Saving Daylight Savings Sunday
Last week was Daylight Savings Sunday. And as happens every year, attendance was down, volunteers called out, and momentum seemed to stall overnight. I get it. At my church, the Sunday before was my highest-attended Sunday of the year. Daylight Savings Sunday? Right back to where we started.
3 Ways to Intentionally Care for Your Volunteers
One of the most valuable assets you have in ministry is your volunteers. They can make or break what you're building. Getting a new volunteer, especially a high-quality one, can be a breath of fresh air. But even the most dedicated people can burn out and walk away.
As the leader, it's your job to care for them. Not just because you want to keep them around, but because they're people, and we're in the people business.
4 Principles to Get People to Come to Your Meetings
Picture this. You have an awesome volunteer meeting planned. You’ve spent weeks or months putting all the pieces together. You have food, childcare, printouts, and slides. You’ve been talking about the meeting for weeks. You even got your pastor to announce it from the stage!
But when you talk about it to the people who it’s designed for, they’re non-committal. They’re not excited, maybe even apathetic. You find yourself in a panic, thinking that no one is going to come.
5 Steps to Presenting Your Genius Idea to Your Pastor
I had a genius idea. I knew it was going to work. It was going to excite my volunteers and reach all new people for Jesus. But there was one problem. Ok, so maybe three problems. It wasn’t in the budget or in the plan for the year. Therefore, I needed to get my pastor’s permission to make it happen.
Leading Change Without Losing Your Team
Leadership is hard and leading change is even harder. But it’s an essential part of the job. Every year I look back on the last and ask what could we do differently? What’s working? What’s not? And how can I make what I’m doing better? And set goals for the next year. With those goals inevitably comes changes.
Is Your Ministry Moving Forward or Just Staying Busy?
I’d been serving at one church for a few years. I’d put in the systems the children’s ministry needed the most, most of my volunteer positions were filled, and I was happy with the way things were going. Kids were getting saved and baptized. Visitor flow was good. Outreaches were well attended. I felt like I could just sit back and relax. Which we all need to do from time to time.
But the problem comes when we take our foot of the gas for too long.
3 More Midweek Service Alternatives
In kidmin, there is a lot of help out there for Sunday mornings and events. But there is one recurring event that churches all over the country deal with that seems to be silent.
Midweek.
4 Steps to Strategic Volunteer Recruiting
One of the problems any ministry faces, especially kidmin, is recruiting. There always seems to be a lack of volunteers. What’s worse, if you don’t actively recruit regularly, you’ll find yourself doing ministry all alone.
So how do you recruit? How do you get people to join your team regularly? How do you find these people?
Fall Festival Planning: 3 Steps to Success (Part 2)
Fall Festivals are an incredible opportunity to reach out to your families in your community. Many families are looking for a safe place for their kids to trick or treat. You can provide that with your church.
But if you want your guests to come back to your church, you need to have a well-organized event, a solid contact information collection plan, and great follow-up.
Fall Festival Planning: 4 Essential Steps Before the Big Day (Part 1)
One of the big three events almost every kidmin leader leads is a Fall Festival. While this event can be a lot of work, it’s never been as difficult as putting together a VBS. Planning a one night 3-hour event is far easier than a 5, three hour events in sequence.
5 Steps to Transition Your Kidmin to Small Groups
What does your Sunday morning service look like? Do you have Sunday School and a Kids Service (Large Group)? Large group with a small group component? Just Large group?
Many churches fall into one of those three buckets. Since any successful children’s ministry needs to have some kind of discipleship element, we need to seriously consider how we do that.
4 Steps to Get to Know New Volunteers
I’ve talked about onboarding volunteers before. It’s one of my most popular posts. And while getting your new volunteers the tools and resources they need are essential, there are some questions you need to answer before you plug them in.
4 Ways to Identify Your Kidmin Volunteers
There are a lot of things you can do to communicate to parents that their kids will be safe. But one of the best ways to make it easy to identify who is a volunteer and who is not.
4 Focuses for Your First Ministry Leader Meeting
The first 100 days of any new position is the most important. So much so that they even wrote a book about it.
One of the best ways I’ve started well is to have a meeting with all the leaders of the church or ministry. I’ve done it at the last 4 churches I’ve served. But why are these meetings so important?
Developing a Ministry Lead Team
One simple truth about leading in church is that you’re not going to be there forever. It may be hard to think about the day you will leave, but it is a simple reality. You will leave. Either you feel the Lord calling you somewhere else, you will retire, or you will die. There will come a time when you’re no longer the leader of your ministry.
The best thing you can do for your church and your current leaders is to prepare them for this eventuality. But how do you do that?
How to Involve Elementary Kids in Ministry
In many church models, from birth to young adults, we ask kids to sit and consume. We mean well. We want them to learn about Jesus and follow Him. However, in practice, many times this means coming to a service, joining a small group, and watching what happens.
These are all good things, but they are also passive. In a service, we sit to be fed. In small group, we sit to be fed.
But this is not what Jesus modeled for us.
Using Planning Center Services in Your Ministry
A few weeks ago, I talked about how to set up Planning Center Services. You can see that post here. But once you get Services all set up, how do you use it week in and week out? How do you handle volunteer declines? How do you communicate with them what you’re doing in service, and how can they be prepared?
In this post, I’ll answer all those questions.
Finding the Help You Need with Next Level Kidmin
When I first started out in kidmin, I felt like I was alone. I’d served two internships in children’s ministry. And I still had a good relationship with the kid’s pastor who guided me on my last one. However, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
Fast-forward a year in and I was drowning. I thought I had it all under control, but elementary was the David Reneau show. Wednesday night was holding together with a hope and a prayer, and don't’ even get me started on Nursery.
I needed help, but I didn’t know where to look
Setting Up Planning Center Services for Your Ministry
One of the most useful tools in my ministry career is Planning Center. I reference it frequently in my posts about planning. As much as I love the program, it can be daunting to a first-time user. That’s why I wrote this post about Check-ins.
Setting up Planning Center Check-ins can be complicated. But Planning Center Services is on another level.
5 Steps to Easy VBS Dismissal
You’ve had an awesome night of VBS. You had a ton of kids. More than you originally planned. Now all their parents are outside, and you need to get those kids to their parents safely, quickly, and efficiently.
Good luck!
