Renewal Vineyard Church

Kids Director – Job overview

 

Introduction

 

Renewal is a church based in Nairobi, Kenya where our vision is to be an authentic, and relevant family growing to become more like Jesus. The original vision, when we launched in 2018, was to run church for those who had given up on church and had grown disillusioned with it and provide a safe space for people to encounter and meet Jesus. We continue to do this and our church is marked by accessibility, love and warmth. But we have grown to add in other services and we welcome people from all walks of life and at all different places in their journey of faith. We now have well over 300+ in attendance on Sundays across our services with the majority being from Kenya but also many other nations (over 20). We have a broad socio-economic span in our church life and work hard to make all feel welcome.  

 

A bit of our history

 

We are a church that has its roots in Vineyard, and the Anglican church from the UK and we would typically be described as charismatic evangelical. We were planted in 2018 with a vision to be a community learning to live like Jesus to be on mission across our city and beyond. We like to say that we take Jesus seriously but don’t take ourselves too seriously.

 

As we grew we realised that more and more families were coming and we were keen to make sure that we began offering and walking in this life for our kids and teaching them what it meant to follow Jesus fully. This eventually led to us running another service called ‘Family Church’ which is aimed at families with kids aged 0-10 and every week they come and worship together as a family, do games, activities, crafts, worship, drama and more. The basic idea was ‘let’s throw a party every week for our kids so they want to come to church and at the same time equip the adults to learn how to disciple their kids.’ And we run this as well as running more typical kids provision during our 11am service.

 

We now have around 100 kids coming throughout the month with 80+ every week in attendance for our 11am service and around 40+ kids and their families for family church.

 

Nairobi context

 

Nairobi is an amazingly vibrant city and a cultural melting pot. In some ways it is like any other urban centre in the world yet it is also incredibly unique. It is culturally Christian and the religious overtones of the city are vast with churches on many streets, Christian music in shops, Christian slogans painted all over and many people having a working-intellectual understanding of Christianity. But if you dig much deeper this is a faith, often, born more out of history, guilt and social pressure than a deep personal relationship with Jesus.

 

What our church is like

 

The most common feedback we hear about our church is that we are a family and a pretty relaxed one at that and we value fun and hanging out whilst also valuing deep connection with Jesus and learning to be like Him. We work hard to strip away the unnecessary barriers to access church whilst also seeking to be orthodox and challenging in our thinking, worship and practice.

 

We are a busy, fast-paced church, seeking to find creative ways of seeing God Kingdom come here in Nairobi. We value being Rooted – in Jesus and in community, being about “More than me” - living selflessly and with outward focus and being a people of Adventure – living bravely and creatively.

 

We are passionate about justice and work closely with sex workers in our Rejesha project and trying to release wrongly convicted prisoners through our AJAR ministry.

 

Further details about Renewal can be found on our website:  www.renewalchurchnairobi.com

 

 

The Role

We are seeking to appoint a Kids (and possibly Youth) Director who will enable the children in Renewal and our wider community to become fully connected into the life of the church and grow in their walk with Jesus.

 

The successful candidate will be energetic, creative, confident and highly organised.  They will command the respect of both children and parents through their warmth and competence. The successful candidate will inspire, coordinate and equip our large team of volunteers.  They will have significant previous experience of working with children

 

 

Job Outline

 

Responsible to:           Lead Pastor

 

Workplace:                 Nairobi, Kenya

 

Contract:                     Full time, initial 2 year contract

 

Salary:                         Dependent on experience

 

The successful candidate will build a vision for Renewal’s work with children (and possibly young people).  They will work closely with a team of volunteers and the Renewal staff team to carry out this job. He/she will equip children and parents to “Know Jesus, Grow like Jesus and do what Jesus did”.  The role will involve planning and delivering Sunday sessions, based around connection, community and fun, as well as providing opportunities to nurture and develop children during the week.  He/she will find creative ways to engage the wider church in our mission to see children valued and their talent developed and expressed.

 

Job Description

The list of tasks below is indicative and not exhaustive.

 

Family Church

• Deliver a fun and creative Family Church that engages children and enables families to grow together

 

Kids Church

• Develop and envision a program for kids across the life of our church to include Sundays, holidays and specials

• Coordinate the volunteer rota to ensure that each group is staffed effectively

• Understand and implement best practice in children’s work, including Health & Safety and Safeguarding policies and procedures and model good practice to others

 

Pastoral Care

• Provide pastoral support for children and their families alongside the team

• Be involved in baptism and child dedication preparation

 

Training and People Development

• Provide training of Kid’s Church volunteers as needed

• Support, develop and motivate existing leaders/helpers working within the various children’s groups and their families

• Identify and encourage new Kids’ Church leaders/helpers to join the various teams

 

Administration and Communication

• Communicate and advertise church activities for children and families in a contemporary and effective way, including drafting updates for the Renewal Church website page and drafting and posting Family Church updates on social media.

• Writing an update about Family Church and Kids’ Church for the Renewal newsletter

 

Church Engagement

• Play an active part in the wider life of Renewal, such as community groups, Alpha and worship nights.

• Handle any administrative tasks required to support the Chief Operating Officer and Lead Pastor

 

Person Specification

The successful candidate will have a good number of these qualities:

• Will love Jesus deeply and want to share this

• Be passionate about working with kids and seeing them develop

• Have a strong understanding of best practice in terms of safeguarding children

• Be or become a committed member of Renewal Church

• Have significant previous experience of working with children and young people

• Engage with children and young people incredibly effectively

• Have experience of leading a large team

• Be deeply creative

• Plan exceptionally

• Have excellent inter-personal skills

• Be able to multi-task and see tasks through to completion

• Be willing to engage fully in the life of the church

 

 

Current structure of the church

The current staff team comprises:

• Lead Pastor

• Associate Pastor

• Director of Education and Leadership/Chief Operating Officer

• Operations Manager

• Rejesha Project Lead

• AJAR CEO

• AJAR Legal Manager

• AJAR Legal Assistant

 

Applications

 

For an informal conversation about this post and to answer any more questions we would love to chat more about this. Please contact our pastor at chris.arnold@renewalchurchnairobi.com

 

To apply for this post, please send a CV and a covering letter outlining your philosophy of Children’s Ministry to Adrian Palmer:  adrian.palmer@renewalchurchnairobi.com