Our kids team recently had the opportunity to lead an All-Staff meeting at our multi-site church. We had the pleasure of leading an experience that unpacked how uniquely different God has wired the children we get to serve. We discovered that we have a very diverse group of kids. Children in our ministry have different interests, hobbies, extracurricular activities, and most of all, different styles of learning.
Why Kids Need Curriculum That Points Them to Jesus
The question we ask as a team over and over is how our lessons point someone to Jesus. We’re passionate about pointing kids to Jesus and experiencing transformation for these important reasons:
- Our time with kids is limited (most of have about an hour each week if the kids come to church every week), and we want to maximize that time!
- Technology savvy kids can get just about any information they want. What they can’t get online is personal relationship with Jesus. That’s where we come in… and we do our best to give kids deep meaningful relationship that comes through Jesus and committed leaders.
- We don’t want kids just giving ‘Jesus’ or ‘church’ answers, but we want them to be engaged in thoughtful, personal discussions about faith.
- We want kids to have a personal relationship with Jesus. While we believe that Scripture memorization and knowing information about the Bible helps tremendously in faith formation, that does not equal personal relationship with Jesus. At the end of the day, we want kids who love and follow Jesus, not just know about him.
Use Transformative Resources
As we’re always looking for transformative resources to aid us in giving kids Jesus, we’re really excited for the release of DIG IN Curriculum from Group. We both had the opportunity to navigate through the DIG IN curriculum engine recently, and we think this is a great tool that could help navigate through challenges we face currently. Here’s why:
- First of all, it’s completely customizable which is very important for a multisite context where each campus has different facility setup and sizes.
- There’s a great variety in activities. There are so many different activity blocks that support the Core Bible Discovery, and we have the freedom to choose the ones that best fit our needs as well as limitations.
- DIG IN is flexible with any ministry format. We both also have served in small churches as well as single-site large church to know that having the option of multi-age/age-based Large/Small Group or Sunday School options are valuable. We no longer have to eliminate great content due to the format that it comes in.
- DIG IN is from Group. We both have used Group’s curriculum in the past to know that Group’s REAL (Relational, Experiential, Applicable, and Learner-based) philosophy has proven to help kids connect with Jesus in real, tangible ways that lends itself to transformation in God’s beautiful time.
We’re definitely looking forward to digging into the new DIG IN curriculum… you should check it out too!
