So you tend to, so the guilt method is if nobody steps up and takes care of these kids, these kids are going to help. So that's the guilt method. We're very good at that.

[21:17]
If nobody steps up and takes care of these kids, then the kids are going to be back in church and that's just noisy. Now, that's not how you want to recruit. It's just sort of like you actually are recruiting people to solve a problem. Children are not a problem. They're actually a blessing in your church and they are part of your church family. And people, I think, a lot of adults think of children as they will become part of the church family when they grow up. But, at five, six, seven-year-olds, they're already part of your church family.

[21:52]
And some of them have made decisions to follow Christ and they are growing and maturing in that. And so to have that sort of mentality that kids are a problem and we need to actually get them out of the service and solve the noise problem and keep them entertained. That is not how you want to recruit people. That's not the vision that you want for children's ministry. So you recruit to the vision. You don't recruit because you've got a need, although as I've said, you are always going to have a need. There's always, if you grow, you're always going to have a need.

[22:23]
I need to double my primary team in one of my services next year because we're growing. So I've got to find double the amount of leaders by February next year because of growth. There is always going to be a need. People are always going to step down from children's ministry and you need people then to step up. So you feel like you're filling a gap. You know, it's sort of stopping the dyke from exploding. But it's really that whole thing. If you've understood what your vision is, then you recruit the right people to that shared vision.

[22:56]
You can recruit to not just that bribery one, particularly in small churches. I think people stepped in because they wanted to, they're worried I was going to burn out. So sometimes they step in because they're my friend and they want to help me. Or they step in because I'm looking after their kids and they feel like they should step in and look after it. It should be a shared thing. So helping people to step in because of gifting rather than guilt is a much better.

[23:33]
And you'll get long term leaders as a result of that. Now most of children's ministry is done out of sight. So a lot of other ministries, the adults in the church will actually see. But kids' ministry is often done at the same time as the morning service. So sharing the vision, articulating the vision, sharing the vision, seeing the vision lived out is really, really crucial in children's ministry. Because it's often off to the side and people are blind to it.

[24:03]
So that communication of those stories is a very, very important thing. Any questions on vision? I'm pretty sure that probably up until about six years ago that most of the people were doing children's ministry out of it. They saw a need and they didn't feel that they were gifted in that area. But they just knew that there was a need and they just stepped in.

[24:33]
What you want to do is you want to keep moving towards people who are round pegs in round holes. Finding those people where it actually fits. Who just loved doing it. A children's minister generally is somebody who is energised by kids. Now that's not to say that everyone of my volunteers are like me. But my other paid children's worker, she's exactly like me. We will go into a day, you know, four hours on a Sunday.

[25:06]
And we've got four hours of kids' ministry ahead of us. And we can go and dog tied at the end of it. We're energised because it's one of the things in that God has given you that gift that you actually get energised by the kids back. Not all my volunteers are like that. They get drained and exhausted. Majority them will feel like that. But that's probably the difference between somebody who's going into full time or part time children's ministry as supposed to just a normal volunteer. But your normal volunteers, whether they get energised by kids or not, they need to actually, if they don't see that what they're doing is teaching and pastoring kids,

[25:46]
then they will just think of themselves as babysitters. And one of the things that I got my entire team this year, and I did it at a conference, I got all the children's workers, I said stand up and I said, repeat after me, I am not a babysitter. And they all said it. And then afterwards, they jokingly said particularly your leaders who were teaching kids under the age of five, they can feel like that they're babysitters. And I got a beautiful email from a lady who did our toddlers, which is 18 months to two years of age at church at the end of last term.

[26:21]
And she was a helper in the room. So we have a team of five ladies who teach and past this particular age group. And the coordinators of this room have just got it. They really understand that they're not there for babysitting, that they're actively teaching the 18 months to two year olds. We have a teaching program for that young. And at the end of it, she emailed me and she said, you know, I was just stepping in out of need, but she said, I just didn't feel like a babysitter the whole time. She said, I felt like I was teaching, I was impacting these kids.

[26:52]
And she said, I was so surprised what they actually learnt. These are kids who are just starting to talk. And so I communicated with permission, those couple of sentences to the whole team, that she actually, by going in there, she thought she was filling a gap. She's still in need, but by the end of it, she said, I'm really going to miss that when's the next time I can serve. And that's what you want to get. I'm going to miss out on what's happening in that room because now I'm back in adult church. And you want to get that feeling of, if you've set it up with that vision and you've set it up, I have an expectation that our 18 months and two year old kids will learn in that room.

[27:28]
And I've set it up with that expectation. I've trained my coordinators that they're actually teaching. They're not babysitters. And then as that is modeled and understood, people go in and experience it, and then they go in and they go, I really miss being in that room when's the next time I can serve. That's what you want. It's taken me 23 years to get there, but that's what you want. That's what you're heading towards. You want people to understand that what's happening is that they're going to miss out if they're not involved.

[27:58]
That feeling of missing out is a really strong pull to get they can involved. Yes? Yeah. Yeah. At the moment, we're at a size where the people at the 1030, the 9, the people at the 6th, the 1030, the people who serve on Fridays, they go through your four services, got four services on a Sunday. But in the early days, it's one of the big, big issues.

[28:28]
And I'll talk about this now because you've raised it. I was going to talk about a little bit later. The biggest issue in children's ministry is it's happening exactly the same time as a service. And if you're a one service congregation, then you've, one of the issues in leadership is that they need to be fed. Your leaders need to be fed. I've heard of some people who are, they've got full-time workers who will not go back into the adults service. They are not guarding their own personal walk and their own personal, you know, being fed by the word.

[29:03]
And you've got to watch that. So I had to watch that for myself. I had to model that I needed to be fed as well as serving children's ministry. One of the ways that I saw that in the early days of NBM was I started a women's church on a Tuesday because I was doing children's and women's at the same time. And I've got some of the best female preachers in Sydney to come and feed me. So for about eight years I never heard my husband preach on the Sunday because we didn't have an evening service and I had young kids. So the way I got fed was I got fed on Tuesday and I was very upfront with my teens.

[29:34]
So if they couldn't be like me and go to Tuesday and get fed, then they could not serve for a year like I was serving. They couldn't do it. I wouldn't let them do it. One of the things that you've got to decide is how do you get your people to serve to feel like that they're not babysitters and yet be fed. And for years I used to do two weeks on two weeks off. Now that's hopeless for the kids. Not too bad for the adults. Hopeless for the kids.

[30:04]
Let's try one month on one month off. Still bad for the kids. Because you just, you know, you do a book of the Bible and you get a letter that does three weeks and then another letter that does three weeks and another letter that does three weeks. And this letter doesn't know what this letter taught and doesn't know the questions that the kids are. So there's no continuity and there's no attachment of the kid to the adult. So you don't get that pastoring modeling effect. It just becomes when am I rusted on. And the kids know it. The kids feel it.

[30:35]
So the best solution that I've, that we stumbled across was we got people to commit for a whole term, a teaching term of 10 weeks. And so for years I had my term one, press call team. It consisted of two ladies and they did term one together. They actually built up a really good friendship. They have been together now for 12 years teaching. They choose that they actually do term one and turn three together now. But they were my term one, press call team. Then they went back into church and then I got another two ladies and they worked together for a term.

[31:11]
And the language changed with my leaders from when am I on to who's got my kids now? I miss my kids and that's the language change that you want to get to. If they start talking about their my kids, their my responsibility, I miss my kids, then you've struck it with your leadership. They've understood that it's that it's not just about filling a roster and imparting kids with a bit of Bible knowledge. They've understood that it's about teaching and pastoring that they want to see the word of God applied in those kids lives, that they're expecting to see change, that they want their kids to come to them, that they're modeling Christ to those kids.

[31:48]
And once you get the my language change in your leaders, then you've then they've understood it. But, but getting them to work for a term. So that if you work for a whole term with kids, by the beginning of the term, you can do things like what do you know about the book of Mark? And they've got all these gaps in the book of Mark that some things they know, something they don't. At the end of the term, you do a quiz and you said what have we learnt and you celebrate that with the kids. And as a teacher, there's great joy in seeing that impact and that change and you can follow up.

[32:21]
Particularly because teaching is to be applied and as the kids have the word of God applied to their life, you follow it up the next week. How did you go with that? Did you actually talk to your mother about that issue that we talked about last week? And that's where you as a teacher get as much from what you've put in because you see the change that's happening in the kids lives. So I would advise you to go for teens. And in the end, if they're 10 weeks on, turn one, chances are they're actually less out of church.

[32:55]
They're out of church for a 10 week period, but they're out of church less than if you had one month on, one month on, one month on, one month on, one month on. Okay. Now, the next area that you must get right, and this is so important, is the senior pastors relationship with the children's worker. So whether you're, whether your children's minister, whether you call them the children's minister, the children's worker, whatever title that you give them, that person that's responsible for the children's work in your church, you need to work on developing a really healthy relationship.

[33:31]
Majority of children's workers tend to be female. Oh, take this off. And majority of senior ministers tend to be male. So you've got to work out a healthy dynamic of you relating well. A lot of children's workers tend to be young, single females. And they are often extremely passionate about the work that they have with children's menace in terms of working with kids. They tend sometimes to have tunnel vision, and you've got to train your children's worker to be a team player.

[34:04]
That the children's ministry is not the bele and end all. And, you know, I've had to work out that with my husband and with other staff members, you know, that we're in shared space. We have shared resources. It's not just all about children's ministry. So trying to help your children's workers who are passionate, but also to be team players and to be adaptable and flexible within a team is very important. They tend to be energised and gifted in children's ministry, but they can come unstuck in some big areas as a result of that.

[34:36]
A lot of children's workers tend to be really good at relating to kids and not really good at relating to adults. And this is where your support and your encouragement can really, really help them to develop. They can get burnt out very easily. One unrealistic job expectations. If you as a senior minister have never done children's ministry, chances are you will never get to understand their world. My husband's not done any children's ministry. He still gets blown away by how much he makes a decision and he says, okay, we have running an open day.

[35:09]
Can you run some kids' ministry activities along with this open day? And he still can't work out why it takes me so many, why that one decision now has cost me a week's worth of work. He can't understand what it takes to get it up and running. Now, it's not important that you actually understand, but that you have a listening ear. And that when your children's worker says it's an unrealistic job description, or I cannot do that job in the time, then you've got to listen to them.

[35:40]
Because there's a huge amount of children's ministry. Sometimes I say to my husband, you know what I did today? I moved stuff around and I did admin. Because there are two things that will swallow up your kids' workers' time, like you wouldn't believe. So you've got to be very careful about that. I am going to have to have some water. I've just been really unwell and I'm just feeling like I'm going to fall over. So I'm actually going to sit down for about two minutes. Sorry, I have very low blood pressure. But I don't want to faint on you.

[36:12]
Okay, so children's workers tend to tunnel vision. So you've got to be very careful about the job description that you give to your kids' worker. So if you give them too much face-to-face teaching, and not enough prep time, and they're saying that that's the issue, then you've got to listen to them. Because often they're female, they will tend not to speak direct.

[36:50]
And so if you're sensing stress in your female children's worker, then you need to be the one to gently draw them out. Because I'm unusual in that I am quite direct in what I, you know, if I'm feeling something, I'll be able to speak to it. It's also, you know, the senior minister is my husband too. So that's a different dynamic that I have. But children's workers tend to feel like they can't approach the senior minister about an issue.

[37:21]
So they'll tend to keep things in. So if you're sensing stress in your children's worker, then you need to gently get alongside and ask feeling questions how you're feeling, rather than how you, you know, to maintain, to want to step in and work out how to solve an issue. And often women just want to be heard. And if you have a good listening ear, you'll end up with a good working relationship with your female children's minister.

[37:52]
When you're launching a ministry, if you launch it too quickly, that's when you'll burn your children's workers out. So when there's a new ministry happening, or when there's rapid growth in a children's ministry, so I almost burnt out three years ago. We moved into our church building and our children's ministry doubled in 10 weeks. So I had to restructure things. Normally I make one change in children's ministry every year. I made five changes to cope with the growth.

[38:23]
I did that in two months, sorry, two terms. And by fourth term, I was almost ready to pack it in. So it's very important that you are slow to launch a new ministry. So if you have a Sunday morning ministry that's humming along, don't begin to then launch three other new ministries in the same year, or you'll burn your children's worker out. So we, I had parents asking year after year after year, can you run a kids' mission? Now we had the skills and we had the teams, but we didn't have some of the resources, so we put it off.

[38:57]
So that when we started it, we started from a really strong vantage point. So be slow to start ministries and don't start too many children's ministries all at the same time. So in the last three years, we've established three playtimes. Our kids' ministry, our Friday evening kids' ministry, was established four years ago, and we've had kids' clubs for the last three years. So we've done that in the last four years, but for the first 16 years, it was mainly making sure that Sunday ministry was really, really strong.

[39:30]
You can't launch those mid-week stuff if your Sunday kids' ministry is not working strong. So be slow to launch other ministries and watch launching too many, too quickly, or you will burn your children's worker out. The other thing is watch growth. Now it's a strange thing that happens in children's workers is that you would think that children's workers would be excited about growth, wouldn't you? More kids come into Christ, your teams are growing, but it's a strange thing that children's workers who are either employed or like me,

[40:07]
I'm not employed and volunteer worker in our church, that with growth comes enormous grief. Because as the children's ministry grows, I do less face-to-face teaching. Because what's taken my job, I'm a non-teaching coordinator, I spend a lot of time dealing with big issues with kids, talking with parents, and training my children's workers. So there is no time in the week where I have one group of kids where I am personally teaching them face-to-face, except for scripture, which is when we go into our state schools, and even then I'm training people to take over my group of kids.

[40:50]
So it's one of those strange things that children's workers who've got ministries that grow really, really grieve the growth because they don't do the face-to-face with the kids anymore, because their children's ministry is so big. So watch for grief in your children's workers, because they will grieve the fact that they've not got a group of kids at their teaching, because that's what energizes them. On a Sunday morning, I will go into the toddler room, the press call room, the cater to, the three to five. I'll be doing spot lessons, I'll do five minutes in there, I'll go to another group, I'll watch a leader, I'll give them feedback.

[41:24]
I'm moving from group to group to group all the time, and it's one of those things. I have 650 kids who know me personally by name, but I don't know any one of them, the way that I used to when I had 10 kids in church, and I grieve those days, and your children's worker will too. So watch for grief. I didn't think about that one, did you? It's a strange one. I've got a children's worker, I've been to Queensland, and she's at the point, she's such a great children's worker, and she's at the point where she so has grieved the growth that she may step down from a very thriving ministry, and go leave a church that is just growing under her ministry, and go into just being a face-to-face scripture teacher, because she's so missed.

[42:13]
She's so missed teaching kids face-to-face. In terms of children's, the relationship that you have with your children's worker, it is very, very important for you to actually understand that every person in your church, that you are responsible for teaching and pastoring them. So what I have blinded us on to that third or a half of your congregation that just happened to be under the age of 11.

[42:43]
They, you are as much their teacher, pastor, even if you don't effectively teach a pastor them. So what I mean by that is that take a strong interest in what is being taught to the kids in your church. So one of the things that I do is I meet with both my husband as he worked through the preaching roster. So our Sunday morning ministry is our two children's churches on a Sunday morning. They follow the sermon series. We've done that for 22 years.

[43:15]
So whatever raised preaching on, I'm writing material for the kids from kindergarten, five years of age, up to 11 years of age. And we're doing that week in, week out. We used to do it for their underfives as well, but our underfives grew too much. And they're not in church at all. They go straight into their programs because there were too many children in that age group for them to be effectively signed into their programs. We just lost parents. You know, 50 parents would take 50 kids out and then take 15 minutes to get back into the service and became impossible for us to manage.

[43:48]
But our teaching ministry for our primary follows the adult sermon series. And so I spend time with Ray. I work through the passage. We're doing a cleasiesties at the moment. And I will work through what are the big ideas in this passage? How do I communicate that to children of this age? And how do we effectively teach it when I've done the kids club programs as kids for your kids club program that I'm writing. That's a cyclic program. I'll sit down with him and say, these are the big ideas across four years that I want to teach kids from non-church backgrounds.

[44:22]
Are there any gaps in my teaching program? And he will go through that with me. Yes, you've covered this. Yes, you've covered this. Yes, you've covered this. You've missed this. And so I've got to write term three. We'll be on the book of Acts because there's a big gap in what I'm teaching the kids. So it's a very helpful for you to sit down. Not to your children's work or will know how to teach kids. But for you to actually sit down with your children's work and work out what it is that they're teaching the kids.

[44:54]
And that's a very helpful thing to do. In order to do that, you need to spend time with them. Particularly, it's interesting that if you employ someone to do kids' ministry, you will book time to see them regularly. But if they're a volunteer, you tend not to book time to see them regularly. And that's what was happening. I'm in Pat Lee. I'm married to the senior minister. So we were talking things on the run, but it was much more helpful for us to have a meeting time where we sat down and did focus what's happening in children's ministry, what needs to happen, what are the issues, where am I going?

[45:28]
So you tend to do it if you pay a children's worker, but you tend not to do it if they're a volunteer. And you can say, I value children's ministry. But if you don't give time to your children's coordinator, then you're communicating one that you don't care and two that you just don't value what they're doing. And if your children's worker does not feel that what they're doing is valued within the church and particularly by you as being the leader of that church, then they will tend to burn out and you won't have them long term.

[46:02]
You also need to listen to them. I've talked a little bit about that, that male female dynamic, but you also need to give them a voice and decision making. So many times before I started, now I don't go to senior staff level, but I go once a month and all the volunteer coordinators come in once a month and with the senior staff and we have a meeting together. But I have a voice now. So before decisions by senior staff or when it was just my husband, he would make decisions about what we're doing.

[46:33]
And all of a sudden, he's given me two weeks worth of work and he's then wondering why I'm stressed and I'm going, I just can't do this. I needed to have a voice when the decision was being made way back here. So the first time we ran a weekend away, he said, yeah, let's run a weekend away. And the last person he talked to was me and I had the most amount to organise because the children's ministry that was happening on that weekend away. It took me a month to get that organised and ready, whereas the person doing the food took them two nights.

[47:04]
Yes? No, we don't. And partly that was just the cost issue. It was just so expensive for families to do. We have a youth weekend away and I'm looking to run a, that's the next stage of what I want to do. I want to run a kids camp for primary age kids. So now that our kids missions are humming along, that will be the next thing that I'll be looking at. But it is the cost. They're extremely expensive to run and when we were running them, we were running them at a loss.

[47:41]
Not because, mainly because of the families. Families need to be subsidised to come. But then when we go so many families, our single people couldn't subsidise the families. It's just expensive. It's very expensive to go away. The kids loved them. They loved them. Okay. Any other questions on that? Now, we might move through the next two fairly quickly. Recruiting.

[48:14]
Now, like I've said, most people recruit at a bribery or guilt or because there's a gap in a roster. If you've understood your vision, then you recruit to vision. It is so important that you get this understood. Tonight I am running a seminar and it's just looking at this thing for an hour and a half of how to actually recruit to vision. Because if you don't get that right, then your whole leadership, which is the crux of your children's ministry, if you don't have leaders, you can't have a ministry.

[48:51]
And who do you want to get being attracted to that and how do you go about recruiting is very important. It is very important with leaders that you have an expectation. In the early days, I had very low expectations of my leaders and it really worked against me in having long term leadership. I had tunnel vision. I knew what I wanted to do. I knew what I, what vision I had. I just needed a couple of people to help me to maybe fill some paint pots and cut some things out and take some kiss to the toilet.

[49:21]
But the less I expected of those helpers, the more issues I had with them turning up on time and helping. Once I began to raise the bar on what I expected of leaders, then I got people, actually some of them said, no, I can't do it. And then other people actually then thrived and stepped up to the plate. And the higher over the years, my leadership expectation has grown and grown and grown. You don't want it to be so high that it's impossible, but don't set your bars so low.

[49:56]
I don't have, I have trainee roles, but I don't have any helping sort of roles. Everyone who comes in is training to be a leader. So everyone is on a trajectory of moving forward. And that's where I see them. It's interesting. One lady, we now have coordinators of each section of our Children's Ministry on a Sunday. So I have two toddler coordinators, a 9-10-32, preschool coordinators, two infants coordinators and two primary coordinators.

[50:27]
And moving people into those coordinating positions is an interesting thing. I had one lady, she was brilliant with the preschoolers. And she just was such a natural three and four-year-old leader. And we needed to create structures for growth, so I stepped her up into a coordinating position. After about a month, she came to me and she said, I hate it. I absolutely hate this role. And I said, what is it about it that you hate?

[50:57]
And she said, I don't, I spend my time managing the room and not interacting with the kids. I spend my time interacting with parents at the door and not down on the mat with the kids playing and talking with them about what we're learning. And she hated the step up. So then stepped her down and stepped another lady up. And working out how to actually recruit and what the expectations are and where people fit in those roles is really, really important.

[51:27]
And it's often, give it a go. Let's see where you come unstuck and then change it around. I had one lady who stepped into primary teaching and she had five girls. And by term three, she was tearing her hair out. She said, you know what? I hate Sunday mornings. I said, why? She said, my kids, my girls, they're so caddy. They're awful to one another. They're just, I don't know what's happened to them. And hormones hit your five girls like you wouldn't believe. And they do become very destructive in relationships.

[51:58]
And she couldn't stand what was happening to her girls. She hated the dynamic. And she said, and I, she just clashed with them. And she said, I am not good at children's ministry. And I sat down with her and I said, okay, Joddits, take me through. What is it about kids that you, you know, that you're, you know, good at doing? And she described some of the things and I said, I think you're in the wrong age group. I said, I should think that the way God has built you, you'll be really good with the preschoolers. Now at the beginning of the year, I didn't pick that and she didn't pick that. She said, I don't think so.

[52:29]
I don't think so. Anyway, she, she lasted the end of the year because she was a godly woman. Tried to love those girls as best she could. She started the next year. She said, I'll just do term one and term three in the preschool room. I'll just give it a go. I'm not doing full year. She did term one. At the end of it, she said, please, I want to do full year. Can you, can you make it happen? I love this age group. I love my kids. She was just in the wrong age group. So trying to work out where people fit and what expectations that you have and clarity is extremely important, what you expect of leaders.

[53:00]
I've written an entire book which I make all my leaders sign, which I have lost. Here, I have a leadership book. That's my manual. And depending on your role in children's ministry, you have to sign a leadership commitment form. The first part of that is all about your personal godliness. The second part of that is how you're going to protect your own walk. In other words, what service, what growth group you're going to be in.

[53:32]
All that sort of stuff. And over the page, it's a signature that if you're a coordinator, then you have read this number of pages within this book. And so my expectations are absolutely upfront with my leaders. I'll take them through. You can see that's in .form, the expectations of children's workers across the ministries in our church. That's a lot of information for people to keep in their head. But that's the detail that children's workers get lost in. And it's this absolute maze of what's risk assessment. How do I train my people in risk assessment?

[54:07]
What's safe practices? What screening do I have to do for my children's workers? Absolutely not near the admin and procedures that you have to put it in place. But you need to be very clear with your leaders what you expect to them. And so my holiday teams, they have to sign off their red certain pages in this book because I can't communicate to all my people all these expectations. Clarity is extremely important in children's ministry. Training. You've got to train your workers. So that's formal training as well as demonstration. So I do formal training of children's workers. I do seminars, but I also do ongoing training.

[54:45]
So I have got by the end of term, by the beginning of term four, I will have met. So I will have sat in on every children's worker at the Sunday morning, the two services and watch them do a small group at least once in the year. And I spend time with each of them. They know I'm coming in. They jokingly say to one another, you know, it's the worst Sunday of your life is when Santa comes in and watches. So they joke with one another, but they, but they then affirm one another. They say, no, you know, it's really important. It's really valuable.

[55:20]
I have this mantra. Feedback is my friend. I stole it off my husband. And I get them. I ask for feedback when they see me demonstrate. And then if they don't give me feedback, then I self critique myself. And I say, no, actually I could have done this better. I'll know this worked okay, but what about this idea? So feedback is is your tool and your friend. And the way I work with the person, this is my rule of thumb. I sit with them after immediately after they've done this small group or done the kids talk or whatever it is that I'm observing.

[55:58]
And I sit there and they're expecting me to come out with everything that they did wrong. That's what they're expecting me to say. But the first thing I say is you tell me what you did that you were happy with. And they go, oh, I wasn't expecting that. And it just relaxes them. And they, and they, some of them say there was nothing that I did that I was happy with. And I go, stop and think, what is it that you did that you did well or what is it that you did that caused a good response in the kids?

[56:28]
So they start talking. And then I say, what is it that you did that you would have liked to have done better? So they're learning to critique themselves. Then I come in and I say, this is what I saw that you could have done better. And I end with this is what I saw that I absolutely loved that I think you're doing a fantastic job. So it starts with them being positive, going to negative, maybe negative and going to positive. And I only ever say one thing on the negative. So it's one thing and an area and it needs to be specific and concrete. You notice that when you, that the kids all started talking to another or rolling backwards or flicking each other or whatever.

[57:10]
So it's observable. What I saw in the kids when you did this. How do you think we could fix this? So feedback is very, very important. It takes a long time to train a leader, particularly in our area. So what age do you begin? Well, in the school holidays, this is what happens in our school age program. So kindergarten to years five, they watch your kids talk in church. There's teaching every Sunday. Then they go out and I've got, you know, all the kids from that age group in front of me.

[57:42]
So they can have 100 kids in front of me and they're all sitting there and I say to them, we talk about the kids talk. I get one or two up to pray and then they all go into small groups. And what I do is I identify kids within each age of children's ministry and I say, Rachel, could you get five kids to come to you and then I go through and I nominate leaders. Kids who I've seen have come to Christ and are growing in Christ and they form small groups and every holidays, they're in those small groups. There's no leader in these small groups.

[58:16]
It's just kids leading kids and the kids actually get the whole kids to do what they do with their leaders during the term, which is they pray twice. They pray once about what they've learned in the kids talk and they pray about whatever they like. So you get Rachel. She's got converted at five at six. I've identified that she is a growing leader at six years of age. So this is Rachel's first time. It was her parents that were in that DVD. Rachel at six. This is for having last school holidays. I said to Rachel, could you get five kids to come and pray with you?

[58:49]
Great. She's been asked to be in leadership for the first time. She's six years of age. She gets five kids to come to her. She sits them down and she says to them, right. Now, what did Sandy just say? What do we just learnt? And then she re-irates what the big idea of the kids talk wasn't there. I was listening to her doing. She goes, OK, now I don't think we know you. Would you like to introduce yourself? Make sure everybody knows one another because that's what she's seen her leaders do. Then she goes, OK, we're going to pray. Now, remember what Sandy said the first time we pray about what we've learnt. If you don't want to pray because you're new, that's OK. But everyone else, we pray.

[59:22]
And then she goes around and they will pray, including the new child at this particular point. And then she says, they finish and this is OK, now we can pray whatever we want. OK, let's go. And then they will go around and pray. Now, I train leaders from that age upwards. I'm expecting to identify kids who are growing and leading in that area. At the end of it, Rachel comes up to me because some of the other groups are still praying. She says, Sandy, we're finished. Would you like me to get them to play a quiet game while the other kids are finished? That's good to go. She goes, OK, we're going to play heads down thumbs up. I'm going to be really quiet. I'm training her in leadership. I'm only identifying. I've got other kids who come up to me and say, you haven't chosen me.

[1:00:01]
And I'll say to them things like, well, you know, when I've seen you in your small group, you're a bit rude to your leader. I said, I'm looking for people who are listening and respecting their leaders. That's why I'm looking for when I'm looking for somebody to lead a prayer group. Train from a very young age. OK, we're going to have to stop it. There, aren't we? Is that right? Sorry? Best of? Yeah, yeah.

[1:00:35]
Yeah. I do want to go to parents though. Let's go to, this is one thing, making sure that your leader, your leadership structure is stable and able to cope with growth. So people need to know who's got their back. They need to know who is going to step in when there's an issue with a child. They need to know who's got their back when it comes to parents. So it's very important that your leadership structure, your children's work needs to know that you've got their back when an issue comes with a parent.

[1:01:12]
I want to move on to parents and just say that there's two very important things we'd understand that this is some areas that parents, that children's workers can have blinders to and also that they can come on stuck with. And the first thing is that children's ministry needs to have an eye to the parents. Most kids ministry is just focused on the kids and they forget about the parents. But kids ministry happens for an hour or two a week. The rest of shepherding and pastoring those kids happens 24 or 7 with the parents.

[1:01:46]
And so part of the role of a children's minister is to actually have an eye to the parents. So our mission statement is, our mission is to supplement the families role in giving children every opportunity to become Christians, then to mature, becoming active partners within the body of Christ. We don't want parents to abdicate their role to us. And two often children's ministries can be set up where the experts will teach your kids. Just leave it to us. You do not want that happening. You want your children's ministry to actually supplement what's happening at home.

[1:02:17]
So in order to do that, you've got to inform your parents about what you're teaching. You've got to work at how you can equip your parents to do the job of teaching and pastoring their own kids, because that's their primary ministry. You've got to resource those parents. Don't just send them to a Christian bookshop and hope they come out with a good Bible. You've got to do that work for them. And so partnering with parents is really, really important. And most children's workers do not have a vision to the parents or they're threatened by the parents. And they don't have kids themselves. So they feel like they've got nothing to offer to the parents.

[1:02:53]
So having that partnership idea is really, really important. And this is the area that children's workers can come unstuck within the early days. They'll eventually have enough experiences to work out how to do it. But there is a lot of parenting styles. So the parenting styles that come unstuck in community are in particular are the attachment parents. So any parent that does probably the extreme forms of attachment parenting will tend to come unstuck in communities.

[1:03:26]
Because attachment parenting particularly is very child-focused and the child determines a lot of what's happening in their world. And so when you've got parents coming in and you've got a program where you sign the child into the program and the parents can't stay, then you can get some issues actually happening because the parents won't separate from their child unless the child is totally happy. Now most children have separation anxiety. My son, our son was probably the only child that I've ever seen that has stood there and said, you can go down, Mummy, at three years, two years of age.

[1:04:03]
He turns around, most children cry when their parents leave. Now you can get parents who say, if my child asks for me, I want you to come and get you. Now that's unworkable in a community. You can't be going out every time a child says, I want my mummy and just going into the service and getting them and coming back and getting them and coming back. Because you abdicate your responsibility to all the other kids in the room and it becomes unsafe because then your ratios are wrong. So I have a crying policy which parents who say, doesn't matter how long the my kid cries for, I don't want you to get me. You can't have that as a working model.

[1:04:41]
And you can't have, if my child is a little bit unhappy, you have to come and beat me. It doesn't work. So in community, parenting styles have to compromise because you're in community. And so I have a crying policy. If the child cries for more than five minutes, parents have to come and get them and they have to then settle them then the following week. They can't stay in the room because they're not being approved. They need to come back the next week. Now that communication of that can get really awkward with some parents, but you need to work through those policies.

[1:05:13]
Okay, now I'm not going to get through all of the other stuff on that sheet, but is anyone got any other questions about all the other issues that are going to come up in children's ministry? I haven't even got to what are you going to teach the kids and how you're going to teach them? Yes? Yeah, yeah. I started off with much more females. It's interesting. I, there is a phenomenon that's happening in church, and that is if you have a female leader and it's a mixed group and it's boys from six years of age upwards, then 20% of the boys will pray.

[1:05:57]
If you have a single sex boys group and a female leader, you'll probably get about 40% of the boys praying. If you get a single sex boys group and a male leader, 80 to 100% of the boys will pray. It is phenomenal. It is phenomenal. And it's not determined on the quality of a leader. You can have a really brilliant female leader and you'll have the same statistic happening. And it is one of those things that I have worked so, so hard to get males into children's ministry. We have males teaching males from year one upwards in both our services now, but it's taken me 21, 23 years to get to that.

[1:06:41]
But it's phenomenal. You just… Yeah, I get the male leaders to go and recruit and tell stories. I just go, or I get the male. Anyone who wants to, most people have no idea, I just say, come, they start talking to me about children's ministry. I say, come, I can talk to you about children's ministry, but that's not going to convince you to do it. Come and have a look. My present primary coordinator, she did not have a clue about children's ministry. She came in, she observed it. And she said, I have…

[1:07:13]
She watched a year, five girls group and they read the Bible and she said, they're actually doing a mini bubble study. She said, what were you expecting? She said, I thought you just play games and do a bit of craft with them. But she actually said, they're actually reading the same passage that I'm reading with my growth group in a different version. But they're actually wrestling with the word of God. They're praying, they're applying it to their life. And she said, and then the kid she heard the kids pray. And she said, you know, we're not praying like the kids are praying. The kids are praying through the passage. She said, how do they do this? You know, why are they doing it? And we're not doing it as an adult group. And then I said, so you're interested in kids, and then she said, absolutely.

[1:07:50]
So part of the recruitment process is actually getting people to come along and see it, and particularly males. Males need to come in and have a look at it because it's just, you know, an unknown area. Right? No, I haven't mentioned that. Yeah. No, I'm training, where am I going? Bundera Presbyterian tonight is really looking for looking at coordinators and how we cast vision. And tomorrow it's three training things, one on God's purposes in the church.

[1:08:22]
And the next one is on helping parents shepherd their kids. How do you, the children's workers do that? And the third one is the skills based how do you teach memory versus getting scripture into kids heads? So, yeah, if you want more information, that's on the website. If you're a Geneva push church plant, then I offer two years free membership on kids wise. Kids wise is the website where I publish all the material that we use in church. And there are three sections to kids wise.

[1:08:53]
One is membership, which has got school age programs that teach books like Leviticus. We did that last year. That's just about to be published on there or books like Genesis, books mark, all of Matthews on there. And so that school age program, there's also a store there, which has many movies. So we create, I get professional chalk drawers and we make speed drawings. So there's a number of those on there. There's also cyclic programs for under fives and kids clots, which are in the store. And then there's a section on the website called training. And so that's where you can book me to train or you can book into training.

[1:09:32]
So if you're interested in training, that's there. But if you forget kids wise, you can just Google my name and it should come up. Yes? We've done it in children's church. We don't call it Sunday school. We call it children's church. So whenever we've, you know, because we follow the adults, sermon, serious, if we've come across passages, we will actually do it. They'll do it in their small group. This is school age kids. So kids from five years of age upwards. And we do it the same way that we do it with adults. If you love the Lord Jesus and this is for you.

[1:10:07]
And you can take a piece and we've also done it in church. Just gets a little bit logistically awkward in church because our kids are going out and just the numbers. But we have at times brought the kids back into the service and done it if it's holiday program or or that. And we usually encourage them to go and sit with their parents as we do that. But yeah.

[1:10:39]
Yeah, we did talk about that a little bit earlier. So the structure that I suggested was that you have term teams. So you get people who are committed to working as a group. And they take on that term and then they go back in and then they don't serve until the following term. If they do first term of this year, then they do first term of next year in the same age group. Because it usually takes any volunteer. By the time they get to third term, they are all ready to pack it in.

[1:11:12]
And I go around and I said, look, this is the worst term. They're tired. They're depressed. If they've got issues in their small groups. If they haven't worked out that leaders lead and they're not there to be the kids' friend, all of those issues that come into play when you've got volunteers who are stepping up. If they've not learned management of kids' behaviour, then by the time they get to third term, then you've got a whole stack of them that are tired and exhausted and want to give up. Never recruit. Go around asking to recruit for the next year. I never ask any of my workers until it has been sunny and Sydney for 10 days.

[1:11:47]
So it's usually the 10th day of September. If it's been sunny, that's when I last started asking, would you like to serve in 2014? I won't ask. I won't have any conversations with anyone until the sun's hit them for a few weeks. So yeah, you might be recruiting later. But I'm going to the UK in November. I don't know when they recruit. I can't get any sun. It'll be interesting. But it's seasonal. So your workers are exhausted in term three.

[1:12:19]
So you've got to be very careful of your term three teams that are wrong. Because they're tired, exhausted. There's a lot of sickness. It's the killer term. So don't recruit until late third term, early fourth term. So you're going to be working on the next year and then you're going to be working on the next year. That's one of the reasons I started kids wise was to actually because people were asking me for my program. So I put it on there. So there's probably four years of primary age. Sorry, there'd be about five or six years of primary age resources that you could use on a Sunday morning on that website.

[1:12:56]
And there's four years of sort of after school programs and two years for toddlers. So two years for preschools on there. And there'll be a program on their next year for toddlers that we're developing at the moment. You've got to work out. You know that whole thing of partnering with parents. You've got to inform them about what you're doing. One of the reasons why I like the model of and I say this tentatively of us following the sermon series is that every Sunday morning, like on Sunday, I'm going to stand up and I'm going to give a kids talk on Leviticus.

[1:13:31]
Okay, I'm doing. Sorry, we're doing Cleezy Asties, aren't we? We're doing Ecclesiasties three on Sunday. Parents are doing it in their growth group. I'm teaching their kids about it on Sunday morning. The only part of children's ministry that my parents get to see regularly is the kids talk. So I'm giving them a parenting seminar every time they come to church because my kids talk is there to inform the parents to give them the language with which they can actually go home and talk with their kids and begin a discussion. And that's one of the reasons why and I'm modeling to them how to actually go about doing that. And so every Sunday morning, I'm doing a parenting seminar, although the parents don't really realize it, but I put it up front on my newsletters.

[1:14:15]
Why not talk to your kids about what what you what you both saw in the kids talk this way. It's up front. It's on the agenda. I want them to actually see that I don't want them to abdicate that responsibility to me. I'm actually now equipping you to go and talk with your kids. Last year we did Leviticus. I gave them definitions of a time that I gave them definitions of the priesthood. I unpacked those big words so that they could use them with the kids. Now the issue is that you will burn your kids' work around. If you say, okay, let's scrap everything and I want you to write programs that fit my sermon series. That will kill your children's worker like you wouldn't believe because my children's workers are good at teaching, but very few of them are good at programming. It's a different skill set.

[1:14:56]
So what you can do is you can do the model where you do some kids talks and some songs or memory verses over the turn. So one week it's, I'm going to, we're going to teach the whole congregation, the memory verse that we're teaching the kids. We're going to teach the whole congregation the song we're teaching the kids, which holds this unit together. So you can do bring things into the service which inform and help the parents to do their job at home. Which give them light to what you're doing in the kids program. You can do the model where the kids talk, follow the sermon series and then the kids go out and learn something different.

[1:15:34]
A lot of churches do that or you can do our model which is you follow the sermon series both in your spot in church and your spot out. But just be very careful that you don't burn your kids' work around. Can I just say if you're interested in these, they're not on kids wise, but they're on our MBM website. And I've kept them there since I started. These are parenting newsletters and there are resources in there. There's also things on 10 tips which are parenting tips. So if you want to go and have a look, you can have a take a couple of these as well, but you're most welcome to take them and adapt them to your church.