Help Is on the Way!

By: Chip Griepsma – Director BCM International Training Ministries

“What do I do? I’m feeling so out of my league! Over my head! Out of my depth! “Why,” you ask? Well, I’m responsible to coordinate our church’s children’s ministry. I’m supposed to help our teachers and their volunteers do a great job reaching the kids for Christ, as well as help them effectively disciple the kids in God’s Word. Where, oh where do I start training our folks? I have no clue!”

Sound familiar? Have you been there? Are you there now? Do you know it’s essential to train your teachers well, but perplexed where to get solid, straightforward, effective training materials? You know you haven’t the time, energy, or perhaps not even the expertise, to put together your own lessons for training!

Well, despair not! Do what others have efficiently and effectively done. Whether you’re an inexperienced or experienced teacher, Christian education director or pastor, thoughtfully consider using In Step with the Master Teacher to train your children’s ministry staff.

What is it?

Just what is In Step with the Master Teacher? Simply: a ready-to-use, internationally developed, biblically centered, discipleship-focused teacher training course. Each of four core lessons has corresponding satellite lessons which can be used to flesh out foundational teaching principles. Church leaders are finding ISMT to be economically feasible and easy-to-use because of its ready-to-go prepared visuals, reproducible worksheets, and fully scripted teacher notes.

Do Like Betsy!

So if you’re perplexed as to where to begin training your children’s ministry leaders, consider doing what Betsy did!

Four or five years ago, about the time In Step with the Master Teacher was published by BCM International, Betsy and the associate pastor of her Pennsylvania church were seeking to improve the skills of their teaching staff. But would ISMT be ‘generic’ enough for them? With the vast diversity of curriculum that churches were using in their children’s ministries, could any single teacher training program like ISMT really be used by every church?

Because Betsy lives in the area, she attended several training sessions offered at BCM’s International Ministry Center in Akron, PA. It wasn’t long before she knew ISMT was, in her words, “an excellent way to present her teachers with basic training skills, regardless of the teaching curriculum being used.” In Step with the Master Teacher was not tied to any one denomination or any one publisher’s curriculum’s perspective.

Building Relationships

Betsy’s church has approximately 50 teachers and helpers – some ‘seasoned’ teachers and others novices – in a variety of children’s ministries: Sunday School, children’s worship, mid-week and summer programs. All are currently being trained with ISMT curriculum.

Betsy wrote, “Last Spring we introduced In Step with the Master Teacher by training our teachers with ISMT’s core lesson ‘Building Relationships,’ which helps teachers see how they can better understand their children, as well as showing their children they are truly valued.”

Betsy continued, “Our associate pastor felt relationship building was our main need at that time. We offered the class for four weeks straight at the 8:30 am Sunday School hour, which corresponded with our early service. We had babysitting available.  At the end of the sessions, the enthusiasm for more training was there. The evaluations that the teachers filled out showed their main need was finding out how to effectively lead a child to Christ, which led this year to our offering training with the Leading a Child to Christ lessons.”

‘Response has been wonderful!’

Terry is another who sought out In Step with the Master Teacher for training the staff at his church. He shares, “I am a ‘retreaded’ elementary school teacher. Upon my retirement from 30 years of working mostly with grade 7-8 students, I was asked to join the staff at my church in Ontario, Canada as a ‘part-time’ pastoral assistant. Among other responsibilities, Christian Education is a major focus. Our departmental superintendent has been concerned with training/upgrading for Sunday School teachers and youth workers. After much research, I came upon the ‘In Step’ materials, liked what I saw and proposed to present to our staff the 4 core sessions between September and June, 2006-7. I do each presentation twice, during our Sunday School time so that teachers from all classes can rotate responsibilities and attend. This way the staff doesn’t have to schedule another night out.”

Terry says he alters the lessons “…briefly to fit into our 45 minute Sunday School lesson time. That generally has not been a major problem. The materials allow for great flexibility. The response has been wonderful. Teachers are discovering that ideas/suggestions they have heard/read elsewhere are being reinforced, and they are getting an opportunity to re-think some of the things they may have been doing or perhaps not doing.”

This May, Terry has been asked to teach the four core lessons from ISMT for church’s College and Career class. Why? To prepare young men and women who have the potential and God’s calling to become children’s workers. The plan at Terry’s church is to review one or two sessions each year and add one or two of the satellite sessions as continuing training each year for their teachers and Christian education workers.

Missions 101

Terry isn’t the only one who has thought of using In Step with the Master Teacher to train young people who are in high school or college. Other churches are grasping the vision of training young people well before they head out on short-term mission trips. ISMT training enables any young person to be more adequately equipped to share God’s Word, whether staying at home in local neighborhoods or crossing an ocean to work in a cross-cultural context.

To express her own excitement, one Christian Education director of a 2000 member church in Pennsylvania wrote BCM to say ISMT “…is the best teacher training material I have found in the twenty years I have been directing Children’s Ministries!”

Once again, if you are perplexed as to where to start effectively training your church’s children’s staff, let me encourage you to consider In Step with the Master Teacher.