Jigsaw is a creative ministry in Fremantle, Western Australia – that may even emerge as a church plant. Brad Flynn shares the following 'learnings' from the past 6-8 months. This may give you some ideas to brainstorm around: 

1)     Kid’s Holiday programs are a great start!  We’ve been utilising the Group publishing resources such as Serengeti, Bug Safari, Lava Lava etc. We’re just about to do one in the week leading up to Christmas. Parents “love” the opportunity to have their kids involved in the program while they go shopping. We’ve had a few kids from the holiday program join Jigsaw regularly – but not many (because at the present time it meets on Saturday mornings!). However, it’s great to interact with local community more and make new friends. It energises (and often exhausts!) everyone – and we all love it.

2)     Multi-age grouping works really well! While sports clubs and schools group the kids into their age groups, we’ve discovered that kids really enjoy interacting with kids outside their peer group, both older and younger. The older children can “look out” for the younger ones and the young ones “look up” to the older kids. Sometimes there is an initial “shy” period for the younger children, but soon they become more comfortable and they often “rise up” to where their older friends are at.

3)     Kid’s love to lead and do. We created name badges for different roles in our program so the kids can choose to be “tribal song leaders” (pick the songs and lead the actions), “tribal DJ” (cue up and play the background music) and “prayer warriors” (praying for the group). We’ve found that the kids love to participate in the running of the programs – not just to be spectators while the adults do the music, the prayers and the stories. When we do a story, we try to get as many kids “acting” or narrating as possible. It’s not as slick and it’s a bit rougher than if the adults did it all – but the kids love it. Perhaps the most important thing is that we are helping to develop their skills and are emphasising a simple, interactive, participative model of church.

4)     Saturday morning – is not the best time for kids programs. While gathering on a Saturday morning works for Adventist families, most of our community children can find it a challenge due to:

a.      Shifting between staying with separated parents on alternate weekends.

b.      Playing sport.

c.      Going away or going shopping.We are thinking of running an after school program next year, which would allow more community children to be regularly involved.

5)     The more adults and youth involved – the better. We’ve found that a significant time in our weekly gathering (for Jigsaw) is the art/craft/cooking time where the kids and adults sit next to each other and create. The relationships that are formed between the adults and kids in the 20-25 minutes are laying a foundation for the children to feel valued in the community and to have “mentors” to talk to. A new girl spent 20 minutes at my wife Annette’s craft station – and then when she saw my wife next week, they were “best friends”! Working as a volunteer in my local government primary school, I have found that that many children are hungry for love and a little attention from adults.

6)     “Go with the flow” programming. We’ve found that the program usually never runs according to our running sheet – we often have to “go with the flow” and make last minute changes. Kids are sometimes late, the length of the activities can vary and numbers fluctuate. But the success is not whether we timed everything correctly or in the right order, but whether we achieved our goals. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t achieve them all that week, but there’s always next week!