When it comes to nursery ministry, most church leaders focus on creating a safe environment that parents feel comfortable leaving their children during church. However, the importance of your ministry goes well beyond creating a safe environment. In fact, I believe it’s the best place to establish a foundation for spiritual growth for kids in your church.

There’s no denying that the first three years of a child’s life is the most critical time period for personal development. Between conception and age three, a child’s brain undergoes an impressive amount of change. At birth, it already has almost all of the neurons it will ever have. It doubles in size in the first year, and by age three it has reached 80 percent of its adult volume.

Over the past week, we’ve unpacked some valuable insights when it comes to establishing a healthy nursery ministry. Today I wanted to take some time to provide three final tips for creating nursery environment that fosters development and spiritual growth.

Three Tips for Effective Nursery Ministry

Here are three things you can do to maximize your opportunity to establish a foundation for spiritual growth in your nursery ministry: 

1. Be intentional with visual stimulation. The remarkable visual abilities of newborn babies highlight how rapid prenatal brain development occurs. Newborns can recognize human faces, which they prefer over other objects, and can even discriminate between happy and sad expressions.

How can you be more intentional with visual stimulation in your nursery? Remind nursery volunteers to smile and make eye contact with babies and toddlers throughout the hour(s) they’re in your care on Sundays. Look for ways to incorporate visual activities in your lessons with toddlers.

2. Incorporate audio learning. There’s not a lot of audio interaction with babies in most nursery environments. However, intentionally communicating with babies could be one of the most valuable things your volunteers do each Sunday.

Babies experience a lot of sensations, especially that of hearing. According to this study, during their first year of life babies can already respond to language preferences including the difference between the language spoken by the parent and a foreign language, the voice of the mother and a stranger, and words of significance and insignificance.

What does this mean for your nursery ministry? Be sure to intentionally incorporate audio learning with the babies in your care. Tell Bible stories. Pray blessings over the child. Sing worship songs or play worship music.

3. Create consistency. The nursery is often the area of ministry with the least consistency when it comes to volunteers and the Sunday morning experience. While you might not be able to change your approach to nursery ministry overnight, there are some things you can do to create a consistent environment for kids. Be consistent in the songs you sing and stories you tell. Adequately training volunteers about the importance of stimulating with God-filled interactions will increase the likelihood that these behaviors and emotional responses will be imprinted on their mind. What can you do today? Ensure every worker understands the importance of their role.