My library has no windows. So when the overhead fluorescent lights are off, the room would be pitch-black if it weren’t for the warm light coming from the table lamps sprinkled around the room. I sit in a red velvet chair in front of a large carpet where the students will sit when they come in. To my left is a little end table with a lamp on it, the book we’re about to read leaning against it. Behind me is a large screen, usually showing footage of a green forest or a bustling city street. As the students enter, stirring music indicative of the story they’re about to hear plays.
I never explicitly state the purposes of each of these elements to the class, but one morning, a student hit the nail on the head and made my entire year. The kindergarten class was just getting settled on the carpet, nearly silent except for a whisper or two. One little girl raised her hand but didn’t wait for a nod to start speaking.
“Mr. Werenich, why does it feel so magical in here?”
Now, honestly, what I wanted to do right in that moment was pull out a camera or something and ask her to say it again, because it was an expression of the very feeling I was trying to create – and to have this kid say it out loud was a dream come true. But even though it was a moment that happened in a school, that moment solidified something important for me about in-person ministry.
See, when the school was shut down, I had the opportunity to create ‘library content’ in a virtual context. I pre-recorded myself reading a story to the camera, and added music, sound effects, and close-ups of the illustrations. I’m pretty proud of how they turned out. But I don’t think I ever would’ve gotten feedback like that no matter how many of them I did. And that’s because when that little girl sat down on the carpet, she was already immersed in the story that was about to be told, even before I had opened my mouth.
I’m Matthew. I’m a teacher and librarian at Immanuel Christian School in Oshawa. My wife Jenna is the children’s pastor at Whitby Christian Assembly, and every Sunday morning and Wednesday night I’m proud to help out with her ministry. We’ve been married for just shy of five years, and we’ve got a two year old daughter named Hally with another one on the way in about a month. In one way or another, I’ve been involved in student and children’s ministry for about sixteen years.
Many of us have been back in church with kids for almost a year or more now. And when we came back, I think a lot of us – myself included – were tempted to just get back to what we’d been doing before Covid, except for spreading out the chairs a bit more. But I think this season that we’ve been in has changed – perhaps even heightened – the needs of our students. What we used to do was great, but we can’t simply do what we used to do, because the kids we used to have hadn’t been so deprived of opportunities for human connection.
Now, I’m not saying forget everything you know about ministry. That’s silly. And I’m also not saying forget everything about virtual ministry either, even though some of us probably want to. What I’m saying is that kids today need the church to provide connection – human, tangible, meaningful connection – even more than they always have. And today, since we’re surrounded by skilled, experienced ministry leaders from different churches, that means we’re ideally placed to share tips and tools on how to meet this need. So that’s what we’re gonna do.
Let me sum up what we’re doing here with this.
Our goal is to share whatever we can to help each other glorify Him in the way we serve our communities.
When I think back to when I was a kid in children’s ministry, there’s one moment in particular that I distinctly remember that made me feel like I personally mattered to the people running the show. The children’s Pastor Shawn asked me if he could use me for a sermon illustration in front of the kids. I agreed in a heartbeat, partly because I thought he was the coolest guy in existence but also because I loved helping out any way I could. So he laid me down on a table and then turned on a really bright light right next to me. He hung a white sheet on the other side of me, so only the silhouette of myself and the table were visible to the kids on the other side. He proceeded to act out the role of a surgeon, pulling various items out of my chest as the kids roared with laughter at his false German accent. And to cap it all off, he decided to wake me from my anesthesia by pouring a bottle of water on my face.
I would quickly like to publicly advise against waterboarding your children. But it wasn’t my spluttering or my soaked T-shirt that engrained this memory in my mind. It was that Pastor Shawn had developed the kind of relationship with me where he could do something like this. He was ambitious enough to give this gag a try, he trusted me to play along, and he knew I could handle being the butt of the joke. And in encouraging me to be a part of his ministry – as silly a way as it was – he showed me Jesus. Jesus got his disciples involved in his stuff all the time, and that’s what Pastor Shawn did for me.
When all of us were in virtual church, kids kept seeing us on their screens. But some of them stopped knowing us because of the distance. I saw Pastor Shawn every week, but I knew him because of the way that he involved me. This isn’t a critique of your ministry, by the way. The fact that your connection with your kids was hindered during that online period was a symptom of the times that we all faced. We put a lot of work into making our online content fun and exciting, which meant that we had to be fun and exciting. And I think we need to keep doing that.
Keep being fun. And stop doing it yourself.
Pastor Shawn did more than pick me to play a game. He asked me (outside of service) to help him with this idea. Many of you are probably already great at this. You tell Bible stories where the kids act out the roles, or you get the kids to compete in games against each other – boys versus girls, and stuff like that. That’s great – and that’s why it’s so important to remember the reason we do that stuff. We don’t do it to fill time – we do it to help create moments of connection. Here are some other ways we can do that.
Firstly, ask your kids for help before, during, and after service. I don’t want to over-generalize, but as far the kids I work with go, they’re usually jumping for a chance to help. Part of that likely has to do with the fact that they might get a piece of candy out of the deal, but the other part is that helping out makes you feel like an important piece of the puzzle. Like things would’ve been different if you hadn’t been there. Stacking chairs is the classic example, but it can be things like setting up the game, distributing materials for a craft, whatever. And one thing that I think is especially effective is asking a kid directly. I’ve done it where I just say, “Can someone help me move this thing?” and a few kids come running, but the difference there is that I’m making it clear I don’t need someone – I need anyone. If I go to a boy and say, “Can you help me move this chair”, I’m making it clear that I think they are the person for the job.
Another thing you can do to connect kids to you and your team is by playing games where you work together with the kids. I’ve always loved running games, but I’ve found lately that I’ve been focusing too much on the individual fun of the player and not on the capacity for connection that games can produce. When games involve teamwork, you’re providing opportunities for the kids to get to know each other better. And that works whether the kid is playing with another kid or with a leader.
It can be hard coming up with games that foster cooperation, so I’ve got a collection of 19 screen games that you can access. Most of them involve guessing, which is the easiest thing in the world for someone to participate in. You can grab a few sets of partners, play the video, and get them to work together and guess. Alternatively, if you want to replicate these games, each of them can be put together using stuff you’ve got lying around at your church. Either way, they’re free, and they’re ready to go – so now they’re yours.
If you’re in need of more ideas after that, I have a collection of instructions for over 200 games that I call the Gameopedia – it’s designed to help you find a game for your exact need in 60 seconds or less. That’s yours too.
Okay, so we’ve talked about connecting kids to kids and kids to leaders. Now let’s look at connecting kids to the Bible. I really think this is one area where we’ve really shined over the past two years. Through our virtual church, we’ve relied on dynamic videos to tell Bible stories. Maybe that’s been church curriculum, or Superbook or VeggieTales, or video adaptations you’ve found online. Whatever it’s been, it’s hopefully been great. You can find more big-budget interpretations of Scripture online today than ever before. Virtually, kids have seen and heard the word, and that’s awesome. The only drawback of this high production value content is that it can’t envelop them.
It’s the difference between watching Frozen and going on the ride. You might like both, but one faces you and the other surrounds you.
I remember there was this youth speaker at Lakeshore Camp who was doing a sermon on the distractions that surround us and keep us from engaging with God. As he was talking, there was this buzzing coming from somewhere, but it grew louder and turned into the sound of wind, honking cars, and noisy chatter. Soon it was too loud to even hear what he was saying – and then it all cut out. It was a powerful way to represent the very point he was trying to make, and I’d never forgotten the way everyone was looking around at first to try and figure out what was going on. A video can’t do that. That’s the kind of thing you can really only pull off in person. He connected me to the biblical principle he was trying to teach by taking advantage of the physical space around him.
When we film something, we work hard to get it right before we upload it. Keep that. Keep the high production value and commitment to excellence that you fostered when creating digital content. At the same time, now’s our chance to leave two-dimensional presentation behind.
When I say two-dimensional, think about the similarity between a stage and a screen. There’s a line between the creator and the consumer that cannot be crossed. But we’re back in the building – which means we’ve got to cross that line at all costs. We don’t want our kids just watching or listening to the Bible story – they could be doing that at home. We want them experiencing it. Here are some ways to make that happen in your space.
First of all, lighting is key. When you’re in a dark room, you naturally tend to look at the brightest point first. You can use that when you’re telling a story. If you turn the lights out and shut the blinds, then you can decide where the light goes with a lamp or a flashlight or a screen. You decide where the focus goes. And when it’s dark, there’s fewer distractions. Movie theatres have known this for ages.
Also, when you’re telling a story, it takes less than a minute of prep time to put some background sound behind the story. Pull up YouTube on your laptop or your phone and type “worship padding” or “epic music”.
You might not know this, but you can actually loop YouTube videos with a click. And if you’re on your laptop, you can throw rain, crickets, the sound of water, or jungle noise on a separate tab. All of a sudden, your kids are that much closer to feeling like they’re in the world of the story as opposed to just watching it.
I’ve curated a playlist of backing tracks I use all the time that you can pull up with a click.
Lighting and sound enhance your presentation of the story, and if you mix this with making your kids part of the story, you’re immersing them even further. One other thing that you can do is encourage open-ended discussion with your kids. This is easier in some contexts than others – for instance, if you’re running a classroom or a small group, you can facilitate that kind of conversation as the leader. If you’re with a large group of kids, it can be harder for a kid at one end of the room the hear the ideas of a kid at the other end. In my classroom at school, we have Devotions every morning. What I do first is play a video, because kids love videos. I draw from a range of sources. Sometimes it’s a movie clip. Sometimes it’s a YouTuber explaining a biblical principle. Sometimes it’s a music or lyric video, or a Bible story someone else has told. That’s the two-dimensional side of things that we’re taking advantage of, but we leave it behind at this point. Then I have three open-ended questions about the video that I put on the screen. I break the kids into groups, get them to tackle whatever questions they want, and then after a few minutes we come back together to share some of the stuff that was talked about. Usually, I have one kid act as the sharer. Their job is to listen to what the others say and then share that with the group, i.e. “Grayson said this, but Sarai said this”. It means the kid who loves sharing their own opinion can’t use the sharer position as a platform for their own ideas – they have to share the ideas of their group.
I’ve shared 16 themed packages of these videos, and each package contains 5 videos – so which works out to 80 devotionals total. They're all yours!
Lastly, and most crucially, we want to help connect our kids to Holy Spirit. Everything else we’ve already talked about is ultimately about this. We don’t connect kids to kids or kids to leaders just because we want them to have fun. We want church to be a place where they feel surrounded by friends pursuing the same goal – a closer relationship with Jesus. We don’t try to make the Bible story dynamic and engaging for the sake of telling a good story – we want that story to encourage, convict, and inspire their hearts in a way that provokes them to draw closer to God. And during virtual church, I think this was one of the hardest things to figure out, through no fault of our own.
When I think about the most spiritually fulfilling or inspiring moments in my life, nearly all of them happened at Lakeshore Camp. It’d be silly to say that Lakeshore has special ground or that God consistently only wants to move in my life when I’m within that perimeter of space. I think it has more to do with the expectation I have when I get there. When I go to camp, I look for and expect to spend time with God.
But it’s funny – I don’t always do that when I’m at church.
Part of that might be because I’m usually volunteering in one capacity or another, and many of you can likely relate to that. But I think it’s also because sometimes I can think of Sunday morning as just another Sunday instead of a real opportunity for me to connect with God in a significant way. I don’t go in with the expectation that I’m going to meet God.
Whether virtually or otherwise, kids can know what church is without knowing who Holy Spirit is – specifically who He is to them. So let’s keep the structure and rhythm that you’ve established in your programming so that kids come in with a sense of familiarity and safety. And let’s enhance that structure in a way that stops passive engagement.
A kid watching a video of your session can pause it, walk away, or play with toys while watching. A kid in church might ask to go to the bathroom or for a drink of water. The problem isn’t necessarily that they’re bored, although that can be a part of it. I think it’s because the service will go on with or without them. Think about the last time you had a kid in costume on stage or in the middle of a game ask to go to the bathroom – that almost never happens, because they’re a part of the action. And when kids are encountering Holy Spirit within the four walls of your space, the same should be true to an even greater degree.
One of the biggest things that I need to get better at in this area is providing time for kids to respond in a unique way. When you take prayer requests, you’re hearing from the kids, but when it’s time to pray, you’re the one who can end up talking to God instead of them. Invite kids to pray in front of other kids. Or put on some soft music and give kids time to pray on their own. Maybe that looks like them bowing their heads and closing their eyes. Maybe it’s writing a prayer request on a piece of paper. Or drawing your prayer to God. There’s nothing wrong with group worship – and when you put the responsibility on the student to make the moment meaningful, they feel that.
Another way to help kids take your program into their own hands is by asking open-ended questions after a story. Let’s say you just told the story of Jesus and Peter walking on water. You can ask questions about what happened and give them candy or something, for sure. My wife and I do that for a few reasons – it’s incentive to listen to the story, and it’s a subtle way to go over the story an additional time to help cement it in their minds. But when you ask an open-ended question, you get them thinking about how Holy Spirit could get involved in their lives here and now. Those devotion packs I mentioned earlier will definitely help with that.
One of the other things I really don’t think we do often enough is wait for the Lord. Part of that has to do with the structure and rhythm of kid’s church life – and again, I don’t think you should abandon that. But when I ask myself the question, “When was the last time I just got my kids to say nothing more than ‘Speak Lord, I’m listening’”, I’m embarrassed to say that it was at camp, not church. And that’s on me, because I have this silly idea that God’s only gonna speak at camp. That’s not true, and I can’t keep acting like it is because I’m passing on that same falsehood to my kids.
When David fought Goliath, he expected God to show up, and He did. When Elijah was standing up to a hundred prophets of Baal, he expected God to show up, and He did. When Joshua walked around Jericho, he expected God to show up, and He did. So let me ask you a question – how is your program prepared for God to show up? There’s nothing wrong with structure and planning one activity after the other – but if that tangible sense of Holy Spirit were to fill your space, would you be ready for Him?
Ultimately, you understand your space better than I do. That’s why a big chunk of this workshop was tools to add to your repertoire, not suggestions on how to change your regular pacing. And I hope these tools are useful to you. But if we speak in the tongues of angels without love, we are only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. These tools are designed to help enhance opportunities for connection in your program, but those connections are only meaningful if Christ is at the center of it all. I remember being in church one Sunday morning – and I don’t know if it was Holy Spirit, or my own head, but the idea’s stuck with me. The thought entered my head – do I work for Jesus, or do I worship Him? If we’re doing this just to work smarter, it’s meaningless. Let’s make connections as an act of worship. Because when we zoom out beyond our four little walls to see the eternal, spiritual significance of our little church moments, we’re reminded of why we’re doing it all in the first place.