Ministry Paper

Hey there everyone! sorry its taken me a while to update you on everything, its been crazy trying to get multiple papers done every week and then be able to digest everything and write it out to you in an understandable format. so i guess the closest thing for me to do is to show you some of the stuff i've been working on...so here is one of my many papers due this coming week: its our debrief on this semster serving at our church Sunday mornings... enjoy :]


For the past few months of this spring semester at Ignite I have been a in the C.I.A. which unlike the name it stands for Children In Action; just like in the CIA the kids are to be active, but in a different way they are to be active in their walk with Christ. I was a teacher’s assistant in the first and second grade Sunday school class at Lighthouse Garvanza. Every Sunday I would assist the teachers in getting the snacks ready, taking all the supplies for the classroom over to a building across the street and then set up our classroom with tables and chairs. Once the class started I would assist the teachers with the curriculum as well as helping the kids with their crafts and workbooks. Then when class is finished I would help put away the tables and chairs away as well as the craft supplies, workbooks and the containers we used for snack.

The two gifts that I was able to use during this time were serving and administration. I was able to use my gift of serving while I was helping teach the kids, while I was setting up the classroom, making the snacks, and helping setup and create the crafts and the games. I was able to use administration while I was helping organize crafts and games.

One of the things that God spoke to me about during this semester at Lighthouse was that not every church does church the same way as I am used to. I have been given the chance of seeing how people run services and how they work with their children’s ministry. It made it an even better opportunity because I was able to be in the midst of it more than once so I was able to get a pretty good look at how they structured everything. There were times where God was also teaching me was patience, because not only was this a new church, but the person in charge of C.I.A. was also new so he was beginning to setup the infrastructure of the entire program. There were times where we gave input and times where all we were able to do was just follow instructions given. During my time at Lighthouse God also spoke to me through the lives of the kids I helped teach. They were each very different in the way they were brought up, some were raised by a single parent or both, and one of the kids was in the foster care system so he was unable to be there every week. It was also hard because there didn’t seem to be any continuity between teachers and discipline because each set of teachers had a different view of how the discipline should be so. In all of this I have learned how to be flexible and patient and I am learning how to deal with each new system people have setup for their program.
In this internship I have interacted with the people the best I know how to, I have tried to learn all their names which is harder than I thought especially because I only got to see each person once a week. I have tried my best to get to know everyone that went to that church what God has done in their life. During the duration of this internship there were many people who extended such amazing hospitality even from the first week till the last week. They invited us to their homes for holidays, dinners, and weekends for real homemade Mexican BBQ’s and pool parties in the summer; and that was only in the first Sunday there! Recently we were told that if once we were done with our internship at the church and still went to the church he would take us out to lunch! I have been beyond blessed by this church, I have been to the pastor’s house for a BBQ, the pastors have taken all of us to lunch and invited us to their house for lunch on Easter. These people have the biggest hearts and such a gift for hospitality that its no wonder I felt welcome ever since I walked in those doors that first Sunday.

I learned that the way I’m used to something being done isn’t the only way that something can be accomplished, that others have a way to do something and its sometimes works better than the way that I am used to. So I have learned to be open with new ideas which is sometimes a hard area for me to grow in, but the good thing is, is that I am growing in being open to new ideas. I was also able during this time to give my past experiences and ideas for games and such as well as learning new games and such to remember for my home church. My view of ministry hasn’t changed; it has only grown bigger in knowledge as well as in experience. Again, I have learned that my way is not the only way nor is it always the right way to do something.
I believe that I did well in the area that I was serving in considering that every week there were between two and eight kids with two teachers and two helpers. I felt that that there were too many teachers per kids just because of space and what we exactly did but it was not the way I’m used to things being done but that’s what is so good about getting different points of view in ministry. There were days that I had a really hard time with the fact that I had nothing to do because of how small of a class there was with four teachers but that’s how the process of figuring out what to do with the amount of people has to deal with.