Category Archives: Ministry

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How to Deal with Difficult Kids

When I was new to children’s ministry, one of the most challenging things for me to deal with was kids who misbehaved. I so wanted difficult kids, all kids actually, to like me and parents to think well of me. I avoided hard conversations with kids and parents. What I have come to realize is that by avoiding those hard conversations, I was not partnering with parents, and I wasn’t acting lovingly towards their child. Over time I learned you could be fun and firm.

Before we talk about correcting kids, there are a few things you need to remember about most parents.

  1. They love their kids
  2. They want their kids to do well in life
  3. They need help and don’t know how to ask

When we talk about disciplining kids is not primarily about managing your classroom; it is about discipling families. What we are called as the church to do is not turn undisciplined kids into pillars or moral virtue. We are called to preach the gospel and make disciples. In the radically individualized culture, we live in, we are so often seduced by the idea that I can grow in my faith and into Christ. The scriptures tell us that sanctification doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It occurs in the community.

Blogger and author Tim Challies says it this way:

I need to grow in holiness not just for my own sake but out of love and concern for those around me. If I love the people in my church, I will grow in holiness for their sake. I am prone to think that holiness is an individual pursuit, but when I see sanctification as a community project, now it is more of a team pursuit. I am growing in holiness so that I can help others grow in holiness, I am putting sin to death so I can help others put sin to death. My church needs me and I need my church, and this is exactly how God has designed it.

Tim Challies

We can not have a personal relationship with Jesus apart from the context of the community God provided and Christ inaugurated. Disciplining children is gospel work.

There are a few different types of kids workers; most people fall into one or more of these categories.

  1. Freddy Fun – You want to play games have a good time, and your solution to most discipline problems is fun, games, and prizes. (This was me.)
  2. Debbie Doormat – You let kids walk all over you because you don’t want to be harsh or unloving.
  3. Ned the Nonconfronter – Lets kids get away with everything because he is afraid of kids not liking him and parents getting mad at him.

Is there help for these three? Yes, there is.

Come Prepared

Classroom management starts during the week with your prep. You can’t manage your classroom and try and prep at the same time. You need to prep during the week, so you know what you are doing, and so you are free to deal with issues as they arise. Freddy fun – you can’t truly be fun unless you prepare truth to make that fun have meaning. You can’t be fun over time without taking the time to grow in your abilities. You want kids to sit and pay attention? Prepare during the week, so you have something to say during the weekend. This should only take 20 to 30 minutes.

Understand Grace and Understand Work

Something easy to forget when working with kids is not that they need grace, that is quickly apparent. What is easy to forget is we need grace and have received it in Christ. When we remember we have received mercy, we are much more likely to give it to others. You also need to know that what we are doing is not easy, but it is meaningful and so relevant. That as you work, it is Christ who works with you, for you and in you.

How do you Correct Kids in Light of Discipleship

How do we correct kids in Uptown? 1. Warn 2. Redirect 3. Warn 4. Remove. The only exception to this would be if physical with leaders or kids. If this happens, they are to be removed instantly. Make sure that once kids are removed, you affirm them and thank them for coming this week and tell them that you can’t wait to see them next week!

Follow Up

When removing a child from the classroom, I find getting the parents to come to the classroom is much more effective than bringing the child to the parents for several reasons.

  1. When you get the parents (or page them) and bring them to the kids, you can explain what happened. When you bring the kids to the parents, you lose this opportunity to talk with the parents and explain what we do and why.
  2. I find when parents are communicated to, they understand and are more willing partners in the discipleship of their kids.
  3. Parents having to leave the service to deal with their kids makes them more focused and more intent on not having to do that again.
  4. Follow up with a conversation next week, an email or phone call. Make sure parents know that our desire is not to punish their child but to make their child more like Christ.
  5. If a situation is beyond you, make sure you contact the kid’s pastor or ministry leader to deal with the issue.

Bottom line: The goal of managing a classroom is not to have well-behaved kids but rather to conform our kids into the image of Christ. We want disciples, not just good citizens.

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When You Say Easy They Hear Unimportant

We live in the golden age of children’s ministry curriculum resources. Lessons that were once written by teachers who were not professionals but did what they had to because children’s ministry curriculum was no-existant or challenging to come by. We now have the opposite problem. We have more options than we have ever had. The difficulty is finding the right one for our church. We have video-driven curriculums, free curriculum, curriculum that is written by our denomination we have fun ones and others that are more serious. Yet despite their diversity, each of these curriculums has one thing in common. They all claim their curricula are “easy to use.”

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The technology that has promised to give us more free time seems to be consuming more than it provides. We have our kids doing more activities, and we are busier than ever. We as kids ministry leaders get this because it’s true of us as well. So when our curriculum providers do the heavy lifting for us, we don’t argue. When they tell us their curriculum is easy to use, we dutifully pass the message along. How do I know? I have done it. The problem is that when we say “easy,” what our volunteers hear us say is “unimportant.”

We unintentionally build a culture that requires very little from our volunteers, and what we get is not discipleship for them or from them. What we get are leaders who love kids but see what we do as just another thing they do rather than the most important thing. Jesus commanded us to go and make disciples.

Lots of things are discussed in the kidmin community, like how to make our programs more fun or pull off events on a small budget. There is nothing wrong with these discussions; what I am becoming more aware of is the reality that very few conversations are centered on discipleship and Christlikeness. Christ commanded us to do one thing make disciples Paul obsessed over one thing, Christlikeness. We should likewise obsess over these as well.

How do we change the conversation from ease to importance?

  1. Change our vocabulary. – Please don’t say we need your help; it is really easy. Explain that what you will be doing isn’t easy, but it is meaningful. People want to make a difference. If they feel that they are not making a difference, they will quit.
  2. Don’t do all the heavy lifting. – Challange the people you lead to prep during the week to think about the kids they will be teaching. Challenge your leaders to prepare what they are going to say. Challenge them to pray for the kids that will be there that morning.
  3. Don’t look at those you lead as volunteers filling a hole. – Look at those who are volunteering as a person who needs to be discipled, just as much if not more than the kids they are leading. Often people don’t disciple others because they have never been disciplined themselves. Show them what discipleship looks like by disciplining them, don’t just tell them to do it.

People want to make a difference, not fill a hole. Let them. Don’t make things easy. Teach them how to do what they do well so they will push through the difficulty and become good at what they do. In pushing through and growing as a leader, they would become more proficient in what they do that they make complicated things, and stressful situations look easy.

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Are Our Kids Going to be Ok?

I came across a video the other day that as a parent of four digital natives shook me. It was an ad where three generations of a family were asked: “When you were a kid what did you do for fun?” The resulting answers are sobering, to say the least. Watch the video below and we will talk after.

Smartphones are a gift in that they allow us to present with those we love. They are no longer a gift when they isolate and separate us from those who God has entrusted into our care. They make life easier but rather than provide more time to love those God has placed us with the very device that frees us and our time turns on us and devours the very time it freed for us.

Andy Crouch says it this way in his book The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place “Technology, with all its gifts, poses one of the greatest threats ever conceived by human society to the formation of wise, courageous persons that real family and real community are all about.”

Technology is not evil when it serves us. It becomes devastating when we serve it. The single most devastating element of Technology is it isolates us and creates for us a virtual community of people who we can only know casually and never know intimately. We call people who share the same political ideals on twitter friends and go months without driving across town for a barbeque with the best man from your wedding.

We were made for presence, but so often our phones are the cause of our absence. To be two places at a time is to be no place at all. Turning off our phone for an hour a day is a way to turn our gaze up to each other, whether that be children, coworkers, friends, or neighbors. Our habits of attention are habits of love. To resist absence is to love neighbor

– Justin Early The Common Rule

Parents this is something we have to get right. Yet it is something that is so difficult because the very devices choking our children have a stranglehold on us as well. We have become so pleasure focused and pain averse we don’t even see the fact that we are numbing ourselves and making ourselves unable to feel unable to love the very people God has placed us in community with. We are unable to be present because we have forgotten who we are.

When we can’t answer the question of who we are in silence, we can’t answer it in public either, and our insecurities spill out into the world in the form of manipulations. We hide our confusion behind a posture of perpetual offense. If we are opposed to someone or something, that’s enough to create our identity for the day, which is to say we use others so that we can get the temporary identity we need. We don’t know who we are, so we make others feel the pain of our insecurity.

– Justin Early The Common Rule

Parents if we want our kids to answer the question of what did you do for fun as a kid differently we have to give them a different example. We have to give them a better story. Rather than teaching our kids to numb their pain electronically teach them, they were made for the love of God and love of neighbor. Kids remember what they see far more than what you tell them.

“Imitation is a far stronger principle with children than memory. What they see has a much stronger effect on their minds than what they are told”.

– J.C. Ryle

If we want our kids to live a different story we have to practice the gospel and preach the gospel. To apply the gospel to the lives or your kids you need to know what they are facing so you can point your kids to Jesus. The problem in so many families is parents are too distracted scrolling Instagram to listen to their kids and kids are to distracted by games to talk. We need to give our kids the gift of boredom. When you are bored you eventually create a creative way of escape. This is how kids develop critical life skills. When you as a family put down your devices your kids will get bored they will eventually start talking to you and you will actually listen because you are bored too.

Our electronic addiction is not the worst problem our world has faced because there have been many others that are far worse. It is, however, one of the more sinister problems because so many of us don’t see it as a problem. We were meant to be more than the amount of like we can manufacture with just the right angle of our selfie. We were meant for real lasting eternal connections with the family God has placed us in.

At the end of his book challenging families to rethink how they use technology, Andy Crouch ends with this sober challenge to be present.

We are meant to build this kind of life together: the kind of life that, at the end, is completely dependent upon one another; the kind of life that ultimately transcends, and does not need, the easy solutions of technology because it is caught up in something more true and more lasting than any alchemy our technological world can invent. We are meant to be family—not just marriages bound by vows and the children that come from them, but a wider family that invites others into our lives and even to the threshold of our very last breath, to experience vulnerability and grace, sorrow and hope, singing our way homeward. We are meant not just for thin, virtual connections but for visceral, real connections to one another in this fleeting, temporary, and infinitely beautiful and worthwhile life. We are meant to die in one another’s arms, surrounded by prayer and song, knowing beyond knowing that we are loved.

We are meant for so much more than technology can ever give us—above all, for the wisdom and courage that it will never give us. We are meant to spur one another along on the way to a better life, the life that really is life. Why not begin living that life, together, now?

Andy Crouch

So how do we change our kid’s story? Here are a few practical suggestions.

1. Filter your internet – Our family uses Circle by Disney it is a game-changer.
2. Limit your time – decide how much time is appropriate for adults and kids and keep each other accountable. – We don’t use screens at all on the Lord’s Day and when we come home from school and work we put our phones in a box still on so we can have undistracted availability.
3. Turn off all notifications – I did this a while back and it has been a game-changer for me. I only get notifications of text messages that’s it.
4. Delete apps that take up lots of your time. – I enjoy social media but when I look at my screen time report on my phone and see that I am spending more time than is wise for me to spend or am in a season I need to focus, rather than deleting the social media accounts I just delete the apps on my phone that make them so easy to access.
5. Remind yourself that restraint and control create freedom, not oppression. – You are free to use your phone for its many good purposes when your phone isn’t using you. The control allows you to love God and love neighbor. It allows you to treat your phone as a good gift rather than as a poor functional savior.

Here are a few resources I have found helpful.
The Tech-Wise Family
The Common Rule
Parent Chat
Liturgy of the Ordinary
You Are What You Love

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Training Kids to be Truthful and Kind

At the risk of sounding like a nerd. I remember reading the encyclopedia as a child. The encyclopedia salesman came to the door and sold us a set. I loved it. It was the internet before the internet was cool. I had something many kids didn’t have I had a private stash of information. What I thankfully didn’t have was a platform to share that information I had gathered about historic events, strange animals and various states. This generation more than any other has more information at their disposal and more opportunity to share their ideas than ever before. Knowledge plus platform minus the humility that failure and difficulty over time bring is a recipe for arrogance and self-reliance.

When I was growing up information was hard to come by now information is everywhere. Growing up sharing what you have learned was not easy now with the advent of social media everyone has a platform. The job for parents when I was growing up was helping lead your kids to information. Today parents are no longer curators of information but clarifiers of truth.

As a pastor and a father, I have come to realize that if I don’t teach my kids someone else will. What we teach our kids today is not primarily information that can be found elsewhere we need to teach our kids how to use the information they have acquired. We have to give them a grid that will enable them to interact on social media and other online platforms that don’t feed the ego and the subtle arrogance that knowledge and opportunity bring. We have to teach them what no one else will. If we want our kids to be a meat eater and a bone spitter we need to teach them clarity and charity.

What are meat eating and bone spitting? It is the ability to in every conversation and situation look for what you can learn, look for what is true rather than trying to win every argument. If you have been on social media we have a massive problem in our country that is more than Democrat/Republican we have informed or misinformed people who think they are right and are hell-bent on making sure they do not lose an argument. What we need more of is not information. We need more clarity and more charity.

The first thing we need to teach our kids is clarity. Is it true? Is what they are reading is what they are saying true? We have a generation that is ruled by their emotional response to any given situation yet they have failed to stop and ask “Is this true?” Truth is not relative there is objective truth. As Christians, we believe that objective truth is the Word of God. We have to teach our kids to check their ideas, information, and presuppositions against what the Bible tells us the truth is. We do this by pointing them back to scripture over and over again. We do this by personally showing them how we filter our political, moral, and spiritual decisions based on what the bible says over what someone tells us we should say or do as an “Evangelical Chrisitan”. Clarifying for our kids what is true will help them properly filter information that they are given or come across on their own. If they are not clear on what is true they will belive a lie. If they don’t have an external filter for the truth they will believe things about God and themselves that isn’t true.

We would rather be certain we are right than charitable with those we disagree.

The next thing parents have to teach their kids is Charity. Modern culture has traded charity for certainty. We would rather be certain we are right than charitable with those we disagree. In our online and offline interactions, we need more charity. Charity is achieved over time through the crucible of pain and the realization that we don’t know it all. Without charity, we will produce a generation that is convinced they are right and will never learn how wrong they are until it is too late. Charity is more than an attitude towards others it is manifested in neighbor love. When we no longer have to live to one-up our “enemies” on facebook we are free to learn from them and ultimately love them. Jonathan Edwards said this in his book Charity and her Fruits. “Do not make an excuse that you have not opportunities to do anything for the glory of God, for the interest of the Redeemer’s kingdom, and for the spiritual benefit of your neighbors. If your heart is full of love, it will find vent; you will find or make ways enough to express your love in deeds. When a fountain abounds in water it will send forth streams.”

If your heart is full of love, it will find vent; you will find or make ways enough to express your love in deeds. When a fountain abounds in water it will send forth streams.”

– Jonathan Edwards

The greatest gift you can give your kids and the kids you pastor is the twin girds of clarity and charity. Is this true and is this kind? Information is superabundant truth and kindness are not. May we raise kids who collect information and in an attitude of charity spit out the bones of untruth and cling to the meat of truth. May our kids grow in their knowledge but grow even more in kindness and truth.

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Who is Responsible to Disciple my Kids?

Is it the church or me?

Discipleship is something parents and pastors need to take seriously and engage in together. When I first started in kids ministry over twenty years ago, the primary discipleship of children was the responsibility of the church. Over the past ten years or so the pendulum has swung from the church being primary to the church pushing parents to be primary in the discipleship of their kids and the church cheering them on. The result has been in my opinion less discipleship.

The answer to the discipleship of the next generation is not either or but both and. How can the church be intentional about discipline kids and how can parents make church an important aspect of their kids lives because of that. At the same time, how can parents disciple their kids more intentionally and how can the church resource and encourage that?

Why church discipleship is necessary

If you crush whatever initiative you set up for parents to do at home, you will only get at best 25% to 30% participation leaving 70% without the benefit of your discipleship resource. If we only view discipleship as parent driven and avoid things like VBS and other church driven initiatives many kids will miss out. Another issue we need to address is some kids come to church with grandparents or friends, and their parents will never be the primary disciplers of their kids. As kids grow, their friends will have more influence on them than their parents. As a community of faith, we need to provide a place where kids can grow in their faith even if it isn’t a value at home.

Why home discipleship is necessary

The modern America family is more transient than ever. People move to different states, different churches, different denominations like never before in history. We may never have them long enough to develop their kids and nurture their faith so we need resources they can take with them on the journey. Particularly early in life parents have more influence than anyone else on who their kids are becoming. Parents need encouragement and help.

Here are some things we try to do at our church to disciple kids.

  1. New City Catechism each week from preschool to college.
  2. Story-Based Discipleship class for Jr. High Kids.
  3. Small Groups
  4. Internship
  5. Worldview/Theology Immersion Week
  6. VBS

Here are some things you can try at home to disciple your kids.

  1. Family Worship – We use this book at our house.
  2. New City Catechism – Why Catechism? 
  3. Reading Classic Works with your kids – Leland Ryken has some great books to help you navigate the classics – Also Karen Swallow Prior’s new book would be helpful
  4. Spirit led conversations
  5. Student Discipleship Guide

The goal of discipleship is not what we do to be acceptable to God but rather how is our conformity into the image of God affecting our life and practice. How are we intentionally forming the loves of our kid’s hearts? James K. A. Smith says it this way

“Jesus is a teacher who doesn’t just inform our intellect but forms our very loves. He isn’t content to simply deposit new ideas into your mind; he is after nothing less than your wants, your loves, your longings.”

This happens on purpose, not on accident. Not overnight but over time. May we as pastors and parents be curators of hearts rather than only informers of intellects.