Accidental Intentional

Well here I am...no one knows I have this blog and that's OK. I need a space to write down my journey as an accidental intentional kidmin leader in our church and this is as good as any. So why accidental and intentional you may be wondering? Well here's the story...

A few years ago, we moved from the pacific NW to south TX. In case you're wondering, the church in TX is very different from the church in WA. One of those differences was that our church in TX had a full time, paid children's minister. I had never heard of that before. It was great, classes ran smoothly, they took the kids straight to Bible hour for us each Sunday morning, they had pagers, they had activities upon activities for us to attend. They had a huge pool of volunteers. Almost everything they did was free to attend, they had quite a large budget. It was obvious to us that kids were a priority at that church.

Two years later, we moved back to WA, back to the church that I had attended since I was in high school. I had never noticed it until then, but our church did nothing for our kids. Sure, they have Bible classes, Sunday morning and Wednesday night, all year long. And occasionally they held a VBS if the youth group was also planning to use VBS as part of their mission trip that year. They have summer camps for kids starting in 1st grade, and they participate in LTC for kids 3rd grade and up. But for the most part, for kids 6th grade and under, there wasn't anything other than Bible class. And even that was a struggle.

Each year, in the spring we have a church enrichment conference. I remember the first one I went to after I had my son, he was almost 1 year old and it was advertised that they would have childcare...I showed up, excited to get to attend some classes that weekend, only to find that "childcare" meant only kids that were potty trained. I got back in my car with my little guy and cried the whole was home. It was the same story, year after year. So this year, it was advertised again for childcare, this time at least they made a point to say it was for kids 4 years old and up and I decided to email our preacher and ask him if I could be in charge of the childcare for the next year. I told him it was time for me to stop complaining and start helping.

A week or two later, I was emailing him asking if my husband and I could meet with him to start an active children's ministry at our church. So it wasn't technically a planned role that I had intended to take on when we came back here (thus the accidental part), but it is something that I care very deeply about (thus the intentional part)! So here's what has happened in the three months that our church has had a children's ministry...

We held a meeting in May to see who would be interested in being a part of our ministry. About 10 people came and of those 10, only 2 have actually been involved since then...I figure 20% is not a bad start for our church. In June, we had a KidMin Kick Off which consisted of lunch after church and then we had planned to meet with all the parents of kids 6th grade and under to go over all the fun things we had planned for the rest of this year. We had 6 families stay...quite discouraging to me! In July, we had a KidMin Family 4th of July CookOut and Bike Parade. I'm not sure how many stayed, but we had over 200 hot dogs and they were all eaten! It was a success, people started to see that these kids were important (imagine that)!

Our next big venture is VBS, it starts in tomorrow...it's definitely been an adventure so far planning and I think we just might pull it off :) Anyway, tune in for a post-VBS post to include prayer requests for the rest of our year.