When it comes to Children’s Ministry, there is no doubt that kids in fourth and fifth (and sometimes sixth!) grade are completely different from kids in younger grades. They’re also vastly different from kids in middle school, even though they’re so close in age. Ministering to preteens can seem daunting, exhausting, hilarious, and fun all at the same time.
Preteen Ministry expert Sean Sweet, a Preteen Pastor and Community Director at FourFiveSix, a ministry dedicated to reaching preteens, has written what I would consider the guide to Preteen Ministry in Let Go & Run Beside: The Essentials of Intentional Preteen Ministry. Packed with practical advice, ideas, and encouragement, this book is the a must-have for anyone who works with kids in the church.
Even if you do not have a separate preteen ministry (yet!), I found this book extremely helpful for navigating this critical time in a child’s life. Many preteens are gaining new emotional and social tools as they enter this lifestage. They’re realizing for the first time that they are an individual who is separate from others. They’re reinterpreting events from earlier in their lives with the new emotional tools they now possess.
There is something that often happens when kids enter fourth or fifth grade in Children’s Ministry. The previous excitement they had for everything happening in Kids Church diminishes; they sit down in the back during activities, sometimes refusing to participate in games they used to love, and slipping into the dreaded zone-out during worship in music. I’ve seen it happen time and time again, until I started adjusting my strategies to include these kids in a different way. Sometimes that was by using intentional activities or utilizing discussion or questions, but overall, I knew our structure had to change in order to continue reaching these older kids in our ministry.
Sweet’s book addresses these changes and the challenges of preteens. Perhaps one of the most helpful sections of the book has to do with questions. No longer can you simply ask fourth and fifth graders straight forward Who? and What? questions. Now you have to start diving into Why? questions, as well as their own questions, letting them ask you about Bible passages, theology, and God in ways that might seem uncomfortable at times as they struggle to figure out what they think about what they are discovering.
What Sweet is advocating for in this book is certainly challenging, especially if you have always done ministry in a particular way. It will break some old habits and force you to think about incorporating new strategies into the mix of what you do on a Sunday, Wednesday, or weekend. However, I think that in the end, it will help grow your ministry not in numbers, but in spiritual depth and discipleship.
Near the end of the book, Sweet takes time to discuss goals:
Peter Drucker helped to make the idea of SMART goals popular. These goals are:
* Specific
* Measurable
* Achievable
* Relevant
* Time-bound
SMART goals aim at reaching a clearly-defined destination, whereas the types of goals God often lays before us are not about arrival as much as they are about the journey. A God-sized goal isn’t about reaching a destination as much as it is about moving in a specific direction.
Sean Sweet. Let Go & Run Beside: The Essentials of Intentional Preteen Ministry, (Four Rivers Media & FourFiveSix, 2020), pg. 145.
I often have moments while reading when I have to put a book down, pause, and think for a moment. This book gave me plenty of these, and this final section on goals was perhaps the section that had me nodding, evaluating my own ministry, and thinking deeply about where I needed to shift priorities. Many churches often fall into the trap of SMART goals. They want goals that are definable, quantifiable, and easy to understand. However, God simply doesn’t work in those parameters all the time. Often, God’s work is seen in the stories, the handwritten notes handed to you after a long weekend of services from a kid who wrote down what they had discovered about God. God works in quiet ways that defy measuring, and re-envisioning preteen ministry not as a destination but as a direction makes all the difference.
In your own ministry, what does Preteen Ministry look like?
While reading this book, we hosted a preteen event for our fourth and fifth graders. I found myself rethinking our schedule, our discussions, our messages, our games, and everything from the ground up because of what I had discovered in Sean Sweet’s book. By the end of the weekend, I realized the power of morphing what we do for fourth and fifth graders. The kids in our ministry talked about that weekend for weeks afterwards, which led to more intentional plans for Preteen Ministry.
If you have any fourth or fifth graders in your children’s ministry, I cannot recommend this book enough. You can find it on Amazon.com. It is certainly worth the read to transform your preteen ministry into something that will have eternal impact.