Keeping Your Children's Ministry on Mission

For years, when students have asked me, ‘What’s the one children’s ministry book that I should read first?’ I couldn’t recommend just one. Instead, I recommended three: one about organization, one about teaching, and one about keeping children safe. Now I can recommend just one to read first because Jared Kennedy has managed to fit all of those essential elements into a single book!

Keeping Your Children’s Ministry on Mission delivers as advertised. Kennedy rightly knows that the gospel is the only means by which we will have a lasting impact on the next generation. To this thesis Kennedy adds a wealth of practical help and instruction to guide your ministry. Every senior pastor and children’s ministry director should read this book and get it into the hands of all their teachers, helpers, and parents.

I can’t think of a ministry in the church more complex than children’s ministry, and I can’t think of a better guide through that complexity than Keeping Your Children’s Ministry on Mission. Whether you’ve worked with kids for days or years, you’ll find this book comprehensive (from abuse policies to age-graded teaching), balanced (holding onto what’s biblically ideal and practically realistic), and immediately helpful. Jared has packed more than a decade of experience and breadth of perspective into ten short chapters. It’s like having your own children’s ministry consultant only a shelf away.

Are you passionate for kids to embrace the good news about Jesus and follow him throughout life? In this outstanding resource, Jared Kennedy offers us an essential biblical vision and engaging strategic plan to pursue Christ-exalting child and youth discipleship at church and home.

What truly happens when the gospel shapes our goals for children’s ministry? Jared Kennedy knows. As a studied pastor-practitioner, Jared understands how to help leaders and churches connect the gospel to the nuts and bolts—policy-making, recruiting, training, protecting, and reproducing—of children’s ministry. If that’s your mission, you have your manual!

Reading Jared Kennedy’s Keeping Your Children’s Ministry on Mission took me back to all the Sundays I’ve spent on my hands and knees in the nursery, passing out snacks in children’s church, or teaching kids to sing God’s praises. As theologically rich as it is practical, Kennedy guides us from the early church fathers through the roots of the Sunday school movement to contemporary protocols that safeguard the most vulnerable among us. Along the way, he casts a vision for children’s ministry that welcomes children to their Savior and helps them find their place in God’s family. As both a mother and a children’s ministry worker for almost three decades, I heartily recommend it.

Jared has labored in the trenches of children’s ministry for years. You can tell by the wisdom that’s dripping off of every page. If you work with children, do yourself a favor and read Keeping Your Children’s Ministry on Mission from cover to cover. You’ll be encouraged, challenged, and reoriented around the gospel of God’s marvelous grace.