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This article first appeared at Wesleyan Kids on September 17, 2013

I’m noticing various approaches in ministry lately.

• Traditional, contemporary or blended worship services.
• Seeker sensitive, holy huddles, and house churches.
• Chronological Bible storytelling, series-based, or topically-based.
• Large-group/small-group, rotation stations, video-based, or classroom format.
• Purpose-driven, Gospel-centered, etc.
• Family equipping, family church, family-suppored, or family educational.

There are a lot of various approaches… and the proponents of each do a significant amount of marketing and education to convince you and me that their particular approach is the best (or worse, that their way is biblical, the only right way).

Approaches to ministry and communicating the Gospel is not “The Gospel” itself.

Rather, a particular approach is a vehicle that carries the message of “The Gospel.” In different cultures and at different times a particular approach may be successful in communicating and producing disciples. And just like our modern vehicles do, they eventually break down, need to be fixed and tweaked, and at some point, replaced. There are, however, classic vehicles that do stand the test of time and last a while. Other vehicles don’t last a while. It served a particular purpose, in a particular time.

I have allegiance to a particular set of approaches that I believe best communicates and produces disciples in Hayward, WI among its children and youth, and its unique socio-economic, small, rural culture. Then, over time, test, retest and set the particular approaches that best communicate and produce disciples.

I can never stagnate and settle too long, or be married to an approach… after all… it’s just an approach. The only thing I am married to (other than my wife) is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As I discern new needs, I need to adopt new approaches and discard old ones. It requires constant change, constant tweaking, constant messing with the approach.

Understanding approaches in ministry helps a faith community deal with change.

Change is happening all around students anyway and they are used to the current of culture changing constantly. Change is not seen as negative, it is actually seen as a sign of progress and growth. It’s okay to take a risk and change something. It doesn’t have to be a big change, it could be small. But because change is a part of life as people and organizations grow and develop, NOT changing can have very serious consequences if things stagnate too long.

Understanding approaches in ministry helps a faith community deal with relevance.

If we really believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ is real and works in real life, then we need to be aware of the questions our current culture is asking then seek to address and answer those questions. The Gospel is always relevant. Our approaches help keep the Gospel answering the correct questions culture is asking, not stuck on questions it was asked 10, 20, 40, or 60 years ago. It’s just a different world.

Understanding approaches in ministry helps a faith community pick curriculum, engage and multiply disciples.

Curriculum is not Scripture. The Bible is Scripture. We shouldn’t argue about which curriculum is best, rather, which curriculum best communicates God’s message to this world at this time in this particular place. The Bible should be our core curriculum with an approach layered on top that helps with delivery. The approach engages the student and helps multiply disciples because it answers the questions our culture is asking.

Remember…

• an approach or method of doing ministry is not the Gospel itself, but is a vehicle to communicate and produce disciples
• you shouldn’t be married to an approach
• approaches are helpful in regard to change, relevance, and practical ministry decisions.

photo credit: Jon Tyson on Unsplash

This article first appeared at Wesleyan Kids on January 11, 2014

My body encountered a strain of strep that it had never seen before and it knocked me down for a week prior to Christmas. Ten days of Penicillin later I was feeling mostly better, with a twinge of an earache.

About a week later, it all came back with a vengeance! In Hayward, all the clinics are closed on Saturday, so the only option for medical intervention is the ER.

Diagnosis?

An abscess on my tonsil that I needed to have drained. Wonderful. The Hayward ER could not drain the abscess, so I had to go to Duluth (an hour and a half away), to get this abscess drained by an Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) specialist. Boy was that painful!

The ENT doctor was fantastic.

He informed me that what I had was the number one killer of people in Minnesota and Wisconsin in the 1900s. In fact, our first U.S. president, George Washington, died of the very ailment I had. Comforting. After assurance that I would not be dying of this condition, I asked the doctor how I obtained this wonderful abscess.

The ENT specialist told me that my body had probably never seen this type of step before and I was most likely run down (He was right on the run down part).

Once he realized that I worked with kids on a regular basis, the ENT doctor gave me some tips on prevention:

1. The best thing anyone can do to prevent regular infections is to get a good nights sleep and eat well. Doing these things are more important than even exercise (although exercise is not to be ignored for other problems).
2. At the end of the day, especially during the germ season, take off the clothes you worked with kids in, throw them in the wash, and take a shower. This gets rid of all the germs you have from all those little precious wonders that you don’t want making a home in your body 🙂
3. Most germs live on surfaces. The best thing anyone working with kids can do is to make sure that the surfaces are cleaned at the end of every day. The ENT doctor said that the worst thing on an airplane is not the recirculated air that everyone on the flight breathes, but rather the surfaces on the plane that never get cleaned! Boy, start thinking of all those surfaces in one’s world that don’t get cleaned: shopping cart handles, remote controls, steering wheels, public door handles, etc.
4. Wash your hands. Regularly washing your hands with soap and water, especially before you eat, is one of the best practices of those who want to stay healthy.

I am not a medical specialist, so please take these second-hand-shared ideas as tips and suggestions for how to prevent the spread of the seasonal sicknesses. I am also not a germ-o-phobe. I’ve been known to take a drink out of one of my students pop cans or chew my daughter’s gum (much to her delight!), but this ENT’s suggestions and the infection I contracted made me think more carefully about how I practice and enact healthy safeguards in my life.

photo credit: Martha Dominguez on Unsplash

How does a connect-the-dots activity, made into a contest, where a prize is involved, become a disaster?

I’ll tell you…

I wanted to do a game with the Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade students when we were doing the story on the Temple being built by King Solomon (second link). My children’s coordinator found an elaborate connect-the-dots sheet on the Internet and I thought it was perfect for what I was thinking.

It had 64 dots!

I thought this would be so fun! The plan was to give the students each a copy of the 64-dot sheet and then the first 10 students who completed all the dots and ran it up to the front for verification would get a prize: a Kit-Kat. The students were so excited about the possibility of getting a piece of candy and trying to beat their fellow students. To give some perspective, we split up the Kindergarten, grade 1 and grade 2 students into 6 small groups by grade and gender. At each small group table, there are, on average, about 7 students.

So we were ready… the students had the sheets in front of them (upside down) and a pen… and they were ready to race.

Go!

And they were off. I could tell that they were all excited and engaged. They really wanted to be in the top 10 so they could get a Kit-Kat! The first couple of students who got done were from the 2nd grade boys group. Then there were a couple more from the 2nd grade boys group. This is the point where I started to sense an impending disaster. Then there were a couple of 2nd grade girls who made it in the top ten.

As these 2nd graders are turning their completed sheets in and getting candy, I start to notice panic at the 1st grade and Kindergarten tables. There’s only a few spots left in the top 10. Seeing that the 2nd grade students were dominating, I made a quick decision to extend the prize to the top 15 thinking this would alleviate the growing panic. It had, however, the opposite effect, because it allowed ALL of the 2nd grade students to get a prize and a couple of 1st grade girls!

By the end of the game, where the top 15 had received their prize and the chance of winning a Kit-Kat had been extinguished, almost all of the 1st grade and Kindergarten girls were in tears. And you would think that a developmental specialist (as I claim to be at times) would have realized in the planning stages of this game that it would have favored the older students who could count to 64!

I had simply forgot that Kindergarten students, even most 1st graders, cannot count (without help) to 64.

I felt horrible. It wasn’t until the very end of the game, as I saw the crocodile tears of these young girls that I had made a serious miscalculation. I had mistakenly thought that this would make a great game and a fun contest. Nope. It turned into a disaster!

How did it end?

Well, I had to apologize to the students (and the leaders, because they were questioning my wisdom!). I felt so bad. They forgave me and we made the following week’s game much easier and allowed everyone to “win.”

photo credit: Scott Webb on Unsplash

“Do you think we should not use chairs today? I’ve seen children’s ministry in churches where they didn’t have chairs and the kids had room to move around and sing.”

This was a question I posed to of my children’s ministry volunteers a number of years ago. I wanted to switch things up and try something different. This wise woman, who had been doing children’s ministry for a while, shared some profound wisdom to me that I had not yet learned:

“Think of a chair as a boundary or a container. If you take that away from a child, they don’t have a natural inclination to stay in one place.”

Woah! I had never considered a chair to be a boundary. But in the many years since Miss Naomi’s wise comment, I have learned, through experience, that chairs can be an important tool in containing the energy of children. It’s like giving a child their own 2-foot by 2-foot space that is theirs to both manage and be responsible for.

Sure there are times when I don’t use chairs, but it’s strategic. It’s because I intentionally want a different environmental feel and outcome. But I’ll never forget how important a chair can be in containing a child’s behavior, and I will always remember Miss Naomi’s profound advice!

photo credit: Ravi Roshan on Unsplash

The following board report was from July 2013, which was one month past my 10-year anniversary of working at Hayward Wesleyan:

Board Report

Pastor Jeremy Mavis // July 2013

10 years ago, I started working @ Hayward Wesleyan Church. I had never been a pastor before and yet I felt somewhat confident in what needed to be done:

Teach kids Bible stories and have fun with them

After all, that’s most of what life is about when you’re a kid: you learn stuff and you play. Simple enough. 10 years later there is still that undergirding simplicity in ministry with children and middle school students. It’s tenure that tends to complicate things. Facilities need to be managed, repaired and updated. Keeping up with a rapidly changing world is tricky. Traditions need to be maintained, revitalized or scrubbed. Routines need to be stabilized, encouraged, and often have life breathed into them. The longer a pastor is at a church, the more “things” get added that need to be managed.

You see, as kids get older, ministry with children tends to still stay the same because there are always new kids to minister to. Sure the paint may change and the landscaping matures, but the simplicity of ministry with children and youth stays the same:

Teach kids the story God weaves through Scripture and how it impacts their lives, and have fun with them.

The weird part is that I feel like I’m stuck at times. Children get older and graduate from Main Street, Followers, and Youth, and Jeremy is still there in Main Street, Followers and Youth. I’ve been through a couple of cycles now so it’s starting to feel more normal, but it’s always funny to me when I see high school students and they ask me how middle school is going, almost as if I’m perpetually stuck in my pre-pubescent adolescent stage of life. Perhaps I am!

I used to do most things on my own. Sure, I had help, but most of the ministry was done on my energy, my relationship, my style. It’s only been in the last couple of years that I am learning not only the value, but also the wisdom of having multiple people directly involved in student’s lives: relaying to students the stories of the Bible and having fun. Our focus and intentional attention on small groups these past three years has not merely been a strategy shift, but rather a radical departure from a model of ministry that relies on just one person to a model that believes the more significant and intentional relationships a student has with a mature, Gospel-centered, growing-in-their-faith adult, the more faith sticks in that student’s life.

Leading, fostering, and managing small groups (both students and leaders) is a whole lot more work than merely doing the job myself. It takes a lot more leadership, humility and faith than I currently have. All the more reason to do it! Fostering an environment of small groups and training leaders to lead these groups force me to learn and grow in areas that I’m both deficient in and simply do not have enough faith in. I’m learning a lot about leading other leaders as well as learning to believe that God is charge of it all and not me. This radical shift in ministry practice is really stretching my faith and kindly forcing me to learn new things. Fun stuff.

Nursery

Our ministry with infants, toddlers and their families is great. I know running a nursery doesn’t seem all that glamorous, especially when you’re cleaning up excrement from a kid who missed the toilet, consoling a screaming child who desperately wants her Mommy, all right when service gets done and parents are picking up their children! But our nursery is amazing! Linda Waystedt excels at her calling in that room every Sunday morning. She and her staff of volunteers take their role to teach kids Bible stories and have fun with them very seriously. It’s great to watch the level of care and attention the nursery volunteers provide in that room week after week.

The schedule, routine, curriculum, environment, staff, and volunteers all work together in near perfect harmony. It’s a ministry that is running really well.

The Nursery always seems to need volunteers. So Linda always needs more people than what she has at times. It’s something we are currently looking at:

How can we provide the amazing level of care, attention and intentionality that we’ve built and have a sustainable pool of volunteers?

Main Street

If any of our children’s ministries adopts the simplicity of: teach kids Bible stories and have fun with them, it’s Main Street on Sunday morning. That’s basically the format.

When I started at Hayward Wesleyan, I created a 3-year cycle through the stories of the Bible. We eventually called both the curriculum and the environment on Sunday morning: Main Street. The first year was the stories in Genesis through Deuteronomy. The second year was the accounts of Israel’s history in Joshua through Nehemiah. The third year we focused on the stories in the Gospels and the history of the church in Acts. We did this 3-year cycle, 3 times. That took 9 years. Simple, right? Yep. And it works. I hear over and over again from parents that their students know the stories of the Bible. And not only that, but the chronological storyline of Scripture. Also, I see it in students who are in middle school and we take the stories of the Bible up a notch and learn them on a whole new level. Their knowledge of Scripture is ahead of the curve compared with other students who have not been in Main Street.

I write all of that to say that the consistency of cycling through the stories of the Bible, chronologically, is working. I strongly believe that, developmentally and the place they are in spiritually, this is what elementary students need at this stage in their lives: Bible stories (simple, dramatic, consistent, and in order).

However, we were missing something those first nine years: a connection and partnership with families. A Main Street students’ parents, unless they asked, didn’t have any idea what we were teaching. There was no “seconding” the conversation or discussion of the Bible story at home. This takes a whole different level of intentionality. So we knew we needed to add some intentional pieces to our Main Street curriculum, but I wasn’t ready to write a whole bunch of new materials yet. So I went in search of a curriculum which kept to our core strategy of chronological Bible story telling and yet had some family connection pieces. I was looking for devotional resources that coincided with the stories we were telling in Main Street.

Well, we found it. The curriculum is called “The Gospel Story for Kids.” It has 76 stories in the Old Testament and 76 stories in the New Testament. It tries to get these stories accomplished in 3 years (we’ll take a couple of months longer than 3 years). There is a children’s story Bible that has all 152 Bible stories, so a child can bring that story Bible to Main Street and be able to follow right along. And at home, a family can follow right along as well. The piece that we are really excited about is the devotional materials that accompany and compliment this curriculum. There are 5 nights of devotions for every Bible story. So the idea is that every Sunday we start a new conversation around a Bible story and the families carry on that conversation all week.

Merely having these materials available doesn’t mean people are doing it. More likely than not, families aren’t using these materials consistently. The pull of other things in our world and in our lives distract us and entice our attention away from these kinds of spiritual activities. But having these materials available is a step in the right direction. I know another step is continual encouragement and challenge. I don’t know what this looks like, but perhaps a 2 or 3 minute talk, once a month, with the audience during the 9:40am service is necessary to keep reiterating as well as challenge and talk to new families. Perhaps one-on-one conversations and maybe email communication are further strategies to explore.

Followers

Followers is this thing that can be a lot of fun. Kids LOVE coming over to the church every other Monday after school! Again, the simplicity is apparent in this ministry: we teach kids Bible stories and have fun with them. I think the children would love it if we had more fun, but we have to balance the two parts of the mission: teaching and fun.

We have a significant following of Followers each year. We oscillate between 90-120 children from year to year. It’s super fun. It’s always a challenge to manage this crowd of Followers, but the students just love it. It seems like every year we are trying and experimenting with different strategies to corral and manage this crowd of Followers. Last year we focused on small groups so we could connect leaders with students more intentionally. It worked and it didn’t work. So we’re going to try and keep the things that worked and tweak the things that didn’t work.

One thing about Followers: it’s always fun!!

Middle School Youth

With great success, we have invested significant amount of time and energy into our small groups the past three years, with last year being even better than the preceding two. We still have a long way to go and we all have much to learn about leading small groups well. I’m learning about how to better train and encourage our leaders without overwhelming them. There is so much to learn: developmental stuff going on, social things, cognitive, spiritual, societal, culture, family dynamics, peer relationships, personality traits, etc… all play a role in what makes a small group thrive or dive. It’s a lot to learn, but we can do it.

We have hired Jessica Heyworth to work part-time in the youth ministry arena. We will be combining both middle school and high school into one large group, but there will be anywhere between 22-28 small groups that make this large group smaller. Jessica brings some great ideas of things we need to be doing with those students in our church (in-reach).

There is so much I could write here about what Youth ministry might look like here in the near future and what things we are looking at doing, but so many things are still in the dreaming and planning stage that it would just be a bunch of rambling at the moment. So I’ll save this for another day.

Family Ministry

We are looking into setting some traditions and milestones (rites of passage) throughout our church body as it relates with families and children/teens.

The first is the Child Dedication milestone

We’ve developed a class and materials to walk a family through the conversation about a young budding faith-filled family. I’ve attached those resources to this report. This is done in conjunction with all the pastors as well as our faith community. Children aren’t dedicated in seclusion, rather in community.

The second is Salvation and Baptism milestone

In a faith community with children, salvation generally occurs when they are kids or teens. Once salvation happens, we need to baptize them. These are definitive moments to have intentional conversations with children and the families they are a part of. Heath has developed some of these resources.

Other milestones include:

• Purity
• coming into adolescence
• rites of passage, initiation
• the sex talk
• license (freedom) contract
• first job / handling money
• graduation