You’re fifteen minutes into your kidmin service.  Your volunteers are all busy taking care of the kids who are here.  Just then, a flustered parent shows up with 3 kids in 3 different age groups, and she needs to check them in just so she can get a few minutes of respite and Jesus. 

It’s definitely an inconvenience for you, and a disruption to what’s happening in the service. But what to do? 

My last post was 6 places you’re losing your volunteers. That’s a lot of places, but there is one key thing you can do to hold onto your volunteers no matter how long they’ve been serving with you.  And that is to provide a place for them to live out their purpose.

One of the biggest challenges in every ministry, not just kidmin, is that you always need more volunteers. The maxim "never stop recruiting" exists for a reason. Turnover is constant, which means recruiting never really ends. But simply finding more people doesn't solve the problem on its own. You have to retain the volunteers you already have.

I've been in ministry for many years, and one thing is certain: technology has changed a lot. I'm not old enough to have used a mimeograph, but I know what one is.

What I've noticed over the length of my ministry is that I keep coming back to the same hardware and software to get the job done.

Now that I've been a lead pastor for a year, I see things differently than I did before. I spent most of my career in the kids' pastor chair, and I thought I understood what it would take to sit in this one. I'd heard other senior leaders talk about the weight of the role, and I thought I got it.

In my last post, I wrote about how different things look from the lead pastor's chair. While much of the work is familiar, there are some important differences that most lead pastors never fully see. That's the genesis of this two-part series.

This week I'm speaking from my own experience as a kids' pastor, along with some honest feedback I gathered from several kidmin Facebook groups. Next week, I'll flip the script and share what lead pastors wish their staff, and specifically their kidmin leaders, understand.