From Good to Great: How to Use Your Curriculum Effectively in Children’s Ministry—

I am a self-proclaimed nonplanner. After being a foster parent for fifteen years, I developed a mantra: Why make a plan when you know it’s going to change? Just roll with it.

However, as a new children’s ministry director, I quickly learned this approach was essentially a plan to fail. When I first stepped into this role, I was directionless. Our church was in the process of restructuring our children’s ministry team—without clear mission and vision statements. As a result, I found myself scrambling on a weekly basis to prepare curriculum and lessons for our various initiatives. Lay leader volunteers were left confused and frustrated with no focus. My non-planning attitude was not effectively loving those partnering with me, and it was not equipping the saints for the work to which God was calling them. By His grace, I was able to acknowledge this unhealthy pattern before my ministry team. Together, we were able to assess and reshape our approach.

After developing mission and vision statements we could clearly communicate to our covenant body, we recognized the need to fully utilize curriculum as a strategic tool rather than an afterthought. This took us through three essential steps:

1. Develop a scope and sequence. By God’s grace, we have our covenant children under our umbrella for maybe eighteen years. We are called to be stewards of their discipleship, numbering our days with them wisely. Together, our nursery, children’s and youth ministries gathered to develop a succinct scope and sequence, ensuring our covenant children were encountering God’s Word and theology with developmental appropriateness. Against the backdrop of our mission and vision statement, we were able to identify that we desire for our infants and toddlers to know and experience the Good Shepherd who loves and cares for them, for our preschoolers to become grounded in the foundations of corporate worship, and for all our children to know and engage with God’s grand story of the gospel. Then, as they age into youth, we want them to be equipped to think critically and analytically with a biblical worldview. Our scope and sequence became the filter for our curriculum selections.
2. Equip your lay leaders well. In my early days, I ashamedly was known to simply have handed a teacher handbook to a volunteer and said, “Thank you. Now go for it.” Once again, this resulted in discouragement and frustration for teachers and helpers. In order to equip my volunteers well, I first must sit with the curriculum myself. It’s essential I take the time to read and soak in what we are planning to teach. Then, I can hold trainings, walking teachers and helpers through how best to utilize the curriculum as a tool with flexibility to serve and equip, rather than as a script we must follow perfectly.
3. Take the lesson beyond Sunday morning. At Altadena Valley, we use Great Commission Publications’ Show Me Jesus curriculum for our weekly Discipleship Hour. I love how each lesson’s take-home paper presents parents with ideas of how to continue the lesson’s theme and discussion at home. However, until I walked parents through this facet at an annual parent meeting, the papers were used more to litter the church pews after the service than as an at-home review. If our goal is to disciple our covenant children, it is essential we also equip parents with simple, yet effective, discipleship avenues for the home front. In addition to GCP’s lesson take-homes, we utilize Teach Us to Worship’s monthly parent letter. I have also written “Car Chats” to provide conversation points for the car ride home.

Within the context of your ministry team’s mission and vision statements, your curriculum choice can move from good to great when it exists in the framework of a scope and sequence that empowers you to train and equip lay leaders well and to engage parents to extend discipleship opportunities beyond Sunday morning.