The idea behind that first Kidz Klub was simple: put on an awesome children’s club that would tell the kids about Jesus on a weekly basis. Frontline hired double-decker buses and mini-buses, put posters up in schools and the Kidz Klub journey began.
Kidz Klub grew from there, pioneered by Dave Sharples after a visit to Metro Ministries in New York. God was obviously moving and Kidz Klub continued to expand. At one point there were a thousand kids a week piling into the church.
After years of running this way, Kidz Klub started to shrink. Fewer kids were getting on the buses each week. The question on many people lips was: why doesn’t it work anymore?
God’s heart for the kids of Liverpool had not changed. The need had not changed. But what had changed was the culture. Parents were no longer willing for their kids to get on a bus and go to some church that they had never been to, with people they didn’t know.
After 17 years Kidz Klub reached a key moment in its history. How do we keep showing the kids of Liverpool that God loves them? The answer came to me during a traffic jam.
One of the key reasons Kidz Klub had originally functioned so well was that many of the kids’ parents used it as free child care every Saturday. We realised that if we could run Kidz Klub as an after-school club then parents would still get free child care, but they would know that their kids were safe as they would still be in school.
The only question was: would schools be interested in running an RE-based after-school club?
The answer came on Sunday at church. Clare, a primary school teacher and one of Kidz Klub’s longest serving helpers came to me and said she felt God saying she should concentrate on blessing the kids in her school and she could no longer fit in Kidz Klub. I imagine she was surprised that I was smiling as she said this! I excitedly told her about the idea of running the Klubs in schools. We launched the first ‘in school Kidz Klub’ that September in Clare’s school.
We no longer operate a huge centralised club, but have now created a lightweight, de-centralised approach, setting up smaller Kidz Klub’s in schools as part of the ‘Extended Schools Provision’ initiative. The methods may have changed over the years, but our heart to reach Liverpool’s kids remains the same. Kids Klub has now been replicated across the UK and beyond (including Africa, Poland, Ukraine, USA, Canada and South America). We want to continue to share what we have learned over the past 20 years with other churches in the UK and beyond who have a similar heart for children. Any church who wants to have a big impact on their community can run a Kidz Klub: if half the churches in the UK ran a single Kidz Klub reaching just 50 kids, then together we would be reaching 1.2 million children per week.
Jonny’s Top Tips for running after-school clubs
• Ask God to give you parental eyes for the kids you work with. We work with inner-city kids who are often very difficult. You need to look at them the way you would your own kids.
• Hold on lightly, not tightly to your program. We do something that works and even if it stops working, we can’t let go!
• Value your leaders. It’s better to have fewer clubs and keep the same helpers for years than have more clubs but have leaders regularly changing
• Encourage your leaders to join communities/cell groups/house groups. Your leaders’ faith is just as important as that of the kids you work with.
