What's your routine for preparing to teach? For many of us we read the lesson, study the Bible passage, find crafts, find games, buy supplies, prep activities, and hopefully pray at home during the week, but what about on Sunday morning? One thing that we instituted years ago in our children's ministry was volunteers praying together. We started with a back-to-Sunday-School prayer breakfast on promotion week with a simple breakfast, a vision pep talk for the year and then breaking into groups to pray. Then we added in 3-4 times a year team picnic with prayer times after church. After that we added a prayer time in as an expectation on the weeks volunteers were serving.
So what did this look like?
It was simple, the department coordinator for the week (elementary and preschool) would gather the volunteers in an empty room 5 minutes before we started allowing kids to sign in. The coordinator would give any last minute announcements (it's communion week, so here's an extra time filler, there was a discipline issue that needed to be monitored from last week, the projector isn't working, etc.) Then we'd pray. If the group was small, everyone would have a chance to pray and if everyone showed up on time, then 2-3 people would pray specifically for that day.
What did we pray?
There were also various prayer needs specific to that week or that lesson, but we also provided this prayer list in our volunteer handbook giving everyone ideas of things to pray. Below are 16 things that you can pray this Sunday and every Sunday before teaching.
16 Things to Pray Each Week in Children's Ministry
- that God’s Word would be clearly taught by the teachers and understood by the children.
- that God would bring peace and order to the classroom allowing children to focus.
- that our ministry would allow parents to worship uninterrupted and they would be fed and strengthened for the week of parenting.
- that God would cause the children to have attentive ears, minds, and hearts.
- that volunteers attitudes, words, and actions would glorify God.
- that volunteers would not provoke children to anger.
- that volunteers attitudes, words, and actions would point kids to Jesus.
- that God would protect us and the children both physically and from distractions.
- that children would build God-honoring friendships and that relationships in the church would be strengthened as volunteers serve together.
- that visitors would feel loved and welcomed.
- that children would do what is right and pleasing to the Lord.
- that the children would show patience, kindness and love to one another.
- that the Gospel would be embraced with genuine faith.
- that we would respond in wise and God-honoring ways to rebellious hearts, inattentiveness, inappropriate silliness, etc. and call sin out for what it is.
- that parents would be encouraged and equipped to disciple their children in the home.
- that every child in our classroom would grow into a man or woman completely devoted to Jesus Christ.