How to Help Include Children's Ministry Volunteers in Worship

Effective church ministry exists on a spectrum of the ideal on one side and ‘what people will actually participate in’ on the other side. Let me tease out each side of this spectrum.

The ‘ideal’ could be defined as ‘what has been proven to effectively disciple people in the past’ or it could be defined as ‘what my denominational tradition has deemed as true.’ So, for example, being from a Presbyterian tradition, several years ago some leaders at my church put together a year-long confirmation program with extensive catechesis and a thorough walk through of the biblical story led by adults who care. Once we announced the program to eligible students (of which, there were over a dozen), not one of the parents or students wanted to or had the time to participate in it. Despite catechesis being a time-honored form of discipleship, especially as led by mentor-type adults, the ‘ideal’ doesn’t matter if no one wants to receive the ministry.

And that’s why the other side of the spectrum is also important: what will people actually participate in? A church can believe that the highest demonstration of personal holiness would be a Vigils prayer service that they offer at 2am in an attempt to be as neo-monastic as possible, but that strategy is not going to have many participants.

So, ‘effectiveness’ then, is forged with knowing what the ideal is while acknowledging the starting point of reality: people’s schedules and desires. In a theology of the least common denominator, pragmatic churches often fail by setting the only bar of effectiveness with respect to how many people came. Alternatively, high-ideal churches can lament and begrudge people that never participate in their well-formed plans. Both churches are ineffective.

As such, think about this rubric any time you encounter a non-clergy or non-church-staff person pontificating on the internet about what ‘the church should do.’ Lots of people have ideals or ways to get more people in the door, but very few people outside formal church ministry understand the challenges of both.

Two Interrelated Case Studies

Recently, on the Mere O Discord Server, the Society of St. Annes, a discussion ensued about kids and their presence in worship, partially inspired by Cameron Shaffer’s excellent new book Keeping Kids Christian.

On one side of the spectrum is the ideal, something akin to what Robbie Castleman recommends in Parenting in the Pew: starting at the age of 4 kids should be in the worship service the whole time, including the sermon. On Castleman’s side is the fact that the research for this has been done for decades. Kids who watch their parents sing to the Lord, kids who imbibe the liturgy in their bones, and kids who are not cordoned off from other adult Christians are much more heavily correlated with remaining Christian into adulthood than kids who do not get that experience.

On the other side of the spectrum is reality: parents with multiple children at young ages, or parents with multiple fidgety young boys, or parents with children who have special needs of some kind. To pick just one of these examples, let’s say a mom is nursing a newborn and so keeps the child with her in the service, while also having a 3 year-old boy, and a 1st grade boy. Many moms in such a circumstance will say that church often feels like it has little personal meaning if they’re juggling all three of those children in the pew at the same time, especially if dad has some kind of volunteer role on a Sunday. Thus, many moms just choose not to come to church, because it’d be even more exhausting for them.

That’s why many churches with high ideals offer some sort of hybrid. Our own church- now 9 years old- has full-time Sunday school during our one worship service for those ages of birth through Kindergarten. For the next age group, 1st-5th graders, they come into the worship service from the beginning up to the greeting, which occurs right before the sermon. For the 30 minutes of the sermon, they go to age-appropriate Bible lessons, then return by the time the church participates in the liturgy of Holy Communion along with our closing song and benediction. Lastly, by the time a child is in 6th grade, they are in the worship service the entire time. In the Discord server, many people shared that their church offers a similar sort of hybrid, even as the ages varied slightly.

Now, when I was starting our church, this led to another similar conundrum. Having a hybrid children’s ministry on Sunday morning is still volunteer intensive, requiring a lot of adults to pull off. Worried if I’d have enough motivated volunteers to start the children’s ministry when the church launched, I remember asking for advice from a lot of previous church planters.

One church planter was a pastor in my community who had planted a Baptist church that had subsequently become quite large. When their church started, he told me that they too only had one worship service. And given how intensive their children’s ministry would be (n.b. they did not have a hybrid approach), he wanted to come up with an idea that would prevent volunteer burnout and keep them motivated. So his idea that he shared with me was that they’d offer a ‘mini-service’ for children’s ministry volunteers 30 minutes before the regular worship service. In that mini-service, they’d sing a few songs with the band and he’d give a 10 minute version of his sermon. That way, for the volunteers that would miss the entire worship service, they’d still feel like that they too got to worship that day.

When he shared that idea with me, I realized that it also helped me solve for one of my ideals: weekly Communion. You see, even in a hybrid approach, I’d have several volunteers in the birth-Kindergarten age range that wouldn’t get to take Communion on the weeks in which they served, which is arguably against Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 11. I didn’t think we could have most taking Communion while some do not. So, taking the insight from the Baptist pastor to offer a mini-service, I reasoned that that would also be a good opportunity to serve Communion in the mini-service after my mini-sermon. 9 years later, we still do this every week.

So, I don’t offer these brief case studies so that you’ll do just as I do. If you are reading this, there’s a high chance that your theology of Communion is different from mine. I merely offer these examples to help you wrestle through ministry effectiveness. Some of you need to sharpen your ideals a bit more, while others of you need to acknowledge the starting point of reality a bit more. Regardless, there may be a way to do both in your context.