Digesting The Data

We’ve talked about how our children’s ministries need to change, but what does this mean for you, the leader?

At the 2022 Child Discipleship Forum, respected children’s pastor, Sam Luce, shared his take on the new job description for children’s ministry leaders in light of this research.

Take a minute and look through your files to find the job description given to you when you started at your current church. Do the tasks and responsibilities reflect a role that shepherds children in the ways of Jesus and leads a team of volunteers to become more Christlike through their service in the children’s wing of the church? [Maybe you’re realizing you don’t even have a job description!]

To aid you in your map-changing efforts, we’ve developed three resources that help build a more robust framework for the role of child discipleship within your church.

• Job Description – This is a downloadable, editable pdf you can use to help shape the role requirements, responsibilities and skill sets of a children’s ministry pastor/director’s position. Let this be a starting point for new hires or a shift in your current role to keep the focus on child discipleship.
• 10 Questions – For both the candidate interviewing at a new church and the church staff who is looking to hire a new children’s ministry leader, this resource provides a list of insightful questions to help bring clarity and direction around the expectations of a children’s ministry role.
• What to do in your first 90 days – If you’re new in a children’s ministry leadership role, this brief resource will help shape and guide your first ninety days as a the new leader. If you happen to be in a role but want to make a few changes, this is also a great place to start assessing the effectiveness of your children’s ministry!

One final item the research uncovered is the difficulty to track the short- and long-term effectiveness of child discipleship in our local ministries. Only 3% of children’s ministry leaders said it’s “very easy” to evaluate the impact children’s ministry is having on children.

In response, we partnered with Gloo to create a free assessment tool for your local church to utilize to measure and track the impact of child discipleship. Click here for instructions to begin building your custom assessment to measure the effectiveness of child discipleship in your community!