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:

• Make the basics part of your initial volunteer training. Share the statistics about divorce and children’s living arrangements with your volunteers so that they will have an appreciation for how rampant the issue is. Much of that information can be found right here on Hope4HurtingKids.com.
• Continue to train your volunteers on a regular basis (at least annually) on the impacts of divorce and separation on kids. Teach them about the emotions these kids experience and how best to deal with them.
• Role play with your volunteers in training to discuss how they would react to children sharing news about changes in their families.
• Provide resources like the My Feelings Workbook, Draw Your Emotions and other resources found here and on sites like IAmAChildofDivorce.com that your leaders can utilize or provide to parents in ministering to these kids.
• Teach your leaders techniques like the GAP Method for dealing with fear, the RACE against anger or breathing techniques for dealing with stress. You never know when these techniques might be helpful in dealing with kids from divorced or single-parent homes.
• Teach your volunteers about the difference between empathy and sympathy and teach them how to empathize with children of divorce and the situation they find themselves in.
• Remind volunteers about the importance of using inclusive language and not making children from single-parent homes feel left out by using ordinary phrases like “check with your mom and dad.”
• Educate your volunteers on how children of divorce may react differently to common biblical stories like the prodigal son or the time Jesus was left at the temple.
• Encourage your volunteers to volunteer for a divorce recovery group like Divorce Care 4 Kids or the Big D.
• Remind your volunteers that in dealing with difficult children in your ministry, there may be something more underlying the behavior.
• If possible, send your volunteers to a children’s ministry conference and encourage them to sit in on a workshop on ministering to children of divorce.

This article is updated and adapted from an article originally published on Divorce Ministry 4 Kids on May 15, 2013.

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:

• Do you have separate sections on your forms where both mom and dad can fill out their addresses and contact information? Consider a form which includes separate sections for mom and dad with a check box they can check in the event that the contact information is the same.
• Do you ask for information about other churches the children in the family may be attending with non-custodial parents? If you gather this information you may have a chance to reach out to the children’s pastor/director from the other church to collaborate on the children’s spiritual development.
• Many forms include a section for listing brothers and sisters. Do you have a section on your forms for capturing other children who live in the same house with the child like step-siblings and half-siblings? What about children of a live-in partner of one of the parents?
• Is there a place on your form where parents can list other adults (other than mom or dad) living in the home? This would allow parents to list significant others, aunts, uncles, grandparents or friends who live with and influence the child.
• When you look at the design of your form is it clearly intended to be filled out by a traditional married mom and dad family or does it acknowledge different family types?
• Is there a place for parents to explain the living arrangements of the child? Do you know if the children in your ministry are splitting time between homes?
• Do your forms inquire as to whether or not the child’s parents are still married?

As you think about redesigning your forms, keep in mind that some explanation as to why you are gathering this information might be helpful to parents who may feel like you are prying into their personal lives. Reassure them that, like them, you are only interested in their child’s well being and that this information will help you to best minister to these kids. For practical reasons, you may want to consider an abbreviated form for allowing children into your ministry on a Sunday morning with a more detailed form to follow that the parent(s) can take home and bring back the following week. This will prevent the proverbial logjam at the check in counter.

Forms are critical to gathering important information, and information is key to effective ministry. Sit down with a copy of your forms this week and consider whether you are gathering sufficient information to really know the kids in your ministry who do not come from traditional homes.

This article is updated and adapted from an article originally published on Divorce Ministry 4 Kids on May 06, 2013.

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.

That is why we are starting a brand new series here on Hope 4 Hurting Kids called Sunday Morning Strategies. In this series, we will present practical ideas about how children’s pastors and children’s ministry workers can help children from disrupted families (whether that be divorced, separated, blended or any of the other varieties of modern families around today) in a traditional Sunday morning setting. Whether your church has a traditional Sunday School setting for kids, a small group/large group format or mixed Sunday morning services which include both adults and kids together, we hope that the tips in this series will provide you with practical ideas that you can implement in your church to minister to this hurting portion of your congregation.

Come back on Mondays throughout the summer, and perhaps beyond, to find new tips and techniques each week. Sunday may just now be over, but we promise it’s coming again soon.

We hope that you will engage in this series by commenting with your own experiences!

This article is updated and adapted from an article originally published on Divorce Ministry 4 Kids on April 22, 2013.