Murphy’s Law for Children’s Ministry Workers
By David Blackenship

Murphy’s Law cautions, “If anything can go wrong, it will.” Those of us in the Children’s Ministry know this to be true. Here are a few more of Murphy’s Laws for those who work with children:

1. Children who are deaf and have sight problems will always sit at the back of the class.

2. An emergency will always occur when the Children’s Pastor is on vacation.

3. Any item dropped by a child boarding your church bus or van will always roll under the vehicle to the exact center.

4. The likelihood of the resource room not having an item you need is in direct proportion to the need of that item on that particular Sunday.

5. You will wear your tackiest suit or dress and have the worse “bad hair day” ever on the Sunday morning you discover that classroom pictures are being taken for the new Church Directory.

6. Any Sunday it snows, you will not know that church has been called off until you arrive at the church after having almost killed yourself trying to get there on time.

7. The most undisciplined children never miss.

8. The dirtiest children always want to sit on your lap.

9. The one Sunday you decide to “just let the kids color,” will be the Sunday the Senior Pastor visits your class.

10. No matter what you do, someone will be against it and no matter what occurs, someone will claim to have known it was going to happen.

11. Any liquid spilled behind a puppet stage will always land on the newest and most expensive puppets you have.

12. After you “try” to do Gospel illusions with rope tricks…You will always have mothers calling you saying, “My son just tried choking himself half to death, because he said you did it in your object lesson.”

13. The day you decide your going to stop going to a certain child’s house because they haven’t rode the bus in months is the day the parent calls the Pastor and says their child wanted to come to church but your church bus didn’t stop at their house today.

14. The day you wear your best coat and shoes, the bus springs an antifreeze leak and you have to stop every half hour to climb up and fill it with water.

“This article may not be written by an Apostolic author, but it contains many excellent principles and concepts that can be adapted to most churches. As the old saying goes, “Eat the meat. Throw away the bones.”