6 Steps to a Great Family Service
Family services. Love them or hate them, they have their place. I'm an advocate for family services because I believe children’s ministry needs to be more than a ministry held in another room never to be seen or heard from. These services can be a great tool for emphasizing ministry to the next generation, highlight the great things that are happening, and give your volunteers a much needed week off.
6 Steps to Make Next Year’s Ministry Calendar
It’s the most wonderful time of the year!
No, I’m not talking about Christmas or Thanksgiving (I’m a no Christmas until after Thanksgiving person).
I’m talking about planning for the next year.
9 Survey Questions for the Best Event Feedback
Feedback is so important. I can’t tell you how many times I thought something was going to work and it bombed and other times something trivial became a huge success.
Through the years, I’ve found collecting feedback increases my odds of creating success. There are a lot of tools out there to facilitate the collection of feedback, but the one I use for most events is surveys.
4 Ways to NOT Do Registration at Your Fall Festival (and one good one)
It’s Fall, and that means it’s time for your fall festival, trunk or treat, Holy Ghost Weeny Roast or whatever you call the event you do this time of year.
This is a unique event because a lot of people who may not come to your church may come to your campus for the very first time.
Unlike events like VBS or Egg Hunt, fall festivals offer a specific registration challenge.
How to Create A Volunteer Job Description
Let’s imagine that through very little work of your own you had 30 new volunteers show up in your ministry on the same day. Do you know where you’d put them? Do you know what job you’d give them to do? How would you onboard them to make sure they understand the mission and vision of your ministry?
Asking these kinds of questions helps you see the holes in your ministry. And what you need to work on to get to that next level.
How to Have a Kids Lead Team
Maybe you’ve seen this. You have a fifth or sixth grader completely checked out. They may have been engaged a few years before, but it’s getting close to their time to move on, and they have senioritis all of sudden.
You thought it was only for 12th graders, but now you see it in 12-year-olds.
But what do you do?
5 Steps to a Better Worship Set
I’m not a worship leader, but somehow, I’ve led worship in front of kids and now youth for over 14 years. I can carry a tune, but my rhythm needs help. I can move fairly well, but dancing was never my forte.
When leading in kidmin most of that doesn’t matter, because they’re learning too. Don’t get me wrong, the musical part of your service needs to be done with excellence, but sometimes passion and energy outweighs talent.
Ministry is a Marathon
It’s so exciting when you first start in ministry. There’s so much passion and energy, and you just can’t wait to get in with the kids or youth and change lives.
But if you’ve been in ministry for more than a year, you have to know that not everything moves as fast as you thought they would.
5 Steps to Building Your Volunteer Structure for Growth
I recently saw a post on a Facebook group asking how many volunteers they need for 30-40 kids. It was really a question about ratios, which are very important, but having the correct room ratio may not be enough when thinking about the right number of volunteers.
I’ve written about this before, but when I first started in kidmin, you could have called my Sunday morning service the David Reneau show.
4 Questions to Find Your Perfect Curriculum
One of the biggest questions I see in the Kidmin world is what curriculum do we use? Which one is better? 252Kids? High Voltage? Bible Engagement? Open Church? Write your own?
The curriculum options out there are endless, and you can spend a lot of time, energy, and money trying to find the right one for your ministry.
How to Divide Your Small Groups
If you’ve been doing small groups in your kids service for any length of time, you may be asking what is the best way to split the kids up? Do we do it by grade? Gender? Favorite candy? Random?
The truth is there is no perfect answer and depending on the size of your ministry and how many kids show up per service the answer will be different.
4 Milestones for Every Believer
Milestones are a marker for how far we’ve gone and how much further we need to go. You can call them goals, or behaviors, or events, but they’re things that we celebrate as the people we minister to develop an authentic faith that lasts a lifetime.
5 Numbers You Should Track in Your Ministry and Why
I’ve heard business entrepreneurs say that you have to know your numbers. The same is true with your ministry. How many attended this week? Last week? How many volunteers? First time guests? Baptisms? Small Groups?
If you don’t track it, and by tracking, I mean write it down in a spreadsheet, you’re losing out on valuable information that can help you keep your ministry healthy and growing.
How to Write A Weekly Email
One of the biggest problems we have in ministry is getting the word out. There are a lot of different methods to tell our people about the events, ministry opportunities, and lessons coming up, and there is no silver bullet that every one will engage with. My communication philosophy is not everyone will engage with every form of communication, but everyone will engage with some form of communication.
Why You Should have a Baptism Class
Baptism in water is an essential part of a Christian’s faith, and one of my favorite things to do. Working in Kidmin though, there are a lot of questions about kids being baptized.
How to Create Your Best Event
Whether we want to admit it or not, a lot of ministry is events. Yes, we want people to know about Jesus and grow in their love for them, but how do we do that? Do we hold a class? Do we host a service? Do we put on a VBS or camp?
If you think about it, all of these things are events.
How to Order T-shirts: Part 3
The day is finally here. Your event is coming up and you now have several boxes full of your brand-spanking-new shirts. But how do you get them out to your people? How do you make sure they get the right sizes? What happens if they ordered the wrong size?
If you’re going to sell them, how much should you charge? Do you have to keep inventory?
It’s a lot to think about. There are no perfect systems out there, but these are some things I do to get them out to the right people at the right time, even if I’m selling them.
How to Order T-shirts: Part 2
In this post I’ll answer the question how many shirts should I buy?
In a perfect world, you’d have every participant’s shirt size weeks in advance of your event so you can order the exact right amount and eliminate waste or worse, run out of a particular size. But because of Adam and Eve’s failure we don’t live a perfect world, and now we have to guess.
Thanks a lot guys.
How to Order T-Shirts: Part 1
Let's do T-shirts!
That’s a question that somehow got skipped in seminary. Nowhere in all my studies did anyone tell me how to design, order, and then sell/give-away t-shirts and somehow in my ministry experience I find myself having to do it at least once a year.
Over the years, I’ve developed some strategies to help me be successful and get the kind of shirts everyone loves.
Planning Your Worship Set
Working in Kidmin, I’ve had the unique opportunity to plan not just what we’re teaching, but what we’re singing as well. I’m a church kid, so I’ve heard a lot of church music and my children’s ministry was pretty progressive, so we were singing worship choruses long before other churches were.
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