Call me weird, but I love a good meeting, especially when the meeting is about something that I’m passionate about. As a kidmin professional, I spend a lot of time in meetings and leading meetings.
Over the years, I have learned a few things about meetings:
People lead busy lives; therefore they don’t want to waste time sitting in an unnecessary meeting. Only meet when necessary.
Speaking of time, people want you to respect it. Start and end on time.
It’s helpful if people know what to expect. Send an agenda ahead of time.
Speaking of agenda, keep the meeting on track by sticking to the agenda. Try to curtail side conversations.
Food and fun decorations makes all meetings enjoyable!
Since I recently hired an Associate Director for our ministry (she is awesome, by the way!), we have resumed our weekly Children’s Ministry staff meetings. The purpose of our time together is make sure that everyone is up-to-date about what’s going on and to pray for ministry & personal needs.
While we have only had two CM staff meetings so far, I have thoroughly enjoyed them both. Not only are we planning better but our friendships are deepening. It’s been a beautiful thing to watch.
When designing our meetings, I made the decision to make our time purposeful by keeping each meeting to 60 minutes and having a pretty standard (but flexible) meeting agenda each week.
Here’s a snapshot of what our staff meetings consist of:
Opening prayer & devotional
Recap the previous Sunday (God sightings, what worked well, what didn’t work well)
Updates on ‘action steps’ from the last meeting
This week at a glance: We look at Monday-Saturday events & Sundays separately. We assess volunteer needs and logistics. Then we assign tasks for the week so that we know who is responsible for what. We also review our calendars (who will be out of the office and when).
Other items? (I realize there are other things that might need to be discussed that don’t fall into any other area, so I try to allow some time to discuss other things as well. But, to honor our time, I will chat with the appropriate person about items outside of our meetings if they will cause us to run over our 60 minute time frame.)
Prayer (for ministry and personal needs)
Notes of encouragement (We write notes of thanks and/or encouragement to our volunteers – because we can’t do ministry without them, we need to make sure that we regularly let them know we appreciate them.)
After our meetings, I upload a summary and to-do lists to our shared folder on Basecamp.
For your convenience, I placed a downloadable Staff Meeting Agenda template under the Leader Resources “Forms” tab. You can use it to design your own agenda to suit your team’s needs.
What do your staff meetings look like? Share your ideas with our community!
This past Sunday, I sat in on one of our elementary small groups. For the next few weeks, I will be coaching one of our leaders on how to effectively lead her group by (1) best utilizing her time – she has 30 minutes, (2) redirecting behavior, and (3) facilitating discussion. I thought I’d share the highlights of how I encouraged her to facilitate discussion with her group. I really want to see this leader succeed but she told me, “I really want the children to succeed, too.”
One challenge of teaching elementary children is that there is a good chance that they’ve heard the Bible story that is being taught on any given Sunday. So how can you make it come alive in fresh, engaging ways? Since the context of our conversation was pertaining to small groups vs large group teaching time, the question became how can we help these children see and process the story in more meaningful, personal ways?
I gave this sweet leader some tips on how to do this. When it’s time to review or discuss the Bible story, ask:
Was there anything that surprised you in today’s story?
Did you learn anything new?
If you could ask God one question about today’s story, what would you ask?
What do you think is the most important thing you should remember about this story?
How does this story make you feel closer to God?
Is there anything you need to start/stop doing because of this story?
What did you feel as you read/heard/saw/acted out this Bible story?
These questions go beyond children giving the ‘right’ answers and help them really think about what the story means to them.
You can also find creative ways to ask those questions.
Put questions on a cube or spinner, have kids draw a number and those whose number matches the one the teacher calls gets to roll or spin.
Place 2 or 3 colors in a bag. Have kids draw a color and then their color will dictate what to do activity-wise.
Review/discuss and get the wiggles out by tossing around a beach ball with questions written or taped on them.
Kidmin Leaders: How do you coach your small group leaders to facilitate discussion?
Small Group Leaders: What questions do you ask to help children process and apply the Bible story to their lives?
Depending on where you live, this winter has been extremely long, dreary and snowy. Many of us are ready for things to warm up a little bit. Good news – summer is right around the corner and for those of us in KidMin, we’ve been thinking about summer for some time now.
I recently did an interview with Children’s Ministry Magazine’s David Jennings on what summer looks like in our kidmin. You can read the article here.
I’d love to know – what fun things does your ministry have planned for this summer? Leave me a comment below!
