Not every field of service will have a nursery, but for the most part, it is beneficial to start nursery as soon as you start having families with young children coming. If possible, put up a monitor in the nursery, so the workers can still watch and listen to the service. There are many ways to organize a nursery but one way is to copy whatever is being done in the daycares in your country. You want people to feel comfortable leaving their babies. In Argentina, we actually used the word “daycare” in Spanish for the nursery. It just made sense to them as new believers and helped them to realize that their child would be just as safe in our “daycare” as the ones in their city.
Children’s Ministry
This is another important ministry! If you want adults to be able to listen and your husband to be able to preach without too much distraction, start children’s classes. I taught our first Sunday school with a baby on my hip and children that ranged from ages 2-12 years old. It’s hard and chaotic at times, but it will force you to pray for help! There are many good books written to help you learn to be a great children’s teacher. I would encourage you to study and learn as much as you can even before you get to the field. Bible games at the end of the lesson will motivate them to listen so they can participate in the fun games. Competitions for faithful attendance can help bring the whole family back each week. When the children sing a special in church, encourage them to invite their family members to come watch them. You will be amazed at how many people want to see their niece, nephew, or grandchild get up to sing in a children’s choir.
When people make a decision to accept Christ, they need to grow. They need someone to meet with them one-on-one, teaching them about Christ and the Bible. It doesn’t have to be you for every single girl in your church. When you disciple one young lady, she can then start discipling another girl, and then that girl can start discipling someone else. Pretty soon you will have several people who are disciple-makers. As your ministry grows, your husband will be training young men to be pastors and leaders. Your primary disciples at this point should be the wives or girls who may potentially marry one of those pastors.
The purpose of ministry is not to stay busy; it’s to produce fruit and help people to grow spiritually. What ministries bring fruit? Every field of service is different, but people are people! Talk to other missionaries in your country who have growing churches, and find out ideas, but realize that it is God who brings people. You would do better to pray them in rather than strategize all day. Personally, our churches in Argentina grew from word of mouth more than any event or outreach. Once people became believers, they had a burden to see their aunt, uncles, and cousins saved. They started bringing their family, friends, and neighbors. We would have a special day and encourage them to bring their family and friends. Pretty soon we had a lot of people to work with!
This is also your husband’s goal as he teaches and trains future pastors and leaders. You should be looking from day one who could be a potential teacher. When we got to Argentina, I took all the children from 12 years old and under. I had to teach many classes with one of my babies on my hip because I was both nursery worker and Sunday school teacher. Within a few weeks, God brought a sweet young lady into our church. I started training her right away to work with the children. She was my helper for several weeks, each week taking on more responsibility in the class, such as teaching the memory verse, leading in a song, and teaching the Bible lesson. Eventually she became our first children’s teacher, and I moved into the nursery ministry. As women started coming to church, becoming believers, and being discipled, I was able to start a nursery rotation. It wasn’t perfect, but sometimes you have to accept less than ideal if you want to do something or you won’t do anything at all! I played the piano for services, but started teaching people to play. Pretty soon we had two keyboards on the platform, one with me playing on high volume and my student playing along as best as she could with lower volume. After a few years, I purposely and completely dropped out of the picture. So work yourself out of a job and recruit volunteers as soon as you can! Your goal should be to fill your shoes, not stay comfortable in your shoes! One day you will leave that church with the national pastor and the leaders there, and they need to be able to continue on without you.
Don’t start a new ministry without someone to run it. You want your church to grow, but without workers, you can’t start all kinds of ministries! Stick to the necessary ministries like Sunday school, children’s church, etc, before working in more without the help to do it all. You might like the idea of a kid’s mid-week Bible club, but you also don’t want to do too much and eventually quit. When you are the only one running ministries, it is a lot of work. It is better to start out small and grow as your ministry grows. Train teen girls, young ladies, and moms for the purpose of one day doing these ministries!
How do you find workers? The key is to always have helpers. Never work alone! Choose helpers from faithful people who are being discipled and have a desire to serve. We would use special weeks such as camp and VBS as times to gauge who would make a great teacher or who could be helpers! When they know they only have to commit to one week, they are more willing, and a successful week gives them the boost they need to want to be involved more.
“A little while, we are in eternity; before we find ourselves there, let us do much for Christ.”— Ann Hasseltine Judson
Women and children’s ministries are nothing if the Word of God isn’t at the heart and center of it! Fellowship with other believers is a good thing, but if that’s all it is, it has a very weak, human-centered focus. If we want God’s Word to work effectually and mightily in others, we must make it the focus of all we do.
Before you ever get to the mission field, you should have read your Bible through cover to cover! You should be very familiar with the Bible. Know the books of the Bible in order. Memorize key verses. Know the plan of salvation. Be able to easily tell Bible stories. If you didn’t grow up in a home where this was a priority, you may need to really work on this intentionally.
Look for ways to teach the Bible. Maybe your home church would allow you to teach a midweek Bible club, start a young ladies Bible study in your home, or disciple a young lady. The first person you ever lead to the Lord or disciple shouldn’t be from another language and culture. David killed the lion and the bear before God ever allowed him to go after Goliath. Prepare yourself for the ministry.
More importantly, you must know that you cannot do anything in ministry without the Lord’s help! Many people have done ministry without the Holy Spirit’s guidance and have ended up frustrated and lacking results. Feed yourself before going out to feed others. Prayer is something we often overlook. An idea of a new ministry may come to mind, but before we can even pray about it, we are already making plans and strategizing. Let the Lord lead you and He will help you to know exactly what you should do. Don’t underestimate the power of prayer. When my husband and I were in language school, we wanted to be used of God in some way to bring people to Him. Our biggest roadblock was the language barrier. We prayed about starting English classes to draw people to the church and have the opportunity to give them the gospel. God blessed in an amazing way. Helberth was a taxi driver that we invited to the English class. One day he and his wife, Zarela, showed up at church! They soon became believers and my husband and I had the joy of discipling them. They were so thankful that someone reached them with the gospel that they named their baby girl after me, even though “Mindy” is not a Spanish name! God answered our prayers to do something great for Him through those English classes!
Ministry looks different around the world. Every missionary lady is different and will do things differently because we all have different personalities! Some women absolutely thrive on ministry and could probably make better preachers than their husbands if it were biblical! Some women do what they can because they see it needs to be done. Others struggle along in ministry and can’t wait to turn it over to someone else.
You can’t compare yourself to another missionary. You must do what God wants you to do. 2 Corinthians 10:12 says, “For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves: but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.”
I would strongly encourage you to not to refuse to do ministry. Examine your heart to know why you refuse to serve. Are you using excuses to justify not serving? Are you too scared, too shy, or too busy? Are you too wrapped up in something else, even if it is a good thing like raising your family? You will miss out on so many blessings.
It is possible to be so immensely involved in ministry, thinking that it is a good thing, that you neglect other important things in your life. Many missionary wives put so much time and effort into the ministry because it feels satisfying or you can see quicker results than raising your children and being a help meet to your husband. There has to be a balance between home, family and ministry, and this balance constantly changes as your life changes. Your most important disciples (if you have children) may be right under your nose this very moment!
Where do we learn what a godly marriage looks like? Definitely not from the world. We can’t look at this world’s view of marriage because it is totally distorted! Marriage between a man and woman is now ridiculed and scorned! The culture we now live in pushes homosexuality, feminism, affairs, pornography, divorce, cohabitation, and many other agendas. You must have a healthy view of marriage and the only way to have that is to understand what a godly marriage looks like.
This is important, not only for you, but also for your kids! What they see in your marriage, they will grow up thinking normal and will replicate in their own marriages. This next generation depends on us to teach and exemplify what true biblical marriage is! Many children of pastors and missionaries have grown up in a hypocritical home that only outwardly showed God’s love. At home, their parents were one way and at church, they were another way. This is confusing for kids, and many have left the faith and have even gone to the total opposite extreme, renouncing God and turning to the world’s model of gender and social ideals. If you don’t believe this, just read Romans 1:20-32.
The biblical truth is that God created marriage to be a reflection of Jesus’ love and dedication for the church (us). When Satan destroys a good marriage, this picture is also destroyed. When the world sees a happily married couple, they marvel and God gets the glory! We need to work on our marriage because Satan is like a roaring lion, ready to devour it! He also wants to hurt your ministry, so when he destroys a marriage, he has killed two birds with one stone! How many missionaries and pastors would still be serving God today if they hadn’t stopped working on their marriage!
We can’t work on our marriage until we understand our roles in marriage. Genesis 2:18 says, “And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.” This is the wife’s role to be a helper for him. It’s not demeaning. It’s an honor to be able to help our man! Many people would say that the wife is a second class citizen because God didn’t make her the head, but God uses the same word for help meet in the Hebrew (EZER) that he uses for Himself. The Lord is our EZER (our helper). Thank God we have a Helper as we are our husband’s helper!
In the next verse, Genesis 2:19, we find man’s role in life. “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” God gave man a job, and this gives him purpose in life. When we criticize our husband because of his job, we are stripping away his dignity because this is who God created him to be!
Genesis 2:20 says, “And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.” It seems here that God wanted Adam to see the void in his life, that he needed a companion too! As all those animals passed by him, he must have wondered, “Male, female, male, female, where’s my companion?”
We know the rest of the story because this is where we were created! God made women for a very specific purpose! We can be content only when we realize our role and take it seriously.
My husband often says, “If you are working on your marriage, your marriage is working!” So many people just give up. We have been married for over 24 years now and I can honestly say that it is the best thing that has happened to me, after salvation! I am so thankful for my husband and for his desire for us to continue to work on our marriage constantly.
Whether your marriage is good or bad, I would like to challenge you to work on the principles found in God’s Word! Every marriage could be better!
