If you are like me, you find yourself collapsing across the finish line at the end of the school year in your children’s ministry. Before I could catch my breath, I quickly moved to Vacation Bible School, camp, and all the other summer activities.

In the midst of the craziness, is it difficult to find time to evaluate and process your successes and failures from the school year and your midweek program?

Here are several questions you might want to ask:

1. Did I see the lives of children in my ministry change through the school year?
2. How are their lives different now?
3. Is the direction I am heading going to have a lasting spiritual impact on the children in my ministry?

In the classic movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” they were searching for the lost Ark of the Covenant.

Indiana Jones was asked to find the Ark of the Covenant by the U.S. government before the Germans found it. To do so, he needed the headpiece of the staff of Ra.

Once he located the headpiece, he traveled to Cairo, Egypt.

He went there to find a person who could translate the language on the headpiece.

The headpiece was designed to reveal the location of the Well of the Souls in the Map Room at Tanis.

As the translator looked at the bronze medallion, he translated the inscription on the front.

Then he turned it over and found specific instructions on the back that showed the length of the staff and the location where to insert the staff in the Map Room in Tanis.

In a recent study by LifeWay publishing, they found four predictors of a child’s life-sustaining faith.  These predictors are the result of proper approaches from two sources of ministry to children.

1. Family: Parents play a significant role at home in their child’s faith. The church typically has about 300 hundred hours per year with a child, whereas parents are with their child more than 3,000 hours.
2. Church: The church has a key role in a child’s life in fulfilling its calling in alignment with God’s Word.

These predictors point to the responsibility of two major influencers in a child’s spiritual life, that is, what parents do at home and what the local church’s priorities are when it comes to children.