Welcome back as we continue our “Sunday Morning Strategies” series designed to help you to accommodate children of divorce and children from single parent homes in your Sunday morning children’s ministry. Last week we looked at specific legal issues you need to be aware of when it comes to divorce. Over the course of the next few weeks, we are going to look at parent issues that you need to be prepared to deal with if the kids in your ministry have parents who are separated or divorced.

In a more traditional children’s ministry setting, our interactions with parents are generally driven by the idea of equipping them to disciple their own children on a daily basis. The ultimate goal with divorced or separated parents, but the methods sometimes need to be a little different. In this series, we will look at three different “types” of divorced parents that you are likely to deal with in your ministry and how you as a children’s pastor and a church need to address them.

• The Warring Parents
• The Absent Parents
• The Other Parent

1. The Warring Parents

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Welcome back as we continue our “Sunday Morning Strategies” series designed to help you to accommodate children of divorce and children from single parent homes in your Sunday morning children’s ministry. In this installment we are going to explore some of the legal issues related to a divorce or separation that you need to be aware of in terms of your children’s ministry and the safety of the children left in your care. This advice is given from the perspective of a children’s ministry worker and should not be construed as legal advice. You should check with your attorney or insurance carrier for specific advice or requirements for your church.

Custody Issues

The biggest legal concern you should have as someone entrusted by at least one parent with the care of their child(ren) is any custody issue that may arise out of the divorce or current requirements related to the child. The last thing you want to do is to be responsible for releasing a child to a parent who is not supposed to have custody of the child for some reason or another. Even if that parent is a member of your congregation, you have a responsibility to adhere to any court ordered or agreed visitation and custody schedule.

Make sure that you have a plan in place for who can pick up all of the children in your ministry, but this is particularly important in the case of a contentious custody battle. In our Divorce Ministry classes, we ask parents to let us know if someone other than they will be picking up the child, and we still require photo ID before we will release the child. I explain to all of the parents in orientation that I would rather annoy a grandma and grandpa than do anything to endanger the welfare of their child(ren). We also ask specifically if there is anyone who is not allowed to pick up the child. All volunteers should be made aware of this situation in order to avoid releasing the child to the “wrong” parent.

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Welcome back to our series of “Sunday Morning Strategies” for accommodating children of divorce and children from single parent homes in your Sunday morning children’s ministry or church service. The goal of this series is to equip you to better minister to the children in your church who come to you from non-traditional family structures. In a prior installment, we addressed the need to train volunteers to minister to children from divorced and single-parent homes and some strategies for undertaking that training.

However, just training the volunteers you already have may not be enough. You should also consider “targeted recruiting” to specifically find and recruit volunteers who will be able to relate to, and empathize with, children from divorced, separated and single-parent homes. By having some of these specialized volunteers spread throughout your ministry, you can help to ensure that a hurting a child has someone who can relate to them in their time of greatest need. These volunteers will bring a needed skill set and benefits to your ministry including:

• A unique ability to understand and appreciate the circumstances children of divorced and separated parents are experiencing.
• A sounding board for kids who are convinced that no one really knows that they are going through or cares.
• An innate ability to recognize when the underlying issue that is bothering a child has to do with their parents’ divorce or separation. Adults who experienced divorce as a child seem to have this sixth sense when it comes to understanding children who are currently going through it.

While it is possible to train your existing volunteers in these areas, finding people who already possess these gifts will help both you and the kids in your ministry. Here are some prime candidates who will bring a new perspective to your ministry and the ability to minister to children of divorce and children from single-parent homes: Continue reading

Welcome back to our series of “Sunday Morning Strategies” for accommodating children of divorce, children from single parent homes and children from other modern family types in your Sunday morning children’s ministry. In today’s installment, we’re going to talk about the absolute necessity of training your volunteers so they will be prepared to deal with these kids.

As those who work with kids on a regular basis, we need to be in a position to react to, and deal with, those circumstances that are likely to occur in the lives of some of the kids in your ministry. As I thought back on some of my most uncomfortable moments I’ve experienced personally in children’s ministry, I realized that they were uncomfortable primarily because I was unprepared for the situations to come up. Given the circumstances involved (one was a child who had a grandparent die, and the other was when a child told me they had spent the day before helping Dad to move out of the house), I should have been better prepared. Since then, the same or similar circumstances have presented themselves multiple times. The only difference was that I was better prepared for the conversation. They are never easy conversations, but they can be made less uncomfortable with adequate training.

As leaders in children’s ministry, it is our responsibility to make sure that our volunteers are not caught off guard by these conversations and that they are equipped to speak into these kids lives no matter what circumstances they may find themselves in. Particularly in a large group/small group format where the small group leaders consistently speaks into the lives of the kids in their group, they need to understand and appreciate what the child of divorce and child from a single-parent home is going through.

Here are some ideas for how to train your volunteers to help them to minister to children of divorce and children from single-parent homes:

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Welcome back to our brand new series called “Sunday Morning Strategies” where we are examining things you can do in your Sunday morning children’s ministry programs to accommodate children of divorce and children from various types of modern families. There are certain things you can incorporate into your ministry to specifically address the issues and concerns of these children in your churches, and we will get to those later in this series. However, we’re going to start with some of the fundamentals underlying your ministry. Today, we are going to talk about forms and how some simple adaptations can help you to learn about the kids in your ministry who aren’t living in what we might call “traditional homes.”

You’ve got to love forms, right? Whether you collect information in a computer database or still use a paper based system, most churches collect some sort of information about the kids that come through their doors and their families. Given that roughly 40% of children do not live with their married biological parents, it is important to consider whether or not your forms reflect the changing shape of American families.

How would a family that was cohabiting fill out your intake forms? What about a divorced family where the child splits time between two houses? What about a single-mother and her kids? How would grandparents who are living with their grandchildren fill out your forms? Do you know which kids in your ministry come from non-traditional family forms? Do you have a systematic way of sharing this information in a confidential way with the children’s teachers and/or small group leaders?

Take some time this week to sit down with the forms you use for your children’s ministry and consider how they might need to be revised to be more accommodating to kids from divorced and single-parent homes. Here are some suggestions on things to consider: Continue reading

Here at Hope 4 Hurting Kids, we strive to resource individuals who work with kids to help the hurting children in their lives. Those adults include parents, grandparent, other relatives, teachers, coaches and many others who have the ability to influence the course of a child’s life. Another important group are the dedicated men and women who work with kids week in and week out at churches all over the world. Sunday Morning Strategies is a series for those children’s pastors and children’s ministry workers to help equip them to serve children from disrupted families more effectively.

It’s easy to talk to churches about starting programs like Divorce Care 4 Kids or The Journey or referring teens to sites like Hope 4 Hurting Kids, but one of the biggest questions we get asked by people who work in children’s ministry regularly is:

What can I do on a Sunday morning to help these kids?

People who work with kids have some of the most tender hearts I have ever encountered. I have been blessed to work with these people week in and week out for years now and to meet hundreds of other children’s pastors and children’s ministry workers from around the country and the world. When you talk to these children’s ministry workers about children of divorce they will naturally empathize with them and desire to help them however they can, but many of them just do not know how or what to do.

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Back in 2013, I put together a montage tracing the changing shape of families on television over the last several decades for a children’s ministry conference I was teaching at. In addition to being an insightful look into the evolution of families, if you grew up we these shows, the video is a fun walk down memory lane.  Enjoy.

This article is updated and adapted from an article originally published on Divorce Ministry 4 Kids on October 21, 2013.

In my area of the country, it is officially spring break time. By that, I mean all the college kids are coming to our area to enjoy the beaches and … well you know the rest … to party. In the news media when you hear about spring break, they are usually referring to college kids getting away or families taking a week off to enjoy some family time and a vacation. What about the kids of divorce though? What does spring break mean for them? When do they get to party and have a good time?

Sometimes spring break can mean heartache.

My mom is supposed to have me for spring break, but she said I couldn’t come to her house because she is taking a vacation with her boyfriend and his kids.

Sometimes it can mean confusion. Continue reading

This article, which was first published in the March/April 2012 issue of K! Magazine addresses the issue of how the church should address children of divorce and children from single-parent families in the context of family ministry.  

Family ministry is all the buzz in the world of children’s ministry these days. It seems as though the whole children’s ministry world is painting the world orange! Deuteronomy 6 has become the “go to” verse in children’s ministry, and for good reason. There is much to be learned there. God clearly calls the family to be the primary vessel for imparting and teaching spiritual truth to our kids.

Like many things, though, it’s easy to take a good thing too far. In the lingo of Orange where red is the family and yellow is the church, there is a temptation to lean too far towards the red side (family) in order to compensate for years of yellow driven ministry. When churches do this, they run the risk of losing an ever growing segment of our population and a dwindling portion of our churches – children from divorced homes and single parent families. When our focus is simply on “helping parents to disciple their kids,” what are we saying to kids whose parents have either abandoned them or are in no emotional or spiritual state to disciple them? In those situations, we leave these kids asking and wondering:

WHAT ABOUT MY FAMILY?

The Biblical Mandate

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What if a divorced single parent family suddenly showed up at your church and unknown to you they were involved in a reality show?

What if you found out, would you handle things any differently than when you didn’t know? Stop and think about that for a few minutes.

What attitude would you betray when you didn’t know? Most of you are probably saying, “It doesn’t make any difference as I love all children. I would welcome them like other children.” Really?  Seriously?  Because I’ve been at various children’s ministers’ conferences, and if I could see your face and expression right now, they would tell the real story – just as they do when I approach you at conferences about working with the child of divorce.

These are some of the comments I get.

• We don’t have any children in our community from divorced families.
• We aren’t allowed to say the word “divorce” in our church. I really do want to work with them but my hands are tied.
• Oh! Those kids! They are too out of control for me. No thank you!
• We tried but divorce kids don’t show up consistently, and their parent never knows what’s going on.

Here’s how I’d like to address some of these comments. Continue reading