Ministry through Halloween!

Halloween was a great day for some of us in ministry.  We have a couple of options when it comes to surviving Halloween.  We can embrace it and have fun with God at the center of it, or we can fight it and frustrate and turn off people.

I believe that we need to take advantage of a day like Halloween.  In junior high ministry we are at an interesting point in a life where they are no longer little kids, but they still like all the fun, costumes, candy, and games.  We have to decide how to balance this out.

In our church our children’s ministry hosts an event called Light the Night on Halloween.  It is a night filled with black light performances, Puppet performances, and stories of light and Jesus.  All of the children’s ministry students dress up and participate in singing and watch all the performances.  They have a costume parade and get tons of candy.

I was faced with what to do with junior high students during this time.  Do I treat them like children’s ministry kids or do I just say there is nothing for them on this night?

We decided to make our junior high students a part of the night.  Instead of just having them attend this event with their families we decided to get them up on stage as a part of the program.

Recently we created a music video in junior high ministry to a song called “Wobble”, by Family Force Five.  To start off Light the Night we got our junior highers on stage teaching all the children how to wobble and playing the music video.  The junior high students loved being a part of the program.  The were able to dress up and enjoy the rest of the evening after we did our song, and they go all the same candy all the kids did.

This was a big win for us because it allowed our students to be a part of ministering to the younger children.  I believe this is a great example of how to get students involved on a night that could have gone to waste or been a negative in our ministry.

Halloween was a great night in our church.  I would love to hear what you did and how you turned a negative into a positive.