Getting Plugged In

I have finally made the leap back into Children's Ministry! I attended the KidCity Kickoff last week where we got to learn about serving in KidCity at Hope Community Church. There had to be well over 600 folks there....it was impressive to see so many folks committed to serve in the children's ministry!


The staff did a great job with registration and opening music, a cool glow-in-the-dark dance routine. Laura Lee, the KidCity Children's Pastor, gave an inspiring talk about how we need to work on ourselves spiritually before we can change lives in others spiritually. She related it to working out at the gym to keep physically in shape.


We then got to go to our breakouts...mine was the "Nuts & Bolts of Large Group Teaching". I met the other large group teachers for preschool & elementary and we got a brief overview on how to make eye-contact, use body language and tone in our presentation. Basic stage presence stuff.



Then we went to our classrooms in which we will serve. I'll be in the K-1 room on Saturday nights. Here we got an overview of what to do in case of an emergency & where to go. They showed us the procedure to call a parent & where the info for CPR & First Aid was located. We finished it off by doing a mock fire drill and went outside to the parking lot.

The most impressive thing was receiving my curriculum for the rest of the year! At Seacoast, that was what we spent most of our time doing....re-creating curriculum. In KidCity, they use it "as is" from Willow Creek's Promiseland Curriculum. I'm still at a loss for words. (For those of you in Children's Ministry, you know what I mean...rarely does anything just work out of the box!)


On Sunday, I attended the KidCity Orientation class. This is where we heard about all of the positions within the ministry and how they all work together. We also completed the paperwork to do the background check.

They have these orientations once a month for new folks in addition to the big KidCity Kickoff that everyone attends to re-commit for the next year. They allow you to choose 2 months out of the year to take off from serving. They actually recruit folks to fill in for those "track outs" so the position is never empty. That's smart.

Can't wait to actually begin teaching again. This is exciting and making me a little nervous all at the same time. I hope they like me. : )