At our church, we are currently starting the process of evaluating our existing children’s and youth work and developing a new vision for what we want to see . The first part of this process was to consult the amazing team of volunteers who deliver the vast majority of clubs and activities each week, and so on Tuesday we gathered as many of them together as we could get to start talking about what this new vision might look like.

In a practical exercise we asked each person to privately write down their own personal aims for the children’s and youth work of the church. Namely, what they thought we should be working towards and trying to achieve in all of our activities. I gathered up all the responses and spent the last day writing them up and trying to pull common threads out of them all. To do this, I simply highlighted similar comments or themes in the same colour and added up the number of times each theme occurred. Of course, this is an overly crude method and I realise that some of the outcome is based on my interpretation of those written comments. However, I do think it gives a general indication of what our wider team believes to be the most important factors in the care of our kids and youth, and is therefore a good starting point on which to build our new vision. Here are the results:

• Help children and young people to develop a personal relationship with God x 20
• Provide evangelism & outreach to non-churched young people x 12
• Help children and young people to develop esteem and self-worth x 11
• Provide solid biblical teaching and practical application x 10
• Provide social opportunities for children and young people x 9
• Provide positive role models and relationships in the group leaders x 5
• Encourage active participation in church x 3
• Help support the parents of children and young people x 2

As part of this evaluation, I’d recently started writing a mission statement for the 11-14’s group that I run. Interestingly, it seems to mirror the first three points listed above:

This group exists to help young people discover their identity in God, to become passionate followers of Jesus and to share their faith with others.

Does anyone else out there have a vision or mission statement for their groups? Do they reflect the sentiments listed here or are they totally different? Are there particular themes that our team has missed? Let me know!