The kid’s ministry is such an important part of your local church and ultimately key to its longevity. Because of this, it’s important to be intentional with what you do and how you do things in your kid’s ministry, especially when it comes to what you are teaching. Navigating what topics and concepts to teach can be a challenge, but here are several ways it can be done:

1. Teach thematic ideas

This looks like teaching virtues such as friendliness or patience, and going through relevant scriptures that teach and explain these qualities. Doing this is an effective way to teach children the virtues we aim to live out as Christians.

2. Teach through the Bible

This looks like teaching the different stories found in the Bible. Generally, it’s possible to cover every major story in the Bible in three years’ time. This can be a suitable approach because the children in your ministry are being taught the Bible, what it means, how it can be applied, and how it all fits together. The challenge with this type of teaching is it can be long and drawn out, and requires children to attend weekly over the three years for them to catch everything.

3. Teach for their Mondays

This is how we decided what to teach at Hillsong Kids. We mirrored the heart of our senior pastor and tailored our teaching on Sundays so that it will be helpful to the kids on their Mondays. Our hope is that the kids will be able to take what they’ve heard on the weekend and apply it when they’re with their friends and family throughout the week.

Practically, this doesn’t look like focusing on one specific Bible verse or studying just one virtue. But rather, we teach big concepts, for example, faith. We’ll then go through different verses and the stories of people found in the Bible where faith is explained and demonstrated. In Hillsong Kids we will focus on the same big picture theme for 3-4 weeks as we have found that by doing this we are able to teach the concept to the majority of children in our church as research has shown that a number of them come weekly but another large group come on average once every 2-3 weeks. Our desire is that on the Monday, every child can say, “I know what faith is and how it is relevant in my life.”

It’s important to remember that writing a curriculum for your kid’s ministry can be very time-consuming. If you’re starting up a kid’s ministry from the ground up, writing your own curriculum might not be the best option. Regardless of where your kid’s ministry is at, there is nothing wrong with using someone else’s curriculum and tailoring it to suit your needs.

At the end of the day, what you teach at your kid’s ministry can vary between different churches and different leadership styles. There are a variety of ways to do kid’s ministry right. All that really matters is that the heart of everything we do is about helping children learn about and experience Jesus in a genuine way.

Nathan

This thought was originally shared during a Kids Ministry training session hosted by Nathan Mclean and our Hillsong Kids team during our ‘Online Open Week’ in August 2015. Online Open Week is your opportunity to receive impartation and training direct from the Hillsong team through live webinars.

If you would like to watch the full recording or find out more about future events from the Hillsong Leadership Network, click below.