This workshop builds a bridge between recent resilience studies and children’s spirituality and explores how spirituality can be a protective factor for children in challenging circumstances. Some children have survived the trauma of a population-wide disaster, extreme poverty, or abuse. Other children are coping with such hardships as chronic or terminal illness, parental divorce, or the death of a sibling or parent. Many children live whole childhoods without facing such severe adversity; however, most children encounter some type of troubling issue in childhood such as bullying, rejection from a friend group, or academic failure. Defining children’s spirituality as their relationships with themselves, others, and God, this workshop will demonstrate specific spiritual practices that churches, children’s ministers, and parents can employ to foster resilience in children as they face the ordinary difficulties in their lives as well as the more significant hardships that may come.

3 sessions: 1) The basics.  Many of us learned that during covid we needed to use our limited time with families wisely and cut many of the extras from our programming. Now that we are returning to a normal schedule, it’s tempting to put things back the way they were. This hour will be full of information to help leaders decide what stays, goes or even just needs to be updated in this new season.

2) The comeback. How to get, build and guard a great staff and volunteer culture. As we resume the normal things of ministry there is the ever growing need to create a culture that is attractive to both families and volunteers.

3) Multiply. After speaking of structure and culture, we will discuss how to use this knowledge to multiply the leaders in our ministry. This session will focus on training up young leaders as well as practical recruiting approaches that work.

Child abuse and its traumatic effects is an emotionally charged topic with adults often having angst about how to respond and what to do.  We owe it to the youth we serve and our witness to the world to be knowledgable and equipped in order to respond well. This session will answer questions and offer support around being a mandated reporter.  Additionally, this session will talk about the impact of trauma and abuse on children and their families, how to better equip volunteers and staff in supporting youth with difficult and/or confusing trauma fueled behaviors in the church setting, caring for youth and families in the aftermath of abuse, and prevention resources.