Resources

Core Skills

Core Skills is an interdenominational modular training resource produced by CMN and published by BRF. They aim to offer foundational training for all those involved with church-based children’s ministry addressing the key areas of expertise set-out by the DFES in the Common Core of Skills and Knowledge for the Children’s Workforce.

Core Skills Aims

To enable participants to develop an understanding of children and the skills required to nurture children on their journey of faith.
To provide the participants with the opportunity to explore and reflect on their own experience of faith and Christian journey, and the effect it has on their work with children.
To help participants capture and share a vision of a Christian community in which children’s faith is expressed and valued.

Core Skills (revised)

The six stand-alone sessions are:

Child Development
Working as a Team
Programme Planning
Children and Community
Pastoral Awareness
The Bible and Prayer
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All six modules have been thoroughly field-tested as two-hour training programmes in ecumenical pilot groups. Each module is creative, thought-provoking, interactive and designed to inspire and refresh children’s workers at all levels of expertise and experience.

Core skills for children’s work extra resources Download

More Core Skills

The six stand-alone sessions are:

Transitions
Special needs
Challenging behaviour
The global dimension
Children’s advocacy
Young leaders

Building on the foundational teaching in Core Skills for Children’s Work, this complementary resources offers six key modules of extended training for children’s workers and their teams of adult helpers and young leaders. Interdenominational in its approach, the material is suitable for anyone working with children in a church context.

Core Skills for Family Ministry

The six stand-alone sessions are:

Biblical, historical and contemporary understanding of family
Why family ministry?
Celebrating as family
The role of relationships
Family wellbeing and wholeness
Working with families

This complementary resource has been developed to equip all those working with families. Interdenominational in its approach, the material is suitable for anyone working with families in a church context.

Core skills for family ministry extra resources Download

Research

From time to time we commission research to help us better understand our contexts and areas of ministry.

We are Family (summary)

How is the Church working with families today? What does this ministry look like? What training and resources are available for those working in this field?

CGMC and The Methodist Church commissioned research into family ministry and launched it at a conference in September 2015. This ground breaking project explores a range of themes looking at the current shape of work with families across the church in the UK.

This is the summary version of the report.

We are Family (full)

This is the full report version of the We are Family research.

CMN Publications

We in CMN (and CGMC before it) have enjoyed a long history of publishing our own works. These have had a profound influence on the understanding of children, their gifts and needs in our Churches and organisations.