The Outward Focus

Learning from success

The Southern Baptist Center for National Research at the North American Mission Board (NAMB) recently released the results of a study on evangelizing children entitled Not Just Playtime: Insights from Evangelistic Churches Reaching Children. You can read the fascinating report on the NAMB Web site in its entirety. For now, I’d like to emphasize a few key points.

At a time when it’s abundantly clear that the prime time to reach kids is before they reach their teen years, the study indicates that, overall, baptisms of children age 9-11, a key indicator of the success of child evangelism efforts, has been trending downward and is currently at a 30-year low.

In an effort to combat this trend, the team from NAMB surveyed 1,000 churches with the highest child baptism rates in an effort to learn how the best churches do children’s ministry. Here’s what they discovered:

• The most successful churches take child evangelism seriously. Children’s ministry is not a baby-sitting service while “big people’s church” is going on elsewhere. It is a full-blown ministry effort to make a difference in kids’ lives.

• Regardless of church size or location, the most successful churches evangelized three groups at once – children of their church family, children of regular attenders and those new to the church - and they did so in approximately equal numbers.

• Over 90 percent of the top evangelizing churches reported they have a visionary senior pastor who wholeheartedly supports the church’s ministry to children.

• Half of the churches train parents in how to evangelize children.

• Three-quarters train children in how to share the gospel with their friends.

The report’s conclusion is that the evangelism of children flourishes when pastors are encouraged to enlarge their vision; children become a priority in the church; solid biblical training in evangelism is provided for workers, parents, and children; and high-quality intentional approaches are implemented that do not overburden volunteers, yet include parents in the process. Do those sound like the objectives of a ministry you know?

Awana can play a major role in making children’s evangelism an effective reality, and indeed, Awana receives a favorable mention in the report itself. As we encourage pastors, provide excellent training and raise the priority of children in the church, we help churches fulfill their calling.