How your preteen ministry is structured is one of the key elements in making things smooth and consistent across the board for families. I pointed this very thing out in my breakout at the Orange Conference. I think this is one of the key things that allowed Switch, our preteen ministry, to start off so well.
Structuring Issues
When Mike Hepola, our family pastor, started to consider beginning a 5th and 6th grade ministry, one of the things that Mike and myself really took a lot of time to analyze was our current family ministry structure. We looked at everything about children’s and student ministry to get a good picture of where we were at the time and where we wanted to end up.
I think this step was key because I had spent two years working on the Children’s Ministry team and Mike was the Student Pastor who oversaw all of student ministries before he made the jump to Family Pastor. We went over a ton of stuff and were pretty honest with where both ministries were at. Eventually we came down to a few keys, but to try to give you a summary of some of the things that we thought thru, here’s a picture taken from my breakout slides:
We looked at our structure from birth to high school. Here are some things that we knew were problems with this age group:
- worship – preteens weren’t engaged in children’s ministry and were intimidated by the environment in middle school
- check-in/drop off – parents were not a fan of dropping off their kids at the student building. Preteens felt like “babies” in 5th grade because of the check-out process
- teaching – preteens were bought out of the programming in children’s ministry (rightfully so, same for 4 years. 1st and 5th graders in the same room)
- small groups- because of the structure of children’s ministry, 5th grade small groups were built for 2nd and 3rd graders rather than 5th graders. We wanted to see more discussion.
- lack of stickiness – besides outreach, our families weren’t sticking well thru this stage of life.
Proposed Solutions
After a few meetings with Mike, we came up with a few key differences (baby steps) between Children’s Ministry and Student Ministry.
- Graduated check-out process – such a key. Big deal for our preteens
- Live worship – with 5th and 6th grade students. This is something I love to see every week. Can’t wait to tell you about some of the things our volunteers are doing for this during the summer.
- Hybrid program – small groups on the back-end of large group programming, but shorter and more discussion based than children’s.
- Location – main campus rather than the student building.
Keys
- Every structure is different – you can’t just assume ours looks like yours. God has called you to the church that you are a part of, not my church. Your structure should and will look different.
- Collaboration – you have to work together with children’s and student ministry. I think we take this for granted at Brookwood, but our teams work well together. This is a must if your ministries are to flow well together.
- Input from families – We asked a ton of questions to parents and students. Future and past, old and young, traditional and non-traditional families all were asked their input. We had a ton of relational equity built up because we were solving a problem.
All of this really helped propel Switch to a place of momentum from the start.
How about your ministry structure? What are some areas that need to be tweaked? When was the last time you sat down and had a conversation involving your student ministry team and your children’s ministry team?
