Preschool Ministry Out of the Closet

You can download and print this article by clicking on the link at the bottom of this page. Out of the Closet Preschool Ministry The day is today, and you just know it will be a good day. You drive to Starbucks and when you arrive, there is a parking place right in front of the doors. You walk in and they see you and make your drink without ever having to ask what you want. You take it and head off with a new bounce in your step. Then when you arrive at the building, you walk in and head in the way that the signs are pointing for you to go and into a darkened room you go. As you turn on the lights you look around and again you begin to feel that all is right in the world because you can see stuff that is very recognizable to you from your childhood. And to think you were scared that you wouldn’t know what you were doing. In one corner there is an overhead and screen. Next to that you can see the flannel graph and the box of felt figures, except David seems to have lost his head and not Goliath. No worries, it is nothing that a little tape can’t fix. You see the walls covered with all sorts of posters tapped to the beige walls. There seems to be an abundant amount of mobile type stuff hanging from the lights with strings. You begin to hear a ton of noise from the room next to where you are. When all of a sudden you hear, Knock, knock, ‘teacher’ says a voice from the other side of the door, and for some reason when you hear that small voice something makes you feel as though the world you have enjoyed up to this point of the morning is about to be radically changed. “Teacher,” says that same little voice, “are you going to come out of the closet?” You turn around and open the door of the room you have been in and see that is an old classroom converted to a storage closet to hold all of the old out of service equipment and stuff that hadn’t sold at the all-church yard sale. You leave and enter the room where all that noise and the small voice were coming from. You walk into a room that has the walls painted with bright colors and the walls have these nice colorful attractive pictures but they are all in frames and hanging lower than you are used to. Across the room you see TV’s playing music videos where kids are gathered around mats that are on the floor and dancing or doing exercise to the arrows that appear on the music videos. You can see other kids participating in songs that have these larger than life actions to them. Ministry today has really changed but I will hopefully be sharing with you some insights that I have learned over the 15+ years of full time ministry to kids. I want you to be able to recognize that ministry to preschoolers is not scary. That it is part of our adventure to share the Love of Jesus in ways that will reach preschoolers as preschoolers and not as mini-adults because it may be more comfortable or more familiar for us. That staying in the closet is not the best idea, that there are kids who are saying to you today: “teacher, are you going to come out of the closet so that I can experience the love of Jesus?” When I first started in kids’ ministry years ago, it would have been better if I could have read something like I want to share with you. Many of us have been adults for so many years and we have been away from the preschool age that we have forgotten the exciting world of preschoolers. And so it happens, that we often times try to treat the preschoolers like adults with much shorter legs and arms. Preschoolers are not mini-adults - they are preschoolers, kid’s ages 3-5 years old. Preschoolers and kids in general are adventurers. They are pioneers, explorers into a big world from their world. Allow me to share on a few brief common characteristics of preschoolers: • They are developing their large motor skills. This is why if you make the mistake of giving liquid glue to a preschooler, everything will be glued. Years ago, to learn this lesson, I had tried to have the kids trace their fingers, cut out “turkey feathers” and glue them onto paper. To my surprise not only did the feathers get glued but the seat of my pants became glued as well. Unfortunately I did not know this until I was walking down the hall and a parent had to tell me I had sat on a freshly glued turkey and it was stuck to my buttocks. • Preschoolers are active. I don’t think I need to say much on this topic. I do want to just encourage everyone to not try and have preschoolers sit and learn. They learn through activity. Make them part of the bible story, make them part of the lesson. I have a trunk of clothes and when ever possible I pull kids into the stories I tell and allow them to dress up and act it out with me. If we try and make them sit all the time, we are going against the manufacturer’s warranty of how they are made. Let them do what is natural to them and explore and experience the love of God and they will take away more and own more. • Preschoolers are very literal minded. This became extremely very clear to me years ago, when I knew a girl scheduled to have heart surgery. This little preschool girl had just accepted Jesus as her Savior and then found out she had to have heart surgery. When I went to visit her in the hospital before the surgery, she was in tears. I did as any good children’s pastor would do, I tried to pry and find out what was going on, and of course I thought I knew it was obvious that she would be nervous about the surgery. Nope, oh how wrong I was. After much prying into what was going on, I found out she didn’t want Jesus to leave her. I tried to explain that Jesus would always live in her heart. And at that moment she broke out in high pitch cry that could never be duplicated at any other time. When I finally calmed her down enough, I asked again, this time I was not going to offer any extra stuff until I found out for sure what was going on. The little girl explained over the next few minutes how she had asked Jesus into her heart and now she was going to get another one and lose Jesus. Wow, I would have never known. Even to this day, when I pray with kids to accept Jesus, we pray that they will accept Him into their “lives” never their “heart”. • Preschool kids information can be found on Google. I would recommend reading up on preschool ministry by checking out “Google.com” The web is the largest source of information at your fingertips. Page after page have been written on age specific type stuff. There is so much on the web, check it out. • Simplicity and Consistency matter. Unless you speak the language of your intended audience, you won’t be heard. The more understandable it is, the more credible it will be. Think about some of the great tag lines that are used by some products that kids enjoy. Campbell’s soups “M’m! “M’m! Good!” to the wonderful “Snap! Crackle! Pop!” of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies. Say what you mean and mean what you say. I live in the Greater Washington DC area and have seen this point made time and time again. It seems that politicians usually toss around all kinds of acronyms that very few outside of this area understand or relate to, and so they end up trying to be passionate about things that most do not even care about or know about. Here are just a few examples - see how you do with them, as these are just 4 of the most powerful, influential places in government: - NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) - CBO (Congressional Budget Office) - BLM (Bureau of Land Management) - CMS (Center for Medicare) The preschoolers need to know the basic generalities of what you are trying to communicate before you can motivate them to respond to any specifics. Seeing that teaching, communicating, and modeling have to be the first step in reaching preschoolers, you have to be aware of where preschoolers are starting from. There is one more thing that preschool kids have in common that I want to share with you- Their parents love them. Many parents will choose a church based upon the resources, the ministries, the opportunities that their kids will experience in your church. When parents come to visit your preschool area, they are watching their kids, if they are excited or not as they walk through your preschool area. Preschool kids and their parents alike are not awestruck because you can tape more pictures to your walls than anyone else. They are not blown over (at least positively) because you have more items hung from your lights than any other place they have visited. As you grow in your role of teaching and reaching preschool kids, you will find yourself making mistakes. We should find ourselves doing new stuff and having to learn as we do it, but what an adventure for us as well. It is my prayer for each of you, that you will be able to take this quick over-view of some basic lessons that I had learned on my journey and apply what has been shared in this short article. That after reading briefly some adventures that I have had, you will not feel that the closet is the best place for you. You will be able to see the kids beyond just programs, cool buildings, and nifty little teaching tricks. But you will see preschoolers through the eyes of Jesus, as people He died on the cross for, just as much as the teenager, the adult, or senior citizen.