Children’s Ministry: Big, Crazy Ideas and How to make them happen
Growing up, I have always been a little “out there” when it comes to how I see and experience the world around me. My personality is loud to say the least. So much so that my family used to joke that a picture of me as a child didn’t exist without my mouth open. Since entering adulthood, raising 4 children and being called into the ministry my mother has confessed that she used to pray when I was growing up that God would somehow use my difference to glorify Him. Prayers were answered through my call to ministry, first through volunteering with teenagers and later through volunteering and eventually leadinging in children’s ministries as the Director of Children’s Ministries. (That’s my “official” title)
Volunteering in children’s ministry was unlike anything I had ever done. The Director at the time was great and I learned a ton from her with the most important thing being to just take a breath and have a plan but expect it to change. I had been volunteering for a few years when she announced that she was stepping down. Long story, wrestling with God, (He won) and a different blog later, I was hired as the new Director of Children’s Ministries at the very church that I had grown up in.
Let me just say that, as I mentioned, I learned a lot from the previous director but we were two very different people. I didn’t want to uproot a perfectly good children’s ministry for the sake of being different but I also knew that change, when prayed on and carefully planned, can be a good thing. So, I prayed and began to plan a slow transition of what the Children’s Ministry was to what I felt like God was calling the ministry and I into.
Jump forward a bit and the crazy train was rolling full steam ahead. What kind of crazy are we talking about, you ask? Let me tell you if it was out there, affordable and I could talk my pastor into it, we did it.
The Mud Pit
When I first started volunteering in the children's ministry the director came to me and asked if I thought we could do our own summer camp. We had very few options where we lived and the kids had several complaints about the camps they had previously attended. It sounded like a fun challenge and before I knew it I was answering. “Sure we can,” the words came out of my mouth before I knew what had happened. My first two camps under the previous director were great learning experiences. My first camp as the director came with some hurdles. The camp we rented was doubling in price and I didn’t want to have to charge the kids double what they had paid the year before so “camp at church” was born. I went to the pastor and asked what he thought about me having camp at the church. Let me just point out how blessed I am to have a pastor who supports my “out there” ideas. He thought it was a great idea. We would sleep in the classrooms and have worship and lessons in the sanctuary, we have plenty of land for outside recreation and I had found an option for showers through a nearby ministry with a shower trailer.
Now just to plan EVERYTHING! Theme…check, volunteers…check, speaker…check, swim time at a church members pool...check, not finding a curriculum to fit my crazy theme…check, writing my own curriculum to fit my crazy theme…check.
Now being the “out of the box” thinker that I am, I knew that if I was going to sell camp being at the church to all the kids, I was going to need some pretty amazing and crazy activities. Enter “The Mud Pit.” Our theme was “Walkabout,” as in the Australian Aboriginal walkabout. What better way to experience a “rite of passage” themed camp than mud games. Now to just convince my pastor to agree to me creating a mud pit on the land behind the church. I figured the cost of laying down a barrier, having a dump truck load of top soil brought in and keeping the ants out of it until camp could start. I tried to answer any questions that could be thrown at me and then made the appointment to meet with my pastor.
He said yes……..He said YES!
Camp was amazing that year. I had over 70 kids at that camp. Some of those kids are teenagers now and they still stop me in the hall and ask if I remember the mud pit. It was so great we revived it the next year even though it didn’t really match our theme. The point is to think BIG, think out of the box and just ask. What’s the worst thing that could happen?
Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches
You read that right. Enter our FEAR FACTOR themed winter retreat. I had stumbled upon this great curriculum that centered around conquering fear and 2 Timothy 1:7. I loved the T.V. show and wanted to base our activities around some of those ideas. We did some blind taste testing of some weird sodas, rolled the dice and put our feet in some pretty questionable concoctions and had to blindly trust our team through some blindfolded challenges. Sticking to my true form I knew I could do a better job of really making “conquering our fears” a tangible thing that the kids would forget.
If you have ever seen the show Fear Factor then you know they use Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches several different ways; everything from being buried in them to eating them. (Calm down. I didn’t feed roaches to a bunch of kids.) I did go back to the pastor and get permission to order two Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches for an object lesson (and photo ops). It needs to be said that my pastor in particular is not fond of anything creepy or crawly and I was given two very important stipulations before ordering. 1. I could only order them if they were delivered to and lived at my house before and after the event. 2. They would at no time be in the church and more importantly anywhere near his office. I love my job so these were very attainable.
A few short weeks later I received two male Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches. My kids and I lovingly named them after “Men in Black” characters Edgar and Neeble. When it came time to introduce them to the kids there were obviously very different reactions. Everything from “whoa cool” to “absolutely not Mrs. Kim.”
At the end of the retreat, everyone, including some of my very reluctant adult volunteers had all posed for a picture with Edgar or Neeble and conquered a fear or two along the way.
Both of the above scenarios are big crazy ideas. Some might even say a little too crazy for their taste. So why is it important to think big and sometimes crazy? Kids today experience everything of a grand scale and are rarely impressed with or remember things that don’t jar their senses in some way. I am glad they remember crab walking through the mud pit and holding a giant hissing cockroach for a picture but more importantly I hope that when they remember those things, that the Bible truths and life applications that accompanied them come flooding back with them. I pray that God used my big, crazy idea to leave a lasting stamp of Him on their lives.