Why we need young men in children’s ministry

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ALEX IS THE boy nobody wants in their class. He’s in grade two and has seemingly limitless energy and zero attention span. His comments and questions are never on topic, and everybody is convinced that he is learning nothing. He’s usually facing away from the teacher, making faces or jokes as they try to teach, and the end of the year is a relief because he is finally somebody else’s problem.

Alex isn’t a real person, but I’m sure if you have worked in children’s ministry for any length of time, you had a name (or two or three) pop into mind as you read that—I certainly had a few as I wrote it. We all know that our children’s program is exactly the place that child should be, but that doesn’t dismiss the feeling that the time and effort you poured in over that year—just trying to help them learn something—was wasted.

Fast forward four years for one of those names I had in mind, we’ll keep calling him Alex. He’s in grade seven, still a jokester, doesn’t seem to take life very seriously, and now he wants to help in our midweek children’s ministry through our leader-in-training program. For the next two years we carefully watch, we see him connect with kids and express his faith. In grade nine, he is eligible to lead a class of his own and we cautiously allow him to do so. And that may have been one of the best decisions we made.

He hasn’t settled down much. He’s still a jokester with far more energy than we know what to do with. And when we fill his class with boys just like him, he shines. He knows better than to make them all sit on their chairs to learn their verse, and the colouring sheets are usually ignored, but the boys are learning. They’re doing jumping jacks and running circles, but at the end of the evening they’ve said their memory verses, and they know what the story was about. When they need to be calm and quiet, he knows just how to bribe (or, persuade) them to think it’s a good idea. And at the end of the year, those boys move on knowing they are loved and seen, and they have had a great year.

Photo by Austin Pacheco on Unsplash

After serving in children’s ministry for almost 20 years, I have learned how to lead in a way that kids listen. I have also learned that they will almost always listen better to the 20-year-old young man sitting at the table with them, who often feels like he has no idea what he is doing. As long as there is a gap of a year or two, that young man has an inherent authority in kids’ minds that women have to earn.

The young man in your children’s ministry might do things differently but never discount the value of his presence. For many churches, the kids in your children’s ministry group may not have a godly male role model. Every time Alex goofed off with his boys, they learned that church didn’t always have to be quiet and “no fun.” When he followed the direction of the leader, they were encouraged to respect them too. And when he talked about faith, they listened.