Your kids will BEG you to volunteer!
Once your children hear about all the stuff that goes on in The Landing while their friends parents are serving, they'll probably drag you to the Next Steps Desk to sign up for a ministry team. When you do, here's everything you need to know about the newest space that God has given to The Gathering:
So, what is The Landing?
When we felt that God was moving on our hearts to “put another boat in the water” by providing another service time for the multitudes of unchurched people in our city, we knew right away that we wanted to honor 2 groups of people:
1. The volunteers on our Servant Leader Teams and
2. The children of those volunteers
Sometimes, we can get so focused on the mission to those around us that we forget about the ministry to those with us, and the last thing we wanted was for volunteers and their children to feel like they had to endure serving when the Bible is so clear that it is an HONOR and a JOY to serve Jesus and others!
Sure, we could just tell volunteers to send their kids back to the same KidCity service twice, but that didn’t feel honoring at all to the commitment that those volunteers and their families were making. There had to be a better way, we said, and from that discussion, God gave us the idea for The Landing.
The Landing is simply a fun, safe place for the children of our iOS Ministry Team members to land while their parents serve. And while our volunteers are giving themselves passionately to the people God is drawing to our church, their children will be at The Landing enjoying an atmosphere of community and even praying for their parents as they serve, because at The Gathering, we believe serving Jesus and others is a family affair.
How does The Landing work?
If you’re one of our volunteers and are going to be at The Gathering for both the 9a and the 11a services (either worshiping in one and serving in the other, or, at times, serving in both), you’ll check your kids in at the KidCity check-in desk just like you always have. Nothing changes from what you’ve been doing before the service.
Your child(ren) will worship in the first service like they do now and then go to KidCity after the worship is over. Every child will always attend KidCity during the 9a service.
When the 9a service is over, your child(ren) will be taken from KidCity to The Landing by a member of our KidCity team and a member of our security team. (We made that sound like quite the journey, didn’t we?? It’s really just a few steps from one building to the other.)
You will NOT need to check out your child(ren) from KidCity after the first service. We want you to be free to get to the places where you’ll be serving for the second service, so we’ll take care of getting all the volunteer kids to The Landing.
When the second service is over and you’ve finished with all your Ministry Team responsibilities, simply head down to The Landing to check out your child(ren).
Of course, it’s entirely possible that they won’t want to leave!