Well-Equipped Volunteer: Train & Grow Your Children's Ministry Volunteers

Having kids in the service is great, but it’s easy to lose their interest fast because the service was not designed for them.

Sermons are usually 20-30 minutes long (some a lot longer!!) The songs we sing contain a lot of symbolic and abstract language. Baptism and communion are symbolic acts that kids have a hard time understanding.

But these are only reasons for us to try harder to include children in our worship services!

I have created a worship service booklet for kids to help them focus and become active participants.

I have created it as a booklet. Page one is focused on singing, offering, etc. and page four is focused on the sermon. The inside pages are for drawing pictures.

Here are a couple of things I kept in mind when designing this resource:

• This resource is for kids from Grades 1-6 so I kept reading to a minimum and left it open to each child to choose how much they wanted to write.
• I tried to include as many aspects of the service as possible so the kids are encouraged to actively participate during the whole service.

Page 1

On page one, kids are encouraged to sing as well as listen carefully to the words of the songs. Singing is a form of worship so the kids are asked to circle which attributes of God were highlighted in the singing. Also on page one, active listening during the whole service is encouraged as kids are to mark down whenever they hear these four words – God, Jesus (or Christ), Holy Spirit, and Bible (or Scripture).

Pages 2 and 3

On pages two and three, kids are invited to draw pictures of the Bible story they heard during the Scripture reading and to draw a picture of their favorite part of the service.

Page 4

On page four, the focus turns to Scripture and the sermon. Kids are asked to make a note of the Bible passage that was read and are encouraged listen for keywords from that passage. Again this encourages actively listening as well as following along in their Bibles (it’s easier to pick out the keyword(s) when reading along. As kids listen to the sermon, they are encouraged to write down words they hear that they don’t know. Then they are told to look up those words when they get home. This encourages investigation during the week as well as family conversations. Finally, kids are asked to record what they though was the most important thing they learned from the sermon. Again, this encourages active listening, but it also provides great opportunity for parents to have conversations with their children at home.

Download your copy of "My Worship Service Booklet" and start using it this weekend!

Encourage kids to be actively involved in the worship service with these worship service booklets for kids! Having a resource like this available shows kids and parents that kids are welcome in the worship service!