Easter is my absolute favorite. And I think it’s because it’s had the most impact on my spiritual walk—from Ash Wednesday to Resurrection Sunday.

And what I have found to be the most important way of posturing myself to help kids talk to and listen to God is to experience something. Spiritual practices or disciplines help believers to be intentional in their time with God.

What are spiritual practices?

When you hear the words ‘spiritual practices,’ what do you think of? In Adel Calhoun’s book, The Spiritual Disciplines Handbook, she describes spiritual practices as, “A place where we begin to notice God and respond to His word to us simply to keep company with God.”

Spiritual practice, simply put, is time spent with God. It’s time spent with God in an intentional, yet Spirit-led way. It’s not a program, it’s a practice. It’s something you’re invited in to. We’re simply meant to set the table for kids to keep company with God.

How are we making space for kids?

The word contemplation or contemplative comes up quickly when thinking about spiritual practices. But instead of thinking kids simply are quiet, it means they are having a prolonged thought.  

I like to remind myself that it’s more about slowing down, not about complete silence. It’s all about helping kids notice God and providing space so they can. That means physical space and space of time to slow down.

Why are these practices or disciplines important?

Well, a dear friend of mine told me about metaphor that her spiritual director used to help explain the importance of intentional spiritual practices. And this is what she said. “So, the Christian life is like being on a boat in a river. When we choose to walk with Jesus and accept Him as a leader in our lives, we step into the boat. So we’re in the boat and because of the Holy Spirit in us, and while God’s amazing grace, the river’s current carries the boat down the river. So we’re moving, but we can do more than passively ride the current. We can put up the sail and the Spirit’s wind will carry us farther and more swiftly. Engaging in spiritual practices is like putting up the sail.”

When we participate in spiritual practices, we keep company with Jesus through intentional habits and practices, and we submit to the Holy Spirit to power our journey.

Spiritual practices are a way for us to slowdown so we can join God how and where and when and why He wants us to journey.

What does it look like to make space for spiritual practices or disciplines?

Physical Space and Time

Making physical space and time leads to slowing down. In this space and time, we’re going to engage wonder and curiosity by allowing kids to use their creativity—their imaginations. We aren’t going to tell them what they must do—we’re going to ask questions that invite them to explore for themselves. 

We believe there is no junior Holy Spirit. God can speak to our children here and now where they are.

Set the atmosphere that allows them to listen for God.

Plan, But Program Minimally

Make a simple plan. You might want to include Scripture, images, music (whatever you’re using to engage their imaginations), and questions. Give space for kids to answer and explore and follow where the Lord leads.

We’re in the season of Lent, when we set aside time to pray, fast, and give. It’s the time leading up to Easter where we prepare our hearts for what Jesus has done. That is what the posture part of this is. How are we preparing ourselves? What might the season look like for the ministry you lead? It’s about setting aside time to be with God. How will you intentionally set aside time for kids to be with God?

Invitations to Respond

I’m following a Creative Companion for Lent. One of the quotes from yesterday hit me. “Lent is a time to acknowledge those things that take our attention away from God.”

Now, I’ve heard that before. That wasn’t something brand new to me, but it took on new meaning yesterday when I was reading that and thinking, “What are the things taking my attention away?” And so I thought about that, and I prayed about that and I said, “God, what is it that I need to fast from? What are the things that are taking me away from you?”

What is taking your attention away? And what could you replace it with? Maybe something from today will be something that you can try over the season of Lent for yourself or for the kids in your ministry. Maybe you’re in a church that doesn’t observe lent in a traditional fashion. That doesn’t mean we can’t all be preparing our hearts for Easter, right? We’re preparing to celebrate the resurrection.

I want you to also remember that it’s not about what is being produced, it is about the space that you’re providing for response.

The invitation to respond is the time we provide our kids is to spend time in God’s presence. That’s what it’s about.

How do I do this?

Help kids know God and respond to Him. That’s the focus. That is your benchmark. But how?

Choose things that kids already connect with. The kids in my ministry love talking about Legos, Minecraft, and Fortnite. And I will engage with them using those ideas and ask them to draw what they would hope God would see about their character. Would you create what you would look like as a character from _______ and tell me what God would see in you?

They then create these characters, and they tell me about them.

I would want God to see how much I care for people.

We have also used Legos to create prayer walls. We build our wall, and then we write on the Legos with dry erase markers so we can reuse the Legos. You could draw on them and write prayers.

Making spaces for kids to connect with God takes some trial and error. Okay? What works well for one child, doesn’t always work for another. Some other ideas you can try include the following:

(Watch the webinar for how-tos and ideas for each of these things.)

• Silence
• Reading Scripture
• Drawing Prayer
• Playdough Creations
• Breath Prayers (Breathing in and breathing out God’s truth, God’s Word)
• Movement Prayer/Prayer Stations
• Journaling
• Wondering Time
• Art Reflections
• Sensory Prayer Bins
• Poetry
• Sacred Play

Let’s proclaim to the world that children are followers of Jesus.

One Sunday we did paper airplane prayers. Everybody all ages wrote prayers. Then they folded their prayers into paper airplanes and launched them into our gathering space. After the prayer planes flew, each person went and got someone else’s paper airplane and took it home with them to pray that week for the prayer that was on that paper airplane.

Was it chaotic? Yeah. Was it worth it? 100% because we engaged in godly play in a new way.

So, if you have kids who make paper airplanes every week, turn it into a prayer practice. It’s so fun, and it’ll change your perspective.

There are so many things we can do like this that invite kids in through things they enjoy as they experience God.

How might you start? What ideas from today could be the beginning for you to incorporate spiritual practices in your children’s ministry? What could be something to help prepare the hearts of your kids and your volunteers for Easter?

For more Easter ideas, check out this article!

The Easter Storybook Coloring Pages

Need coloring pages for your family or the families in your ministry? We’ve got you covered in our new resource download from Ministry Spark, The Easter Storybook Coloring Pages.

Download your coloring pages

Free Activity

The Easter Storybook Coloring Pages

Need coloring pages for your family or the families in your ministry? We’ve got you covered in our new resource download from Ministry Spark, The Easter Storybook Coloring Pages.

Download your coloring pages

Free Activity

The Easter Storybook Coloring Pages

Need coloring pages for your family or the families in your ministry? We’ve got you covered in our new resource download from Ministry Spark, The Easter Storybook Coloring Pages.

Download your coloring pages

Free Activity

May the Lord bless you and keep you. May His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. And may He bring you peace.

When I was asked to be a part of leading our church plant, I was both ecstatic and apprehensive. While building something from the ground up wasn’t new to me, I questioned if I was up for the task. How could I do it all? Was my desire to teach children and lead them towards Jesus enough?

Maybe you are in that same place. Uncertain of your qualifications or weary of the amount of work you have ahead of you. Let me tell you: God is right there with you, and any doubts you have, you can tell Him.

I didn’t have any apprehension in saying yes, but I did have uncertainty about how this would look. Where do I even start? Beginning new ministries and programs within a church has more differences from church planting than I originally realized. However, I had a foundation for the essentials of vision, safety, and planning from my ministry experiences. What I needed to do was take time to reflect, pray, dream, and write.

A word of caution: it is so easy to jump into the details and logistics. Those details are important but the timing of when you prioritize them is even more important. You don’t want to be choosing paint colors and branding (while that is SUPER FUN!) before you have a vision and mission for your church and children’s ministry.

The order of how you do things is important.

Where should you begin when leading in a church plant?

PRAYER

I think it goes without saying but prayer. We always need to remember to invite God into our thoughts and decisions. We know that the Holy Spirit can guide us, but we need to be attuned to the Spirit. Starting with prayer and continuing to pray throughout the entire process is necessary and the most helpful.

So, pause for a moment and reflect: What am I noticing about this process right now? Where am I sensing God’s Spirit moving? Where do I feel overwhelmed? What is making me feel uncertain?

Take those questions to God and ask for wisdom as you move forward. Revisit these questions throughout your planning and stay attuned to God’s Spirit.

REFLECT and ASSESS

No matter where you are at in the process, pausing to reflect and assess is critical to movement. Just as you paused in reading this article, make sure to prioritize times of reflection. What I found easiest was setting a recurring time on my calendar that I would pause and assess what was happening.

This is helpful when so many pieces of planning are coming together at once that you need to plan to take a step back and look at what is happening. Invite others into the assessment process and reflect together. When you have trusted people around you, this step isn’t scary. They are with you through it all!

VISION, MISSION, and VALUES

It is time to start your dream phase and what better way to start than with your vision or mission statement. If your church plant doesn’t already have a vision or mission statement that is short, clear and understandable, now is the perfect time to pray and create! Your mission statement needs to be clear and broad. For many, the greatest commandment from Jesus becomes the right vision statement: Love God. Love Others.

Here is the question you need to answer: Why do you have a ministry with children? The answer to this question will be your big picture for ministry and will be the foundation for which you build your church’s children’s ministry?

After you have established your vision, you move into naming your context. Where is your church located? Who is around you? What is unique about your ministry context? The answers to these questions help you know who you are serving and what you need to consider as you create the environment of your children’s ministry.

Now you get to focus on your values or goals. These values need to flow from the understanding of your context and from the umbrella of your vision statement. What are the goals or values of your ministry? What do you hope to cultivate within the children in your ministry?

Long-Term and Vision-Based Values

These values are ones that are long-term and based on vision. Remember that how you meet a goal or support a value can change over time, but the value itself does not.

For instance, at my church, one of our values is Formation: Becoming like Jesus. In our church, this value is upheld through our focus on spiritual practices. We have this same value in our children’s ministry: We desire to help kids grow to become more like Jesus through knowing God’s Word, seeing their place in God’s story, and experiencing who God is.

We teach spiritual practices that are crafted with our kids in mind.

HOW and WHAT KIDS LEARN

This is where my Type-A children’s ministry leaders are going to thrive! You are now getting to some of the details of starting a children’s ministry. You know your context and you have your vision and values. Now, you must think about how you want to shape a child’s faith as you lead in your church plant. How do you want to shape a child’s faith?

You need to answer this question before you jump into what they will learn. You need to think about the how. And then you get to ask: What are the ways that you want to help your kids learn? What different ways of learning do you need to express in your ministry to help kids grow in their faith?

I realized early-on that I needed to make sure that I provided a variety of ways to encounter the Bible, from reading it, to seeing and experiencing it in action, to discussing it. This meant that I had some criteria for my planning and what I was looking for in teaching resources and curriculum.

SAFETY, VOLUNTEERS, and STUFF

One of the largest tasks for leading a ministry in a church plant is establishing a safe environment and having a process for onboarding and approving volunteers for serving.

These two go hand-in-hand since one of most important ways to create a safe environment is through a protection screening for volunteers. Having an application for serving, reference check, policy acknowledgement, interview, and background check are critical steps to protecting your kids AND volunteers. Make sure to check the requirements of your state as well since certain states require all volunteers to be mandated reporters. There is additional training and certification if this is the case in your state.

Check-In

Another component to establishing a safe environment is managing a check-in system. How will you ensure that when the children in your ministry are with you that they return to the proper family when service is over? Depending on how you set up your ministry, whether children are dropped off with you at the beginning of service or if they will be dismissed at a certain point in the service, you need to have a plan for safely taking kids to and from your gathering space.

TIP: Planning Center offers their check-in software for free if you are a children’s ministry under a certain size. Once you grow, they are super affordable too!

Finally, you get to do some of the details that you were probably thinking about at the beginning of this article: what stuff do I need to buy or find for our children’s ministry? I hate to break it to you, but this is a hard question to answer universally. That is because only YOU know your context.

For my context, we did not have any infant-age 2 kids when we planted. That meant that while I did not need an evacuation crib (one on wheels), changing table, or rocking chair, there was a strong possibility that I would need them in the future. Make a list of items that you know you will need day one to establish a safe environment.

The Children’s Ministry Handbook is a great FREE resource that will help you think through many of these details. This could help you immensely as you lead in your church plant.

You’ve got this! Remember, you don’t do this alone. God is with you, and the children’s ministry community is here with you too.

I leave you with this blessing:

May the Lord bless you and keep you. May His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. And may He bring you peace.

What do you want your children to know about God? And even more importantly, how do you want to help children know God? If you want a curriculum with Jesus at the center of every lesson, Gospel Light is one you must consider!

Gospel Light curriculum is built to guide children to a deeper understanding of who Jesus is through relational connection, Bible teaching, and a central focus on the gospel. It emphasizes a relational experience of evangelism and discipleship—learning who Jesus is and what it means to follow Him.

Gospel Light Points Children to Jesus

Making Meaning through Play

For young children, the way they make meaning is through play. We see this when children explore the world with their imaginations. An example of this is when we see children pretend to play house.

Have you ever seen a child play church before? Seeing a child pretend to be the pastor of the congregation and teach the Word of God to those around them is holy. While they may think they are pretending, we are witnessing evangelism. We are witnessing how they may share Jesus with others.

Isn’t that beautiful? Because play is the language of young children, it is one of the primary ways to engage them in learning. Within Gospel Light, the youngest children always begin with play. This is done through art, dramatic play, games, and blocks.

And play is something that should never stop. As kids grow, the ways they play change, but the focus doesn’t vanish. Gospel Light suggests different types of play for every age group, whether that is through a small group activity, art experience, or game. There are always active options to help engage all children.

Building Blocks to Biblical Literacy

Helping children know God and who He is starts with the Bible. This is the foundation of faith that helps us to know God’s story, which reveals to us who God is and what He has done.

While focusing on the Bible is quite common in curriculum, how the Bible is utilized and taught varies. If we want to help kids see God’s story and see their place in it, they need to read and explore it. They need to experience stories over and over again.

If a child starts from the very beginning with Gospel Light, by the time she finishes sixth grade she will have explored the entire Bible four times. The scope and sequence of Gospel Light is built to help kids grow in Biblical literacy. Imagine the children in your ministry knowing the whole story of Scripture, being able to make connections between the Old and New Testaments, and learning more about Jesus. Gospel Light supports the Biblical literacy journey.

Each age level builds on how kids will explore and engage the Bible through three main steps.

• Preschool–Kindergarten: Play to Learn, Listen to Learn, Talk to Learn
  
• Grades 1–4: Get Thinking, Get God’s Word, Get Talking
  
• Grades 5–6: Discovery, Study, Application

Not only does this developmentally appropriate, three-step approach provide consistency, it makes it easy for teachers to prepare. Additionally, worship songs are included for all age levels to help your kids engage with God and reinforce what they are learning about Him.

Personal Connection to Jesus

Within every lesson of Gospel Light, whether it is through the Bible story teaching or an activity, children are introduced to Jesus. Children are shown the connections of the story they are exploring and how it relates to Jesus.

For example, when teaching on Jesus having compassion for the widow and healing her son in Luke 7, Gospel Light focuses on what this healing meant and what it shows us about Jesus.

“When Jesus raised the young man from the dead, the people thought Jesus was a prophet—a messenger from God. They praised God because He had come to help His people. While the people didn’t understand who Jesus really was, they were right about one very important thing: God HAD come to help His people. Jesus IS the one true God, and He came to help all people, including you and me.”

Every quarter of Gospel Light curriculum includes a how-to for guiding a child toward Jesus. This all starts with being living examples of God’s love to each child we encounter and showing children who Jesus is through what we say and do. Gospel Light continually supports leaders and families in how to create opportunities to talk with children about receiving Jesus Christ as Savior. What a gift!

What Is Your Next Step?

As you explore what your children need most, don’t forget the power of the gospel to changes lives. Share the gospel and guide kids to a deeper understanding of Jesus. What will you do next?

Gospel Light

Because the Gospel Changes Lives

With our easy-prep lessons, teachers can focus on building relationships with kids and pointing them to Jesus as they explore God’s Word.

Learn more

More Related to Gospel Light

• Gospel Light Children’s Curriculum: Ignite the Fire
• Evangelism with Kids: Sharing the Good News of Jesus
• Why Every Sunday School Teacher Needs to Know Henrietta Mears
• Know How to Play? You’re Absolutely Qualified to Teach
• How to Lead Hybrid Sunday School with Gospel Light Curriculum

Children are each created to be known by God, loved by Jesus, and led by the Holy Spirit. When they know these truths and choose Jesus, we get to walk in our kingdom identity as His kids.

How should we begin this conversation in our kidmin? How can we intentionally make space for God to do the things that only He can?

Read this full article here.

What This Article Walks Through

Start with the Big Picture of God’s Big Story in Your Kidmin

In this section, you’ll discover the importance of giving kids a big-picture view of the Bible.

A Story to Live By: The Formative Power of God’s Story

To know the Story of God, we need to give context around the stories we teach and repeat the stories to help kids understand the big picture. They need to know the story so they have the opportunity to meet God in His Story.

Kids Meet God in His Story

Our kids need to both experience the wonder of God and ask their questions. Wondering and questioning are not the same thing, and both are important!

The Importance of Reflective Engagement in Your Kidmin

The Bible is full of real people with real stories. It’s impactful. But it can be more impactful depending on how we teach.

Our Own View of God Influences How We Teach

As you read stories in Scripture, what picture are you painting of God or Jesus as you read? What tone of voice are you hearing? How has your view of God impacted how you teach?

Give Kids Opportunities to Be with God

Give your kids some space to simply be with God. It’s the idea of being in this ministry with kids, rather than doing it to or for kids. They get to have a bigger part when there is space for them to be with God and respond to Him.

Worship Response in Your Kidmin Culture

Worship response offers a path for kids to encounter God, commune with Him, and then respond to Him. God will meet with them. Our job is to set the table. In this section, you’ll get some ideas on what that can look like!

Affirm Identity in Christ

We must give our kids language to know and affirm their identity in Christ and to help them live out who God created them to be. At our church, we always remind our community that “Sunday is not the main event. Our lives are the actual event.”

Read this full article here.

Wonder Ink

What if Sunday morning was just the starting point? Wonder Ink is a customizable digital curriculum and toolkit for creatively engaging kids and families in God’s Word. Wonder Ink sparks curiosity and guides children on a journey of faith through the wonder of God.

Explore Wonder Ink

Wonder Ink

What if Sunday morning was just the starting point? Wonder Ink is a customizable digital curriculum and toolkit for creatively engaging kids and families in God’s Word. Wonder Ink sparks curiosity and guides children on a journey of faith through the wonder of God.

Explore Wonder Ink

Wonder Ink

What if Sunday morning was just the starting point? Wonder Ink is a customizable digital curriculum and toolkit for creatively engaging kids and families in God’s Word. Wonder Ink sparks curiosity and guides children on a journey of faith through the wonder of God.

Explore Wonder Ink