Here’s an excerpt from our interview with Salvos, whose leaders and their team, build their health and vitality through initiatives such as this.
Read the conversation below.
NCLS: Can you tell us more about creative innovations in ministry?
DT: And we see that God is doing more innovative work in children’s ministry too. Steve and his wife have all these great new ideas all the time. Do you know how long he’s worked here for?
NCLS: Since he was 19.
DT: Yes, that’s right. So, I’m going to say it’s something like 15 or 14 years he’s worked here for. Last week he said, I think we’re going to do kids TV and during the week can put things up on social media or email out to parents. And kids doing things and saying what they learnt, it’s a way of engaging people during the week, not just weekends.
He and his team totally revamped the way we did children’s ministry. This has been marvellous.
We used to have three Sunday Schools and each would have its own set of leaders, and they’d do a programme together. But, Emma, his wife, she just felt like some of the boys should come up and they hated it. Kids would come along and they’d just hate it. The boys would just muck around, they don’t want to do craft.
So, she said, I wonder if we could have streams where kids choose each week what they want to do and how they want to learn?
Now, the kids go out and then they have time together. Anyone in primary school, so prep to year six, they all come together then they break into streams so they can do outdoor adventure, conversation corner or imagination station.
If you want to go outdoors, say they’re doing something about building the temple or something, they might have boxes and they go and build a temple and they talk about it. Then at the imagination station they might have Lego or something creative. And then conversation corner, they might have the bible there and the kids that want to talk about it just sit in a circle and talk about it and read stuff together.
Each of the leaders then go and manage different stations. Generally there’d be an adult leader on those ones, but then there’d be the junior leaders, the under 18s will come and be mentored a little bit in that process as well. So, it’s much more intentional and that’s how we do it on Saturday night, but they only have two streams on Saturday night because they don’t have the number of leaders necessary. That’s been hugely creative and innovative and the kids much prefer it.
For the boys or girls that just want to be outside, they can go outside for most of it, they don’t have to sit and make paddle pop sticks things or something. But you’ve got to have leaders and enough volunteers to do this with as well.
