Leading in a Church Plant: Starting Children’s Ministry from Scratch

When I was asked to be a part of leading our church plant, I was both ecstatic and apprehensive. While building something from the ground up wasn’t new to me, I questioned if I was up for the task. How could I do it all? Was my desire to teach children and lead them towards Jesus enough?

Maybe you are in that same place. Uncertain of your qualifications or weary of the amount of work you have ahead of you. Let me tell you: God is right there with you, and any doubts you have, you can tell Him.

I didn’t have any apprehension in saying yes, but I did have uncertainty about how this would look. Where do I even start? Beginning new ministries and programs within a church has more differences from church planting than I originally realized. However, I had a foundation for the essentials of vision, safety, and planning from my ministry experiences. What I needed to do was take time to reflect, pray, dream, and write.

A word of caution: it is so easy to jump into the details and logistics. Those details are important but the timing of when you prioritize them is even more important. You don’t want to be choosing paint colors and branding (while that is SUPER FUN!) before you have a vision and mission for your church and children’s ministry.

The order of how you do things is important.

Where should you begin when leading in a church plant?

PRAYER

I think it goes without saying but prayer. We always need to remember to invite God into our thoughts and decisions. We know that the Holy Spirit can guide us, but we need to be attuned to the Spirit. Starting with prayer and continuing to pray throughout the entire process is necessary and the most helpful.

So, pause for a moment and reflect: What am I noticing about this process right now? Where am I sensing God’s Spirit moving? Where do I feel overwhelmed? What is making me feel uncertain?

Take those questions to God and ask for wisdom as you move forward. Revisit these questions throughout your planning and stay attuned to God’s Spirit.

REFLECT and ASSESS

No matter where you are at in the process, pausing to reflect and assess is critical to movement. Just as you paused in reading this article, make sure to prioritize times of reflection. What I found easiest was setting a recurring time on my calendar that I would pause and assess what was happening.

This is helpful when so many pieces of planning are coming together at once that you need to plan to take a step back and look at what is happening. Invite others into the assessment process and reflect together. When you have trusted people around you, this step isn’t scary. They are with you through it all!

VISION, MISSION, and VALUES

It is time to start your dream phase and what better way to start than with your vision or mission statement. If your church plant doesn’t already have a vision or mission statement that is short, clear and understandable, now is the perfect time to pray and create! Your mission statement needs to be clear and broad. For many, the greatest commandment from Jesus becomes the right vision statement: Love God. Love Others.

Here is the question you need to answer: Why do you have a ministry with children? The answer to this question will be your big picture for ministry and will be the foundation for which you build your church’s children’s ministry?

After you have established your vision, you move into naming your context. Where is your church located? Who is around you? What is unique about your ministry context? The answers to these questions help you know who you are serving and what you need to consider as you create the environment of your children’s ministry.

Now you get to focus on your values or goals. These values need to flow from the understanding of your context and from the umbrella of your vision statement. What are the goals or values of your ministry? What do you hope to cultivate within the children in your ministry?

Long-Term and Vision-Based Values

These values are ones that are long-term and based on vision. Remember that how you meet a goal or support a value can change over time, but the value itself does not.

For instance, at my church, one of our values is Formation: Becoming like Jesus. In our church, this value is upheld through our focus on spiritual practices. We have this same value in our children’s ministry: We desire to help kids grow to become more like Jesus through knowing God’s Word, seeing their place in God’s story, and experiencing who God is.

We teach spiritual practices that are crafted with our kids in mind.

HOW and WHAT KIDS LEARN

This is where my Type-A children’s ministry leaders are going to thrive! You are now getting to some of the details of starting a children’s ministry. You know your context and you have your vision and values. Now, you must think about how you want to shape a child’s faith as you lead in your church plant. How do you want to shape a child’s faith?

You need to answer this question before you jump into what they will learn. You need to think about the how. And then you get to ask: What are the ways that you want to help your kids learn? What different ways of learning do you need to express in your ministry to help kids grow in their faith?

I realized early-on that I needed to make sure that I provided a variety of ways to encounter the Bible, from reading it, to seeing and experiencing it in action, to discussing it. This meant that I had some criteria for my planning and what I was looking for in teaching resources and curriculum.

SAFETY, VOLUNTEERS, and STUFF

One of the largest tasks for leading a ministry in a church plant is establishing a safe environment and having a process for onboarding and approving volunteers for serving.

These two go hand-in-hand since one of most important ways to create a safe environment is through a protection screening for volunteers. Having an application for serving, reference check, policy acknowledgement, interview, and background check are critical steps to protecting your kids AND volunteers. Make sure to check the requirements of your state as well since certain states require all volunteers to be mandated reporters. There is additional training and certification if this is the case in your state.

Check-In

Another component to establishing a safe environment is managing a check-in system. How will you ensure that when the children in your ministry are with you that they return to the proper family when service is over? Depending on how you set up your ministry, whether children are dropped off with you at the beginning of service or if they will be dismissed at a certain point in the service, you need to have a plan for safely taking kids to and from your gathering space.

TIP: Planning Center offers their check-in software for free if you are a children’s ministry under a certain size. Once you grow, they are super affordable too!

Finally, you get to do some of the details that you were probably thinking about at the beginning of this article: what stuff do I need to buy or find for our children’s ministry? I hate to break it to you, but this is a hard question to answer universally. That is because only YOU know your context.

For my context, we did not have any infant-age 2 kids when we planted. That meant that while I did not need an evacuation crib (one on wheels), changing table, or rocking chair, there was a strong possibility that I would need them in the future. Make a list of items that you know you will need day one to establish a safe environment.

The Children’s Ministry Handbook is a great FREE resource that will help you think through many of these details. This could help you immensely as you lead in your church plant.

You’ve got this! Remember, you don’t do this alone. God is with you, and the children’s ministry community is here with you too.

I leave you with this blessing:

May the Lord bless you and keep you. May His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. And may He bring you peace.