A BIG YEAR IN HOPEKIDS MINISTRY

[Photo: Hong Teck and Madelin, HopeKids Ministry - Hope Singapore]

The ministry is often perceived to be small so having God do big things in our midst in 2009 has created faith in all of us in the ministry. In 2009…

1. We connected kids to church

We will remember 2009 as the year where our kids care groups are formed. We raised12 key leaders to take up the unique challenge of lead kids as their CG leaders. We fulfill our value not to connect from afar but to know kids personally. Our care leader with their team will champion the goal of shepherding each of the sheep under their care. When there’s proximity, discipleship starts to make sense and we witness God working in many of the kids lives.

Our Holiday Club this year at the Rainforest KidzWorld in the Singapore Zoo created quite a splash when parents, volunteers and teachers play together during the mid year school holidays and we connected some kids for the first time.



2. We disciple kids intentionally



Our Heroes kids camp in June was for the focus on discipling kids. We brought together a team to intentionally to impart to our children the importance of God’s supernatural ability in a special 3 day 2 night camp in Malacca. We used high quality videos curriculum by Lifechurch.tv to facilitate teaching so that we can free our teachers and volunteers to be on the ground for discipling our kids closely. We had an amazing time with the fellowship, fun and learning God’s word together and closer friendships were formed during that extended time together.

In September, we introduced a segment called LIVE! challenge to our kids service where we issue a challenged for kids to share a testimony of how the Lord is working in their lives.

They are to share the testimony on stage in a segment called Open Mic the following week. That week we saw a queue of 6 kids coming in front to share God’s greatness. It was a sight to behold because the kids were not prompted what to share but just share spontaneously from their heart. After that, we called the video team came in to recapture some of these moments but its still far from the actual thing. Here’s the video as best as we can make it.

Hopekids Video

3. We led kids to Christ

Leading kids to Christ is always high in our priority. One week before the children’s day in HopeKids, we partner the whole church to outreach to kids. We had Pastor Jeffrey and Hong Teck co-preached a message about reaching the next generation.

It was well received that convictions grew about the need to plant seeds for the next generation. The whole church was mobilized to bring kids to church and we saw the children’s church broke 200 for the first time after months of stagnancy. As a result, our volunteers and teachers has a new leash of life to follow up, visit and contain the new wine (or is it ribena?) that God has poured in. It was a breakthrough point our hearts growing in excitement and commitment to the cause of reaching children for God.













This year also saw an expansion of the kids worship team with young and vibrant people stepping forward to join the vision of leading kids to worship Christ. It was awesome to hear testimonies of leaders in our worship team reminiscing the days where there’s only 1 or 2 musicians playing the service compared to today with 4 backup singers and a full band, week in and out. It’s a tremendous testimony of God working greatly in building the team so that kids can be lead well to worship Christ.

4. We build God’s team of children’s workers

What a year it was which began when we hosted our first ever children’s ministry conference. The Ripple’s Conference in March was a great time to build our volunteers and teams.

Children’s Ministry Team in Kuching and Germany graced the event, where we explored how to become Ripple Starters to start a ripple that will make an impact to our churches and nations in the future. It was the ministry’s first that was so well received that we are planning to run another next year together to focus on families.

As the year began with a focus to build teams, it ended with one as well. Our key leaders just came back from a retreat in Aloha Changi, a centre in the east side of Singapore. We simplify our ministry in the spirit of Mary to find out the ‘One thing’ that is needed in what we do. It was a good time of fun and we learned the one thing about ourselves, about building teams, about leading kids, connecting them and discipling them. The event cut over a Sunday as we intentionally train our second team take over the running of the HopeKids services back home.

Not everything went well that weekend but we know that God is making His people and teams for next year for the next generation.

In HopeKids we are grateful to God for what has happened. We are yet to finish the year with the team gearing up for another round of outreach in our Christmas and New Year party this year but we are already excited about our next Big year.

With our vision to see the renewal of the spiritual generation to fulfill the great commission and our way to do it to ‘Build Teams’, ‘Lead Kids’, ‘Connect Them’ and ‘Disciple Them’, we are excited about playing our part to fulfill the great commission along side the adult churches in the movement.

We look forward to a fresher and bigger 2010.



Hiew Hong Teck (HopeKids - Hope Singapore) has been in children’s ministry for almost 10 years, leading HopeKids, the children’s ministry in Hope Church (Singapore). He’s committed to lead others to lead children make the biggest difference in their generation.
He enjoys to investing in innovation and creativity to build effective processes, programmes and people to reach next generation children. He is an active facilitator of Focus of the Family’s Parenting with Confidence workshops and is married to Madelin and has 3 kids of his own aged 10, 8 and 5.