Children’s Ministry

Baptist Sunday School, Baptist Daycare, Baptist Vacation Bible School, and a Baptist School helped me immensely. God used these to teach me truths like that He is good and loving and powerful and I am a sinner who's saved through Jesus’ (atoning- I may not have understood this so well as a child.) death on a Cross.

Fast forward to when I was 14. The pastor announced that the 1st and 2nd graders were no longer going to have weekly Pioneer Club because they were losing their teacher.

I felt compassion. “I can try to help them.” I later told him. “I’m not much, but maybe better than nothing.”

It was a small church of 100-150 people. It was the church where my parents had met and married when my dad was going to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and my mom was going to the Baptist nursing school.

So, they let me try.

I taught the one-and-a-half-hour class completely alone from the time that I was 14 until I moved away for college. It was a small class of just a handful of students. The only badges my students ever got were Bible badges. I didn’t really try to do crafts or anything.

There were just a few ideas that I really focused on. One was that snack came from God. If we ate apples it was because God caused the apple tree to grow. If we had Graham crackers it was because God made people who made factories that made them.

Once, in November, I encouraged the children to list out that for which they were thankful. I was the scribe who wrote down what they said. To my amazement they listed hundreds of things.

I loved those kids.

Also, I helped the music minister with her “Children of Promise Singers” program. I volunteered a bit in college and seminary.

After seminary I was the interim English/youth minister at a Chinese church in California. We focused on Scripture memory.

In Beijing I wore many hats and was stretched beyond ordinary human limits.

Then the head pastor announced that the middle schoolers were going to lose their children’s church teacher and it would be canceled.

Suddenly I remembered the call to serve and fill a need when I was 14.

So, when the sermon began, I would go to an adjacent storage room in the hotel where our international fellowship met. A handful of middle schoolers gathered around and I taught them, sometimes as a helper to an older parent, but often alone.

It felt like a weighty opportunity; I was aware that these were likely future leaders. I encouraged them to preach mini sermons sometimes.

A fellow American in the fellowship, Andrew, visited my class and said that it reminded him of his mom who had taught at a Christian school.

We married and now have two darling disciples of our own to guide.

God is so good!

The VBS teacher who led me to accept salvation in Jesus didn’t know that I would grow to also invest in the lives of little ones. I am grateful for her faith and obedience in proclaiming the gospel.

Plant gospel seeds; see kingdom fruit in Heaven!

Helping you find the best Christian children’s books,

Ruth