Welcome back to our series of “Sunday Morning Strategies” for accommodating children of divorce and children from single parent homes in your Sunday morning children’s ministry. In today’s installment, we’re going to talk about the absolute necessity of training your volunteers so they will be prepared to deal with children of divorce and children from single-parent homes.

As those who work with kids on a regular basis, we need to be in a position to react to, and deal with, those circumstances that are likely to occur in the lives of some of the kids in your ministry. As I thought back on some of my most uncomfortable moments I’ve experienced personally in children’s ministry, I realized that they were uncomfortable primarily because I was unprepared for the situations to come up. Given the circumstances involved (one was a child who had a grandparent die, and the other was when a child told me they had spent the day before helping Dad to move out of the house), I should have been better prepared. Since then, the same or similar circumstances have presented themselves multiple times. The only difference was that I was better prepared for the conversation. They are never easy conversation, but they can be made less uncomfortable with adequate training.

As leaders in children’s ministry, it is your responsibility to make sure that your volunteers are not caught off guard by these conversations and that they are equipped to speak into these kids lives no matter what circumstances they may find themselves in. Particularly in a large group/small group format where the small group leaders consistently speaks into the lives of the kids in their group, they need to understand and appreciate what the child of divorce and child from a single-parent home is going through.

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Welcome back to our brand new series called “Sunday Morning Strategies” where we are examining things you can do in your Sunday morning children’s ministry programs to accommodate children of divorce and children from single parent homes. There are certain things you can incorporate into your ministry to specifically address the issues and concerns of these children in your churches, and we will get to those later in this series. However, we’re going to start with some of the fundamentals underlying your ministry. Today, we are going to talk about forms and how some simple adaptations can help you to learn about the kids in your ministry who aren’t living in what we might call “traditional homes.”

You’ve got to love forms, right? Whether you collect information in a computer database or still use a paper based system, most churches collect some sort of information about the kids that come through their doors and their families. Given that roughly 40% of children do not live with their married biological parents, it is important to consider whether or not your forms reflect the changing shape of American families.

How would a family that was cohabiting fill out your intake forms? What about a divorced family where the child splits time between two houses? What about a single-mother and her kids? How would grandparents who are living with their grandchildren fill out your forms? Do you know which kids in your ministry come from non-traditional family forms? Do you have a systematic way of sharing this information in a confidential way with the children’s teachers and/or small group leaders?

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Here at Divorce Ministry 4 Kids, part of our mission is to call churches to minister to children of divorced and separated parents. An equally important part of our mission is:

Equipping those who work with children to serve these kids more effectively;

It’s easy to talk to churches about starting programs like Divorce Care 4 Kids or The Big D or referring teens to sites like I Am A Child of Divorce (http://iamachildofdivorce.com), but one of the big questions we get asked by people who work in children’s ministry regularly is:

What can I do on a Sunday morning to help these kids?

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