by Ryan McAdams

We generally discourage focusing a person on the ways in which a particular situation can benefit him or herself, but for a Christian, the greatest good is conformity to Christ and the praise and glorification of God. So, the true benefits of the service in the Sonlight (Sunday morning with the church’s K-through-5 children) ministry will necessarily result in edification of others and praise to our God.

I don’t intend for this list to serve as a recruiting tool for our particular ministry, but serving as part of the staff for the Sonight ministry confers many benefits upon the servant. Other ministries may share some or even most of these advantages, and this list will not exhaust the set of possible benefits for this ministry. Nonetheless, Sonlight is a wonderful ministry of our church. In no particular order, serving in the Sonlight ministry benefits you because:

• You learn to develop relationships with those whom you have little to nothing in common. Among the staff members, we share Christ in our lives, which gives us immense commonality even with no other similarities. We’ll cover it more in a subsequent point, but for most of the children, we do not have that essential unity. On top of that, most of us on the staff would have no clue about the latest toys or crafts or activities which occupy the children’s minds, and for many of us, we only have a fading memory of our formal educational experience. To that end, we’ve had to think and make effort toward building relationships with the children that we’re going to see week after week. It doesn’t come easily, but this effort can serve us well in the relationships we would seek to develop outside the church as well as we seek to spread the gospel to those around us.
• You have the chance to share the gospel with lost souls each time you serve. Salvation comes not by living in a Christian household, but by grace, through faith, according to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. So, even though most of our children have the tremendous advantage of parents who love God, most also have not bowed their knee to the Lord Jesus. According to the book of Romans, faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ, and each Sunday, God provides a chance for us to present and exposit this very word of Jesus Christ. The ministry also has helped us gain a broader sense of sharing Christ, since the children are watching our every move, so that even our attitudes and actions can help (or hinder) our proclamation of the gospel.
• You partner with the families of the church in the aforementioned evangelistic ministry and in the development of the next generation. The parents rightfully have the vast majority of the influence on their children, but for those with children in Sonlight, they give us a small slice of time to assist them in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Because of this ability to partner with the parents in their family ministry, we on staff gain an extra measure of fellowship with the parents, and we certainly know the parents better as a result of our participation in this ministry. This fellowship and understanding helps the church as a whole promote the understanding of the body as a big family.
• More than just families, the ministry lets you serve alongside members from all walks of life. As our church grows, the difficulty of coming to know all of the members certainly increases, but the growth also tempts us to shrink our relationship focus to those around us in the same life stage. But, through Sonlight, each of us on staff can say that we at least know people outside of our age and life stage. We have the chance to serve next to each other and we aim to encourage development of those relationships with activities and meetings we plan, as well as encouraging fellowship with other members of the church who don’t serve in Sonlight by ensuring that we protect staff members from serving on too many shifts. This again helps promote the unity of the body in spite of the uniqueness of each member.
• You can learn to compose and teach a coherent, engaging message. For the men in particular, some of us have the responsibility to deliver the sermon to the children. While this does challenge us each time, we also can grow in our study and handling of God’s word, and our compilation and proclamation of his truth. We also learn about the necessity of illustrating that truth, because the children provide brutally honest feedback. When the quiet girl in the front raises her hand without prompting in the middle of my message and asks Did you know I lost my tooth?, I know I’ve lost her and probably the rest of the class. But, these experiences help to mold us and make us better expositors of God’s word.

Hopefully you can see how this sampling of the benefits which service in Sonlight imparts to an individual member leads to benefit and growth of the church body as a whole. As a ministry within the church, we would hope and expect that we do nothing except build the unity of the church so that the world would see that we follow Christ through our love for one another.

Essentially, Sonlight does not exist in isolation, simply to watch the kids or even only to teach the kids. It also fosters discipleship, fellowship, and unity within the staff and the greater church body. And by God’s grace, we have a church full of such ministries.