Carmel Kids Club
Carmel Kids Club is an exciting new children’s Sabbath School initiative that was born from a combination of need, a desire to incorporate our Church goals, and difficulties in finding volunteers to serve in Children’s Sabbath School classes.
Carmel College Church is home to a lot of families and therefore has a growing number of children attending Sabbath School each week. However, after several years of struggling to find enough adult volunteers to run the traditional Children’s Sabbath School divisions, we decided to think outside the box. The decision was made to simplify the number of children’s divisions. It now includes a Beginners class for children under school age (0-3 years), a Teen class for children in the early high school (yr7-9), a Youth class catering for upper high school and beyond (yr10+) and a new Kids Club for Primary School aged children. Reducing the number of divisions has allowed us to maximise our volunteers. The Kids Club now has 4 teams with three adults per team, plus we have at least one teen mentee on each team.
Over the past few years, our Church has worked through the Growing Together project and identified 3 goals: to be a Jesus-centred community, to prioritize intergenerational connections, and to be a good neighbour, by serving our wider community.
As we planned for Kids Club, we wanted to be sure these goals remained our focus. Our goal is to help the kids grow in their faith and to feel like they belong to a church family that cares for them.
We have chosen to use programs that are Jesus-focused with stories read directly from the Bible where possible. We are also utilising a Bible timeline to help the children make connections between the different stories we cover. Our goal is to help children find the ways the Bible stories can help them in their own lives.
Relationships are also important, so we are looking at ways to encourager older and younger children within the group to work together and form buddies. Our room features a huge family tree on which children will place their names and the names of their families. We have also incorporated a segment each week, where someone from the Church family will come in and talk to the kids about how God has been active in their life. This allows intergenerational relationships to form
as well as helping the kids to see faith in action. These special guests will also add their names to our family tree – a visual way for the kids to see themselves as belonging to God’s family.
Service is another area we want to build into our Kids Club and is an area we will grow over time. We are utilising a prayer wall where kids can learn to pray for others, their community, and their world; encouraging kids to form buddies and help those who are younger and we hope in the future to also do some service projects as a group.
One of the challenges facing Kids Club is the wide range of ages deciding how to cater to diverse needs. Some of the ways we are tackling this challenge include: utilising small group activities with older kids helping younger ones; helping our older kids to lead out for parts of the program or assist as junior helpers; setting up a quiet corner for younger kids who may need space when it gets overwhelming, and separating into two groups for part of the program with younger kids completing a craft while older kids dig deeper into the story through games and quizzes.
So far Carmel Kids Club has been well received, with up to 30 kids attending each week, including quite a few visitors. There is lovely energy in the room and the kids are engaging in the various parts of the program with enthusiasm. It has been a lesson for us that as Churches we need to be creative, flexible and prepared to do things differently as the needs and resources of our Church change, even though the same God we love and serve never does.