Chris Bright 0:06
Welcome to the thinking church podcast with me, Chris Bright. Every week, I'll be speaking with a church leader about ministry strategy and getting to grips with not just what they do, but the thinking behind why they do it. So without further ado, let's get on with the show. Tom Geatches is the kids network lead for one church based in Gloucester has four locations in the south west of Gloucester, and three in Zimbabwe. It's also my church, which is very, very cool. Tom is passionate about pastoring kids into all God husband, he owns his own kids club, which is limitless kids, as well as working part time as the executive assistant to one church, his senior pastor, Simon Jarvis, needless to say, Tom has a lot on his plate. Tom is great to see you.
you definitely have a lot on your plate, don't you?
Tom Geatches 1:02
I do. But But I excel that way to be honest.
Chris Bright 1:05
Definitely. That's That's for sure. That's for sure. Okay. And I'd love to kick off with asking you how you found leading kids Ministry of a lockdown. How have you found it? And what have you learned?
Tom Geatches 1:18
Yeah, sure. Initially, Chris, it was quite a challenge, really, because our, our primary interface of working with kids is seeing the kids on a weekly basis, really, the face to face contact is key. So when that's taken away and stripped away, certainly you're left with, oh, what can we do? So we lifted apart all of our kids programmes like everyone else, check them online, and to kind of see what would work. And we had great success of it kids still bought in, we still had like regular visitors to our archives online. But our key interface was with the parents. So one of the things we are passionate about as kids team is trying to get behind the doors of our kids, which we could never really do. But suddenly COVID allowed us to, it allowed us into the front room of every child via the telly, which was so cool for us. It got us involved with the parents, which really struggled beforehand. Whereas My parents are rooted in to kids ministry, which is just that's our heart. That's what we want to be able to do. regardless what we learnt. Three things we learned. The first thing is simplicity is key. So often we we spent so long on preparing our programmes and trying to create so much creativity in our kids rooms. And it took ages. But without without this COVID season, we wouldn't have learned that we don't need to do that every week. So well. It's key to still be creative, we can be simple in our creativity and save our time. Well, the second thing we learned is a boy just mentioned our parent interface. So working with parents is so key to what we're trying to do. We only see kids for a small amount of time, whereas parents see them every week, every day, every hour. So it's really key to work with our parents. The last thing we learned, which I'm calling our COVID keepers, is how we manage our time and team effectively. So so often we call teammate for meeting after meeting after meeting, or suddenly we can't do that anymore. So that's one thing that we're going to take going forward is how we honour our team's time more effectively.
Chris Bright 3:10
No, that's brilliant. That's brilliant. We know that kids ministries important. Most people that follow Jesus do so from an early age. How important is it? Is it like capturing those capture people in those early years? And and how? How'd you go about doing it? How do you go about creating those moments that that where people can where young people and your kids can make decisions for Christ at an early age?
Tom Geatches 3:39
Yeah, great question. So we know the Bible is full of passages where Jesus welcomes kids, because Jesus is passionate about kids, and therefore we should be to. And in our kids ministry, what we aim to do is to replicate church effectively. So we want to in Arcadia service, he want to pull all of that across into our kids services. So we're not running a babysitting club for kids. We're running a ministry where kids can encounter God whenever they walk through the door. So that's our prayers, kids, he is really is that kids will encounter the Holy Spirit at the youngest age they can, because there is no such thing as the junior Holy Spirit. And one of the things that I'm always on my team about is how can we create such an environment where the Holy Spirit dwells in our in our place, so kids lives can be changed. I look at my life. And I think that all the mess I could have got into if I wasn't saved at an early age. And I think that the battles that youth used to go through, that's my poor dad. And so kids go through those battles. Now. When you look at the issues going on in the world, his kids are going through these things. So it's so important that if a kid can really understand what it means to to encounter God, and to get filled of his spirit at such a young age, that can be life changing for them and set him off on the path.
Chris Bright 4:49
Yeah, and I hear so many stories of people that may not even Christians, but they say I want to send my children to a youth group because it instils values and things like that. Why do you think parents are realising that now? Because, you know, they're not coming themselves? Yeah. But they there's something there. What do you think that? You know? What are they picking up on that? That maybe they don't want themselves but they want their kids to have? It's an odd question.
Tom Geatches 5:16
It's a really odd thing. So our kids clubs are full of community based children, where parents don't engage with church at all. But they're happy to drop their kids off every week. And even now, we're having parents call us saying, when your kids comes back, because we desperate to bring them to your club, and I think there's something attractive about about a kid's club in the church, and that's God. But these people don't see that. They just think, oh, there's there's lots of nice people there. And they're really happy. And they're really full of joy full of life. And that's God, but they just don't see that.
Chris Bright 5:45
Yeah, that's really, really good. So your kids ministry OC kids, it's been listed as a greenhouse ministry, with the Assemblies of God in the UK. What What does that mean? And how is that helping other churches,
Tom Geatches 6:01
it's such an exciting initiative. So I've been honoured to be part of this table where we're piloting this idea. And the whole plan is to try and relationally grow a network of kids leaders across the nation. So we figured that there's heaps of kids leaders that are doing awesome jobs in churches, but they feel lonely, they feel isolated, they feel they feel cut off from what's going on. So this greenhouse initiative is to try and resource and relationally Connect leaders. So we're not saying as a greenhouse church, we're perfect. We're not saying we, we know how to do everything, because that's far from the truth. But what we are saying is, we're doing something well, open our doors come have a look. So think of think of a natural greenhouse, where you the idea is to take small plants and plant them create an environment where they can grow and flourish into all they're supposed to be. That's what we're doing. So whenever one church on OC kids runs an event, our doors be open wide for anyone, not just a big churches, but anyone to come along and see what they're doing. So they can put themselves in our greenhouse environment, and see if they can grow and learn and pick up some tips, and then take it back to their location. So the whole idea is to try and relationally connect and resource leaders across the UK. And let me tell you, it's heaps of fun. Meeting kids pastors from across the nation is just, it's just brilliant.
Chris Bright 7:17
Yeah. And is it I would imagine it'd be some kind of Mayhem whenever you get kids leaders together. Is that is that the case as well?
Tom Geatches 7:24
Absolutely. Because kids is we love our games. We love our quizzes. We love just mess, which is why we do kids ministry TV on.
Chris Bright 7:31
I think you can't be involved in kids ministry if you don't like some kind of mess. Absolutely. No, brilliant. So I think church we talk a lot about discipleship pathways, and one church we've inputted a discipleship pathway into our church. And so it's using programmes to grow people step by step in their faith. However, with kids, you normally only get one opportunity per week to disciple them, you can't send them from programme to programme to programme. So how do you effectively disciple a child, when you've only got really kind of limited time to do that,
Tom Geatches 8:07
True, So is this like a two pronged strategy. So the first prong is obviously when we have our kids in our care at kids clubs, is we're intentional with that time. So we want to create a great environment where kids have fun and feel welcome, and, and it feels like home from home for them. But we're really intentional about creating those moments where the power of God is there, and where we can disciple kids where we can train them to read and pray and encounter God in their own way. But our second prong of action is came from COVID, really, as I talked about earlier, is trying to equip parents. So we realise that parents have much more engagement with their kids than us. So if we can resource and equip parents, to disciple their kids, we're on to a winner. And then we can support that. And I think that across the UK, that's a turning tide, which is just fantastic. Or as the days of yesteryear, were, hey, parents, there's our kids, make them Christians, disciple them yourself. And we just can't do that we do our best. But we can't do that because of our time constraints. While the turning tide is no parents learn up, we have to disciple our kids. And as kids eaters, we will support that, and encourage that and champion and equip the parents to do so. So I guess that's, that's where we sit on that way. We're really intentional, when it's when it's our time to when we have our Sunday ministries and our kids clubs. But we're also really like, intentional with helping the parents do that, too.
Chris Bright 9:32
Yeah, no, brilliant. Listening about COVID for a minute, because, you know, we're when we're not out of COVID. Obviously, we're still in COVID. So we know we're not even post COVID. But we are in a place at the moment where there's no restrictions. But it does give us a chance to think how, what COVID has done to change the landscape. And so how do you think what do you think COVID has done, kind of moving forward to change the landscape of how you think about kids ministry.
Tom Geatches 10:01
Yeah, it's COVID it's been a game changer for every ministry and kids ministry hasn't been unaffected either. One of the things we noticed when we first reopened our OC kids clubs, we had to re educate the children how to have fun. Because for 18 months, the regulations were so tight restrictions were so tight around children, that even when they were in school, there was so many rules they had to conform to, they forgot how to have fun, which is Southern. And really, when kids should, it should be an eight in every child. So we've had to re educate you on how to have fun, how to dance, how to praise, how to get involved with our clubs, because kids have been so nervous, and rightly so I fully understand why there's been nervousness. And I think that's, that's not an immediate fix. So 18 months of COVID. So far, it's going to take a heck of a long time to, to re educate children into high toughen. And I think going on I think there, because we put all of our programmes online, I think going forward, there needs to be some hybrid arrangement, where, where whilst it's key to have kids face to face, it's also key to have some presence online for kids, because that helps us reach far and wide of people that won't come in our doors. One of the great winds for me personally, during the COVID season was our scores ministry. So that actually took off more than it did pre COVID. Because we schools are asking us to create assembly videos for them, which we did. So we are kids programmes that we run online, we then send out to schools, or the head teachers find out about this and then started asking for our content. So must be about 25 or 30 schools that have an our video content really easy for us to produce, because we were producing it for our kids. But we sent out to schools and still now that's still going on. So this hybrid arrangement is cool. Whilst we can't get 25 schools worth of children in our building, we can reach them and touch them lightly with our content. So the hybrid arrangement of kids ministry going forward is absolutely key.
Chris Bright 12:06
Yeah, no, that's, that's actually fascinating. I didn't know that at all. And just that thought that what you're producing just for an online context has real world impact in, in schools across the city, as I said, Absolutely fantastic. And when when we're thinking about the kids of today, you know, we're both millennials growing up, and you know, or then the next generation is Gen Z, and they're all starting to grow up. They're in their kind of late teens, early 20s. Now, and they're all getting married and stuff. But the next generation down is the generation of my kids, which is and then your kids, which is generation alpha. Yeah. Now, if there's one thing I know is that the generation from my parents and to us to Gen Z, they're very, very different generation, the, as you go down and everything, there's always changes. What are the things that are? What changes are you having to make? And how are you reaching the kids of today? How, what are the kids of today? Like, which maybe is different from from us?
Tom Geatches 13:09
Yeah, I think kids today clearly read really agile and adaptable, due to the water in so our age, we can be agile, adaptable, but it takes us what get the kids instantly, instinctively know, agile, so they change their thoughts, they change their emotions like that. I think that's to do with the world we're in. But more key than that, I call my two girls, the swipe generation, because so they're mad on their tech. They, they love their iPad, they love YouTube, but they would only watch a YouTube video for a few seconds. And if it doesn't grab them like that. Next video is swiped. And the same with films actually. So when we're watching a film, if the film doesn't grab them, by within five minutes, both of them say now I could watch a new film now I can watch a new cartoon. And I think that's that's the generation, the swipe generation, where if something doesn't grab them, within the first couple of minutes, they they're on to the next thing. And so as kids ministers and in kids ministry, we have to be aware of that. We have to make sure our programmes are agile to capture them. But not only that, there has to be such a level of engagement interaction, that we don't lose the kids from the moment they walk in the room. Whereas our generation or generations before us would have given more time I think kids don't know. Kids are so swipe heavy on their tech. And that is their life to their swipe heavy in their life. So it's key that we we create such an environment and atmosphere where kids can't swipe away from us because they're just straight away.
Chris Bright 14:51
Well, thank you so much for listening to this week's podcast. This is only halfway through the podcast and you can listen to the full conversation. By joining our members podcast, just go to our website, www.thinking.church and you can sign up to our members podcast that only costs the price of one coffee per month so it's well worth doing. So why not get a coffee, listen to the podcast and learn something new. We'll see you again for this podcast next week. So bye for now.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
