Planning for future children's ministry

If you were asked, ‘What is your church’s long-term spiritual development plan for any child born into your congregation this year?’, what would your answer be?

Little could contribute more to the long-term wellbeing of any church than a well thought-through plan for the children’s work that reflects the strategic significance of children’s ministry. And an effective ministry plan for children will integrate it firmly into the overall strategy of the church. Doing this will not only massively enhance the productiveness of that church’s children’s ministry, but of the whole church as well.

Since its inception in 1993, Teaching and Training Ministries (TnT) has striven to resource and equip people to teach the Bible to children and teenagers more faithfully and more creatively. This involves helping people to understand the need to have an overall plan for children’s and youth ministry — we call this the all-important ‘18-year timeline’.

Coming to Christ

As with any successful school curriculum, we believe that an effective children’s and youth work programme should be implemented as part of an overall strategic plan. And the different components that make up that programme should also help individual young people to grow and deepen their faith from one year to the next. Surely the hope and dream for any church must be that, given ideal circumstances, a child born into the congregation this year should come to know Christ as they progress through the children’s classes. He or she should then learn and develop further within the youth ministry in order that they can all make significant contributions to the church. There they will, hopefully, eventually aspire to leadership and teaching responsibilities and will, after many years of devoted service and gospel partnership, have their memorial service conducted there too!

Now, it will probably never happen like that, especially given the transient and mobile nature of the world that we live in, but TnT’s plan is to sow the seeds, at an early age, of what will turn out to be mature Christians and lifelong disciples of Christ. Of course, no structure will ever achieve this apart from the gracious work of God by his Holy Spirit, but there does need to be a plan. And it’s around this ideal — at least for the first 18 years of their lives — that we endeavour to help churches build a children’s and young people’s programme that systematically progresses them, as they grow up, in what should be a seamless flow where each stage builds on what has gone before.

Fruit

Because we are all youth and children’s work practitioners at TnT, experience has shown what can be achieved when we start a formal Bible teaching programme with children as young as 18 months old. We have also seen what results when children have spent most of the first 18 years of their lives being taught the Bible in this comprehensive and systematic way. They are much more likely to grow up to be mature, committed gospel workers and ministry partners. So the time when some churches do little more than keep their children occupied in a crche should instead represent the key opportunity for laying the necessary groundwork from which many strong and mature Christians should, eventually, emerge.

Another important aspect of the training that TnT offers is equipping the volunteer children’s and youth worker to handle the Bible with integrity. This has to be done in an accessible way, but when it is, it has extraordinary long-term benefits, both for the workers themselves and for those to whom they minister. TnT also tries, throughout its extensive range of teaching materials, to make the teacher engage with the actual text of the Bible rather than merely parrot the published resource book. TnT is convinced that when God’s Word is applied by his Spirit to people’s hearts and minds, their lives are completely transformed. One Sunday school teacher who has been using the material said that she felt guilty because she suspected that she was learning more than the children as she engaged with the Bible in her weekly preparation. But that is exactly what we are out to achieve! TnT is quite sure that one of our key goals must be to grow the teacher, so that they may teach their children God’s Word as faithfully and effectively as possible.

For more information about TnT, visit http://www.tntministries.org.uk or email rory@tntministries.org.uk

TnT Ministries

Coming to Christ

Fruit

Rory Bell

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