A VALUES BRAINSTORMING IDEA THAT WORKED

We had a kids ministry volunteer training last night. My goal was to introduce some rallying points around some core values we wanted to introduce. But our paid staff had already come up with our “core values” so I wanted to give the volunteers a chance to own and create them too. So to set the stage, we did a brainstorming activity and it ended up being fun an very encouraging. So I thought I’d share it with you. If you’re a youth pastor or a small group leader or teacher… it might work in some context for you too.

Here’s what we did. First, we brainstormed 2 questions:

What do you love about kids ministry?
What are the needs kids have at JCC on the weekend?

To do this, I wrote two words on two giant tablets. For the first question, we used “ORANGE”, the name of our curriculum company as an acrostic to create the list. To answer the second question, we used our church name, “JOURNEY”. We had them do this as a table group first and then we kinda fought for our best ideas to make the master list. It created laughter and enthusiasm and a bit of tension which was awesome.

Here’s what they came up with.

What they love about kids ministry:

what they think kids need when they come to JCC on the weekend:

It inspired all of us to be creative, created an environment of ownership, and was collaborative. It made for a perfect intro to our core values. It really couldn’t have gone better in my opinion. It was a great team building activity that was easy to prep and very effective. I’m gonna do it again in some other environments I lead too.