Archive - Children’s Ministry RSS Feed

Alternating Between Music and Games in Main Street

May 8, 2012 in Children's Ministry, Games 1

In Main Street last summer (2011) we ended up playing games every week for about 15 minutes at beginning if the children’s ministry hour. It was fun. The students had a blast being silly and it brought some great playful energy to the large group time. And, it woke the sleepy students up and got them engaged!

Normally our routine in Main Street was to sing songs for the first 10 minutes and then on to offering, announcements, and birthday celebrations before we taught the large group the Bible story of the day. However, because of the game experiment over the summer we wanted to add that to the line up, but there was no room to put it in.

Then we had the idea…

Saul’s Conversion on the Road to Damascus

May 1, 2012 in Children's Ministry, Main Street Teachings 0

Saul’s Story

At the beginning of Acts 9, Saul is a really bad dude. He is in hot pursuit of any followers of the “Way” (Christians) and has authority to put them in prison.

On his way to Damascus, Saul was blinded by a light, fell to the ground, had a conversation with Jesus, didn’t eat food for three days, met up with Ananias, and got his sight back. Then Saul started preaching about Jesus to people! They were kind of freaked out at first because the guy who had been the ultimate bad guy was now a good guy, but could they really trust him. But he was good.

God knew what he was doing. Saul, who would later be named Paul, was going to be:

“…my chosen instrument to take my message to the Gentiles and to kings, as well as to the people of Israel.” (Acts 9:15 NLT)

What’s your story?

This story recounts how Saul/Paul met Jesus. How did you meet Jesus?

Peter’s Miraculous Escape from Prison

April 27, 2012 in Children's Ministry, Main Street Teachings 2

King Herod got a little excited that the Jews got a little excited when “he had James, the brother of John, put to death with the sword” (Acts 12:2 NIV), so he proceeded to seize Peter also.

“So Peter was kept in prison, but the church was earnestly praying to God for him” (Acts 12:5 NIV).

And then something miraculous happened. An angel of the Lord showed up and released Peter from his chains and walked him through the guards, unaware, and out into the street.

“Then Peter came to himself and said, ‘Now I know without a doubt that the Lord sent his angel and rescued me from Herod’s clutches and from everything the Jewish people were anticipating” (Acts 12:11 NIV).

The power of prayer is amazing!

Cornelius and Peter

April 17, 2012 in Children's Ministry, Main Street Teachings 2

The story of Cornelius and Peter is super important. It is the crux of the realization that God’s kingdom is available to whole world instead of just the Jewish people.

Jews are God’s special people for the expressed purpose of showing the world what God is like and being living examples of the kind of humanity God wants the world to live. Israel had had this vocation for quite some time (all the way back to the Exodus… even the patriarch Abraham).

To a Jew the world was divided into two categories: Jews and non-Jews (or Gentiles).

Peter’s vision of unclean food now being clean and the evidence of the Holy Spirit on Cornelius’ household was a realization for Peter (thus the whole, young Jesus movement) that Jesus died and rose again not just for God’s special people, Israel, but actually the entire world.

This application of the efficacy of Jesus sacrifice has huge implications from this point forward, not the very least being Gentiles can be saved from judgment, too!!

Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch

April 12, 2012 in Children's Ministry, Main Street Teachings 3

Philip is preaching and teaching about Jesus in Samaria.

Last week, Philip encountered Simon the Sorcerer in Samaria. This week, Philip is divinely directed to a location in which he ends up meeting an Ethiopian Eunuch who had some questions about Isaiah 53:7-8. After a fruitful conversation, the Eunuch ask to be baptized. Philip did and then was miraculously whisked away to another part of the country!

Memorizing the New Testament Books of the Bible

April 10, 2012 in Children's Ministry, Teachings 3

This year in Main Street we’re trying to get the students to memorize the New Testament books of the Bible. A couple of Sundays ago, we printed the names of all the books of the NT on posterboard placards and had many of the students participate in holding them on the stage and we all recited the 27 books found in the New Testament.

source Vimeo

Simon the Sorcerer

April 3, 2012 in Children's Ministry, Main Street Teachings 3

In Acts 8, a man named Simon, known in Samaria as “The Great One” or “The Great Power” believed and was baptized. When Peter and John arrived, they realized these new converts in Samaria did not receive the Holy Spirit. So they laid hands on people and they received the Holy Spirit.

Simon desperately wanted this power and offered to purchase this gift, much to Peter’s chagrin. Peter chastised Simon the Sorcerer and encouraged him to:

“Repent of this wickedness and pray to the Lord in the hope that he may forgive you for having such a thought in your heart” Acts 8:22 NIV

Simon asked Peter to pray to the Lord for him.

That’s it. That’s all we know, biblically, about Simon the Sorcerer. There are further legends about Simon that are worth reading and researching. It’s interesting.

Simon the Sorcerer [y3_w31]

Story Lesson (364.28kb, pdf)
Audio File (13.12mb, mp3)
Video Link (4.1.12 @ vimeo.com)
Video Link (4.5.09 @ vimeo.com)

This post is part of the ongoing Main Street Teaching series. Click here to view a list of the other posts in this series.

What Kind of Checkin System Do You Use?

April 2, 2012 in Children's Ministry, Technology 4

I get this question fairly often. It’s one of those questions that children’s pastors and leaders ask each other.

The Database / Checkin System is BVCMS

I’ve been on the lookout for a full-featured, web-based database system for a while, however our youth and children’s ministry could not afford what the companies were charging. So we settled on local, internal networked based systems, but they never fully met our needs or expectations. I wasn’t looking for the best, I just wanted to be able to:

Access information anywhere, via any web-enabled device
Send emails out to various lists and ministries
Have an easy, simple checkin process
Be able to create user accounts for people to manage and update their own information
Have an easy event registration system
To top it all off, we wanted all of these various functions to talk to each other.

We were doing web-based registration. That’s easy. All it takes is a simple web-form and the user-input gets emailed to whomever you choose. The problem with this is that our office still had to manually enter that emailed information into a registration document.

We were doing mass emailing through MailChimp… great, great email system… however we had to manage another database there. In order to use MailChimp we had to load emails from our on-site database into that system and then send out messages. It was tough keeping up with all the emails that were “unsubscribed” or “no longer working” etc.

We did have checkin systems before BVCMS, but they were incredibly cumbersome and complicated. I don’t know why, they were.

Enter BVCMS. This church management system provided ALL (and then some) what we were looking for in a database. And it was an easy decision to jump on board. One of the biggest reasons it was an easy decision was because the price was affordable for our youth and children’s ministry budget.

So if you are looking for an affordable and powerful online database (with a smooth checkin process built in) for your church, you should seriously look into BVCMS.

While I am promoting BVCMS, I get no $$ for doing this. BVCMS is an open-source software, which means the actual program is FREE (interesting, eh?). If you have an IT background, you can load and run this software at your own server expense. BVCMS offers a hosting option for churches that do not have professional IT departments, which is where the cost comes in. Because the program is open-sourced, the more people or churches who adopt BVCMS, the more everyone benefits. It’s kind of a self sustaining community that way!

What Does Your “Easter Eggstravaganza” Look Like?

March 30, 2012 in Children's Ministry, Events 1

I’m often asked by other churches or children’s ministry leaders what we do for an outreach during Easter and how we do it. Here’s my typical answer:

Easter Eggstravaganza

The Easter Eggstravaganza starts @ 11am on the Saturday before Easter. Everyone starts in the sanctuary where we put on a brief program for the kids and their parents:

Our lead pastor sings some goofy songs on his guitar (which he is great at!!).
Then I share a story about the “Jesus of Easter” as a certain character (in the past I’ve done Peter, Roman Centurion, thief on the cross, an angel like Arnold Schwarzenegger…)
Then we separate the crowd into two groups for the egg hunt part: typically infants thru kindergarten as one group, then first thru grade 5-ish.

We have two separate areas for them to collect eggs–one for the younger (often inside if the weather is questionable, outside if the weather is exceptional) and one for the older (always outside… piles of snow and all sometimes!).

Every year we add more and more eggs. I think we’re up to around 6,000 eggs or so now! I have middle school students help me stuff eggs prior to the day (an annual tradition) as well as help spread them in the two areas on the morning of the event.

The egg hunt goes pretty quickly.

Then we have popcorn and juice in the gym for the participants to eat while they are counting their booty. We ask people to turn their plastic eggs back in so we can keep increasing the total from year to year (but that’s voluntary). This is a good time for me to walk around and meet people that I haven’t met before.

That’s it. Really simple. We require the parents to come with their kids. We have a start time, but no end time, because it might be done early, or it might be done late. Things tend to wind down around 11:45am.

We keep the programming time really short and engaging because the program is between them and the egg hunt, so we keep that in mind so we don’t frustrate parents or the kids unecessarily.

People love it! Especially the story part! We typically have around 500 people (kids and their families).

Stephen’s Speech and Stoning

March 29, 2012 in Children's Ministry, Main Street Teachings 1

Stephen is described as a man full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom (Acts 6:3). He did “great wonders and miraculous signs among the people…[and] men began to argue with Stephen, but they could not stand up against his wisdom or the Spirit by whom he spoke” (Acts 6:8, 9-10).

Stephen was dragged before the Sanhedrin and gave an account of the Hebrew/Jewish people’s history. At the end he called them: “uncircumcised hearts and ears…who always resist the Holy Spirit” (Acts 7:51). To this the Sanhedrin were furious and rushed Stephen, dragged him out of the city and stoned him.

“On that day a great persecution broke out against the church at Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria” (Acts 8:1).

We threw paper “rocks” at a student who stood in for Stephen… it was great!