Lead Well

Easter Egg Hunts. Love them or hate them, it’s one of the most popular Kidmin events leading into the Easter season. I know it’s only February, but if you want to have a successful outreach event, you need to start planning now. I’ve led over 10 Egg Hunts throughout my career and perfected my system to reach hundreds of kids and families at Easter. I know this system could work for you because of what happened last year. Last year, my previous church decided to do an Egg Drop. They wanted to fly in a helicopter and drop the eggs on a big field. Essentially it’s the same as an Egg Hunt except the egg distributors are 300 feet in the air. Since I left that church at the end of February, I did a lot of the groundwork to set them up for success. One of the last things I gave them was my to do list. By the time Easter weekend rolled around they had hundreds of families show up and the event was a huge success. I pray the same can be true for you. In this series of posts, I’m going

Being in ministry usually means you’re going to have to fundraise for something. After all, a church is technically a non-profit and generosity is a core tenet of our faith. Over the years, I’ve heard countless ideas for fundraisers for various reasons, but there’s one I’ve done year after year with great success. It’s called Silly String Sunday. Silly String Sunday is where leaders challenge kids to buy as many cans of silly string as possible at $5 per can. Then on the day, they get to spray those leaders with the silly string all for missions. It’s a mess and a ton of fun. Here’s how to do it. 1. Set your goal A lot of fundraisers need to hit a certain dollar amount in order to be successful, and I believe those have their place.  However for Silly String Sunday, I didn’t really care how much I raise. My goal was to see every kid buy at least one can. Just by making a small investment pushes past the awkwardness of never giving before and helps kids realize the joy of givi

Photo by Miikka Luotio on Unsplash I was stuck. We were finally coming back from COVID and starting Wednesday night services back up. We decided to rebrand the night for adults and focus on groups instead of the traditional Wednesday night service. This was great for adults, but what about kids? Will I have the same kids every week? How long will the groups meet? What should I do on First Wednesday, when I’ll have more kids? To make things harder, I wasn’t sure how many kids, if any would come back, and the time I had available to prep another service was very limited since I was doing Sunday online and in person. I’m in the Assemblies of God , so most our churches have Royal Rangers and Mpact Girls Clubs on Wednesday nights. However, I’m seeing more and more churches move away from these programs and others like it for various reasons. This post is not an advocation for or against them, but if you’ve already decided to not do them or exploring your options, I hope this can h

Photo by Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash It was the summer of 2014, and I’m trying to get as many kids as possible to go to camp. I advertised, secured scholarships, made phone calls and much more, but I’d hit a ceiling. Many kids couldn’t go because their parents had already scheduled something that week or they had already committed to attending one of other paid events throughout the summer and couldn’t afford it. Sound familiar? One dad told me he’d love to send his kids to camp, but he hadn’t budgeted for it. If I’d told him about all the things earlier, they may have been able to go. Thus, the parent meeting was born. Even though it started as an information meeting, over the years, the meeting has morphed into a vision casting and connection point for parents. It’s one of the most valuable events I do all year. 5 Steps to a Successful Parent Information Meeting. 1. Plan the Year. You don’t have to have every event listed and don’t feel like you’re locked into everything you’ve li

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash It’s been said that a new guest makes their decision to return to your church in the first 15 minutes of their visit. That’s a small window, especially when you consider most of that 15 minutes happens before service begins. From a children’s ministry perspective, a guest family will need to find a place to park, unload all the kids (which may include strollers, diaper bags, cups, toys, and anything else) The family is already unsure if this is going to work, and the kids may even be more unsure of what is to come. Once the family is ready to enter the building there are multiple questions they have before they leave the safety of their car. What door do we enter? Where do we go from there? Where is the bathroom? Is the preaching good? Is this a safe place to bring my kids? Will they have fun? Will they make friends? Since we’re talking about kids, we’ll look at the last three questions. 3 Questions Every Guest Asks 1. Do they feel safe? Safety is a

Photo by Edu Lauton on Unsplash It's January and that means it's time to start working on VBS. I know it’s 6-7 months out, but there are a few high-level decisions you need to make now to set you up for success in the coming months. One of the first questions that is asked is, "What VBS curriculum should my church use? The truth is there are a lot of great curriculums out there, and while I have my preferences, I won’t advocate for any of them in this post. When picking out a VBS curriculum there are so many things to consider. Theme Cost Content Structure Strategy Music Volunteer needs So much more While you will need to answer all those questions, I think there are three main questions you need to answer before any others. Three Questions to Ask Before Picking a VBS 1. Strategy (Why are you doing this?) For me this is the most essential question to answer.  If you don't take the time to think through your strategy, you're just throwing a dart at the wall

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash John Maxwell famously said that leaders are readers. I’ve taken that to heart and become a voracious reader.  Every year I set a goal to read a certain number of books. I’ve gone all the way to 36 but have settled between 20 to 24. This year, instead of focusing on quantity, I focused on subjects that interested me and read a few pages every day. Somehow, I still got 20 books in. For this post, I broke the books into categories. Each book has an affiliate link to Amazon so you can easily make your list for next year. Thanks for your support! What I read in 2022

Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash Come Christmas time a question I see asked over and over is, “What is a good Christmas movie to show at my church?” Whether it’s for simple service for the Sunday after Christmas, a part of your midweek service, or a family movie night outreach, trying to find the right movie for your audience can be tough. We have to consider language, content, message, and several other factors not to mention complying with copyright laws. I’m not going to cover the legality of showing movies in your church, but you should check with your media/ worship pastor at minimum or a lawyer to make sure it’s ok to show. You don’t want Disney coming after you because you decided to show “The Santa Clause” and broke their copyright. With all these factors in mind, here are five movies you can safely show in your church. I’ve vetted all of them and shown most of them in my own ministry. 5 Movies to Show in Church this Christmas

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash Over the last several weeks, I’ve posted about planning for next year. You can read about calendar planning here and budget planning here . If you’ve been doing this for a while, you may realize that just putting dates on a calendar doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. Early one September, I was going through my to do list for the week and a calendar reminder popped up. “ K-Team Starts ” Uh-oh. I wasn’t ready. I needed to send out invites, advertise to kids and parents, buy materials, and everything else. What's worse is I had spoken with several parents about it already. They were excited for it to begin. And here I was looking at not just an event, but a whole class. One that I had done nothing to make it happen. That’s when I decided to implement this one simple planning trick to make sure something like this never happened again.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash Budgets, love them or hate them, you need to have one to effectively manage the resources God has given you and your ministry. The churches I’ve served in have been on both ends of the spectrum when it comes to budget planning. One of them didn’t give me a budget at all. If I needed something, I had to ask my lead pastor. Most of the time this worked because he would say yes.  However, while I served there, the global recession hit, and we entered a spending freeze for 2 years. I didn’t have a budget and the answer for buying literally anything was almost certainly going to be no. It became impossible to plan and very difficult to minister. On the other side of the spectrum, one church required me to put almost every purchase into its own category. I had income and expense line items for over 20 categories. Many of which were legacy categories my predecessors used that I had no plans for. In addition, I had to painstakingly plan out each categ

Photo by Cláudio Luiz Castro on Unsplash Since this is coming out on Black Friday, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about one of my passions. Video Games. I’ve been playing since I was a little kid and still play regularly. Also working in NextGen, I’ve seen a lot of kids exposed to games and media way before they’re ready because of their parents' ignorance. It doesn’t have to be this way though. Every game has a rating ranging from E for Everyone to M to Mature. (There is a higher Adult Only rating, but those games are few and far between.) As a parent or pastor knowing what games are going to be fun and appropriate for your kids is important. For this post, I’ll pick three games from each system that are family-friendly and can be played easily with multiple people. I won't make recommendations on consoles, but you can see my buying guide here.   In addition, many of these games are on sale for Black Friday. If you’re looking for Christmas or update the games

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash One of the best ways to retain your volunteers for years to come is to show them appreciation. So many jobs they do go unnoticed. What’s more, if you work in NextGen, your volunteers may never hear from those they serve that they’re doing a good job.  How many two-year-olds do you know tell you how great of a job you're doing? They can barely speak English! That’s why it’s important for you as the leader to express your appreciation for their tireless efforts. Even if they serve once a month. With Christmas right around the corner, you may be thinking this is a good time to get them a gift or something special, but you're at a loss for what to do.  With this in mind, here are 4 simple, yet effective ways to show your appreciation.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash 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. Some churches do them great and others never have them. The churches that I’ve served in have been on both sides of the spectrum and somewhere in between. Here are 6 Steps to a Great Family Service.

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash 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. I know I’m weird like that, but I look forward to the meetings, vision casting, and planning of the next year with great anticipation. Whether you’re weird like me or hate having look at dates and times until you go cross-eyed, I thought I’d help by giving  6 steps to make next year’s ministry calendar.

Photo by Afif Ramdhasuma on Unsplash 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. As part of my follow up process, which I write about here , I always send out an email thanking people for coming and inviting them to our next service or event. At the end of the email, I’ll include a link to a survey. Because I’m asking for their time and opinion, I strategically provide the carrot of a gift card drawing between $25 and $50.  One time for budgetary reasons, I skipped the drawing. As a result, the survey responses were very low. By offering some kind of payment the response rate increases dramatically. I’ve used Survey Monkey in the past with great success,

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash 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. Because the nature of the event is come and go, trying to collect people’s contact information can be really challenging and cause a lot of friction between your volunteers and the people attending the event. Over the years, I’ve seen and tried a lot of different methods for getting this valuable information, and I finally landed on one that works. Here are 4 ways to not do registration and one that works.

Photo by Elissa Garcia on Unsplash 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. In a previous post, I talked about building your ministry for growth you can read that here . In that post, I talked about creating a flowchart to see where your volunteer holes are and where to fill them. But when you put new volunteers in their positions, the next question they’re going to ask is, “What am I supposed to do?” This is where job descriptions come in. If you’ve ever worked in the corporate world (in my case, retail) you’ve seen these before. Hopefully, you were given one when you were hired because they help

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? Do you encourage them to engage? Talk to their parents? Let them move on to youth? In my first ministry, this problem was rampant. I was the fourth kids pastor for those sixth graders, and they were over it. They didn’t care and a few of them did whatever the wanted causing major distractions. Putting a discipline plan in place helped a little, but it didn’t solve the problem. That’s when I decided to begin a kids leadership team. We still had Sunday School, so for the ones who came, I’d teach a little about the Bible, and then train them how to run sound, lead worship, and do puppets. They helped me make videos to remind kids of the rules and to go to the bathroom

Photo by Liam Shaw on Unsplash 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. Over the years, I’ve worked hard to get better and am forever thankful to people like Yancy and Orange Kids Music for helping me. It seems to me there are two extremes in children’s worship. Either it’s silly, fun songs with little biblical truth or serious theological filled songs that kids barely understand. We have to find something in the middle that’s fun, exciting, and theologically sound. Ultimately, we need to create an environment that leads kids into the presence of God where he can do His work. With that in mind her

Photo by Miguel A Amutio on Unsplash 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. There’s a famous quote that says, “We overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in a decade.” Ministry is a marathon, not a sprint.