6 From Pearls to a Necklace: Putting the Pieces Together

From Pearls to a Necklace

Putting the Pieces Together

Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.

The truth is, mediocrity is natural. You don’t have to do anything to drift there. It just happens.

Though he’s been a pastor for thirty years, my coauthor, Mark, says he wasn’t really “the preaching kind.” Once or twice a year he would be asked to bring the message to his church, but for the most part his Sunday mornings were occupied by assisting in worship and leading his church’s youth ministry.

Mark’s been known to tell a funny story or two in his sermons. And it’s not unusual to hear a catch in his voice when he’s talking about kids, which he seemed to find a way to do in almost every sermon.

One Sunday after worship, a wise elder in the church, a retired Navy admiral, waited until the rest of the congregation had the chance to greet Mark. And once the way was clear, he took Mark’s hand, looked him in the eye and said, “You had some real pearls there, Marcus.” As the admiral turned to walk away, he said, with a twinkle in his eye, “Yep, some real pearls. I’m still looking for the string, but you had some real pearls in there!”

We have yet to visit a children’s ministry that doesn’t have “some real pearls.” Maybe there’s the mural in the children’s wing that all the kids came together to paint a few years back. Maybe it’s that grandmother serving in the nursery, who has been at her post for long enough to hold the babies of the babies she helped raise. Maybe it’s a wonderful volunteer who sends out a weekly newsletter to parents with take-home activities that families actually use.

Every children’s ministry has some real pearls. But most are lacking the string that keeps every component of the ministry in working order. In

The Communication Machine

If you have been in children’s ministry for even a little while, by now you have discovered how hard it is to keep everyone—parents, volunteers, staff—up to date and informed. How many times have we heard, “I didn’t know about . . .” referring to an event that had been in the bulletin, newsletter, and on the website for months? It’s enough to make you want to pull your hair out in frustration and scream, “What else do they want me to do!?”

Here’s the bad news: there is no machine that can ensure that everyone will always get, much less read, every message we send. Our pace of life means that we skim and skip the majority of what comes in our inbox or mailbox. It’s just a matter of survival for busy families.

So we build our communication system around this reality: just because we’ve sent something or published something we can never assume that the message has been received. When it comes to communications, our job is to make the lives of parents and volunteers as easy as possible. Of course, this is no easy task.

Some parents want things in the mail. Others prefer texts. Others are email only. And for some, only a phone call will do.

Here’s the great news: we’ve got a simple machine that will solve more than 90 percent of your communication challenges.

1. Get all the essential information posted online. Parents and volunteers need a single place to go to find answers to questions: When does Sunday school begin? Where is the nursery? When are we doing VBS next summer? Eventually, you can put all this information in print, but you’ll want it (and your families will need it) on the website first.

Make sure the children’s ministry section of your church’s website has all this essential information:

Once you get this foundational content created the first time, you’ll need to update it at least once a year. And you should update the information and photos on your website at least monthly. Embarrassingly, the average church website takes a one-and-done approach, as if their information never needs to be updated. When a family looks on your website and sees that it is announcing dates for last year’s event, it’s not going to inspire a lot of confidence.

The annual updates, of course, will take much less time than gathering all the information the first time! Having all your content in one place will make it much easier to get specific content into the hands of the people you’re trying to communicate with.

2. If you want an answer, don’t use a billboard or a bulletin. A staff person at a large church told with me how frustrated she was with her congregation: “I sent a message out to three thousand people and only two responded.”

An important lesson about communication in your ministry is that if you want a response, if you need volunteers, if you want someone to attend an event, you’ve got to get more personal than a group email or bulletin announcement. Long gone are the days when we could get all the volunteers we need by passing around a notepad in a worship service. If you want fifty people to attend the church picnic, your best bet is to line up four people to call or email twenty-five people each and collect definite responses. I’m not talking about a group call from a machine or a group email or text. I’m talking about something like this:

Hi Janie,

We’re having our all-family picnic in two weeks on July 17 on the church grounds. We would love for you and your family to be there!

Any chance we’ll get to see you?

If your church is typical, it will sometimes take three to four tries before you get an answer. But in today’s information-saturated world, this is the only way your communication efforts will influence people’s participation. You make your information available through fliers and your website. You change behavior by making specific asks.

3. Be redundant again. Some experts say that, on average, a person needs to be exposed to the same message seven times before it begins to sink in. So share information about your ministry in as many formats as possible: email, website, Facebook, Twitter, snail mail, bulletin boards, text messages, newsletter and bulletin announcements, and sometimes announcements in worship.

4. Develop a plan. Once you’ve got your calendar clear, you’ll want to develop a game plan for how you’d like to promote the handful of programs most important to your ministry. For example, for your annual Easter egg hunt or VBS you might want to find ways to reach out to your community through the newspaper or fliers in mailboxes. For weekly programming, you’ll promote differently. And volunteers will need an entirely different rhythm of communication all together.

If this isn’t your strong suit, feel free to reach out to us at Ministry Architects, and we can help you put a plan together in pretty short order. We’ve included a sample communication plan in appendix A to help you get started.

Tracking the Who: Your Attendance Tracking Machine

If we’re not careful, our ministries can revolve around what rather than who, the children and families that our ministries actually exist for. We’ve got programs to run, fliers to create, meetings to attend—all part of what. Keeping up with who can take some initiative, especially if you don’t have a system in place for attendance tracking. It all starts with the question, Who belongs to us?

Once you’ve got your database machine humming, you’ll be able to pull a directory of children and families who are “yours.” Your directory is ordinarily made up of your active members and visitors. (We define an active member, for directory purposes, as someone whose family is a member of the church and who has participated at least once in the previous year.)

We recommend that you start with a printed directory in August of every year, just before the new school year starts. Maybe you’re thinking: But I have an app for that! Or It’s already in the computer (or on my Facebook or in my email list or phone). And I am sure you do. Please keep your favorite app. You need it to make calls while you are on the go or want to quickly recall the name of a parent in the checkout line at Target!

There may come a time in the very near future when everyone in every congregation will prefer accessing directory information digitally, instead of in printed form. I get it. But here’s why we like getting a print-ready directory at the same time each year:

We’ve included a sample children’s ministry directory in the online resources (ivpress.com/sustainable-children-s-ministry.com).

I know some people in children’s ministry who resist tracking attendance. “It’s not about numbers!” is a common refrain in most ministries. But we don’t track attendance because the numbers are important, but because the kids are! Without tracking attendance, it is a near certainty that

Attendance tracking doesn’t have to be complicated. Whether you use a high-tech database or a good old-fashioned spreadsheet, you can make attendance an automatic process by building your own attendance-tracking machine.

Whether you’re using rosters in your classrooms or an electronic sign-in process, make sure that one person in each room owns the task of ensuring that attendance has been taken, that visitor information has been gathered and added to the list. Those rosters can be picked up at the end of each class and updated attendance information added into a master tracking spreadsheet. Depending on the size of your children’s ministry, recording in the master tracking spreadsheet can be done in fifteen minutes or less each week.

Here’s the piece that most busy children’s ministry professionals forget: set a date on your calendar once a month to review the attendance reports. If you’re using a large database program, don’t get discouraged by the complexity of getting the kind of report you want. Keep asking and refining. Within a couple hours you’ll have a reporting template that gives you a quick look at all the information you need.

Notice who hasn’t attended in three weeks or more. Make a point to reach out to those families you haven’t seen in a while. You never know what may be going on in a family and how much they might need the support, prayers, and gentle nudging of your call.

The easiest time to reengage a disengaged family is within the first few weeks of their absence. Your attendance tracking machine will help you reach out to them long before they have settled into a new normal of not coming at all.

The Visitor and MIA Follow-up Machine

In the last couple of years my family and I found ourselves looking for a new church home. It was eye-opening to be on the receiving end of a wide variety of expressions of “hospitality.”

Frankly, I was surprised at how intimidating it is to visit a new church. I felt like everyone was staring at us. I really didn’t want to stand out. I was afraid I would dress too fancy or too casual. I remember the mixed emotion of hoping that someone would notice that we were new—and being nervous that someone might notice that we were new!

Because we have children, I was particularly interested to see what I would find in each church’s children’s ministry. At one church, a member of the children’s ministry staff walked me around their classrooms to see what was going on for kids. She made me feel so comfortable leaving my children for Sunday school. That personal touch was enough to ease my mommy mind and allow me to enjoy worship while my kids got to experience ministry just for them. We had a good experience at the church, but we never heard from the church again. And we never returned for a second visit.

At another church, we were greeted and directed to an information desk. A really friendly lady took down our information and explained a little bit about the children’s ministry, including pickup procedures. I never realized how important it is for new parents to receive very clear instructions about how the pickup process works.

The kids enjoyed their time, but I still wasn’t sold on the church. The next day, though, I received a friendly call from someone on the children’s ministry staff. I never actually spoke with them. They just left a voicemail, thanking us for coming and offering to answer any questions. I was impressed. We hadn’t made any other connections that day, but we went back.

It was on our second visit to the church that my husband and I saw something that compelled us to continue coming until we knew this was the church for us. Without the personal touch of that voicemail, I don’t know if we would have gone back for the second visit. Both church experiences were good, but it was the follow-up that made the difference.

Please don’t assume that a form letter from the pastor or a cute postcard from the children’s ministry can be a substitute for the human touch of a real person calling (or even sending a personal email). You might even want to try a service like sendoutcards.com. It’s quick and easy, and your teacher can turn a picture of a visitor’s project into a card with a personal message. In addition to making the first phone call, you’ll want your hospitality machine to include a tracking plan and to follow-up with all your visitors until they either become a regular part of your church or let you know they have joined somewhere else. Simply following up with a personal call or message on a regular basis will set your children’s ministry apart from almost every other one.

Of course, your attendance tracking machine will be foundational to building your visitor and MIA follow-up machine. Keep a little folder in each classroom with rosters, a pen, preprinted address labels, stamps, and postcards. Each week, have your volunteers check the attendance, and if they notice that someone hasn’t been there in a while, they can take an address label, stick it to the postcard, and write a quick note.

Safety and Security Machine

Though the average family with children will never see it, your safety and security policy may be the most important machine of your ministry. Since most insurance companies require their church clients to have some sort of child safety policy in place, most churches have one. But many of them are decades old and haven’t been reviewed or shared with volunteers in years. If you don’t know what your church’s policy is, here’s a process for building that machine.

The purpose of your child safety policy is threefold: the first is to protect children. When families trust us with their children, they expect us to return them healthy and unharmed. Many parents actually stay away from church when their children are little because they see the church nursery as a petri dish for childhood illnesses.

Second, your policy should be set up to protect your volunteers. This is why it is so important to train all of your volunteers on your policy. You should have something written in your policy that requires two adults to be present in each classroom. I can hear you saying, “Annette, I can’t get enough volunteers as it is. How can you expect me to have two adult volunteers in every class?” You can’t afford not to have two adults in each room. Unfortunately, there are children who will make up a story to get attention or hurt someone they are mad at. With two adults in a room, both are protected. Any suggestion of impropriety will carry very little weight if you have another adult present.

Third, your policy protects your church. When you have a solid child safety policy in place, your church is protected. When these policies are observed, your church can avoid incidents and scandals in the children’s ministry. Just one incident occurring within a church can cause years of hurt for families, staff, and the surrounding community.

It is common for church people to assume they don’t need to pay too much attention to their safety policy, because their church is like family and the kids are safe. However, this perspective is dangerous. Most offenders are not strangers, but are well known by their victims and families. That is why it is important that we hold all of our volunteers to the same standard.

Some volunteers may be offended and resist changes. But the safety of your children is a higher priority than not inconveniencing our volunteers. If someone refuses to comply with your policies, no matter how silly it seems, you’re better off without that person in your ministry.

Even with a strong child safety policy in place, we’ll want to make sure we have layers of protection for our children. We had a situation in my church recently that made a believer out of me.

We didn’t know that a convicted sex offender was serving in our congregation. At the time, we only ran background checks on our children’s and youth ministry volunteers. No one thought to check the ushers. Though they never interacted with the children, they did have access to all areas of the building, including the children’s ministry area.

Isaac (not his real name), a convicted sex offender, had become a lead usher. He was a gentle and kind man. He didn’t draw attention to himself but was respected by the whole congregation for his commitment to the church and his faithful service. During my tenure, Isaac ended up back in jail for offending another child. Though his offense happened away from the church, had we not had strong security measures in place he could have had access to the children at the church. We were shocked, saddened, and a little relieved for our church kids, because we knew that he consistently had to enter the children’s ministry area to collect the children’s offering.

Fortunately, we had worked diligently to ensure that it would be virtually impossible for a predator to have access to our children. By looking at each environment and asking, “Where could something bad happen?” we came up with several practices that made our children’s area safer.

No matter what your obstacles are, there are creative ways to address them so all of your children can be safe. Take the time to build your safety and security machine.

Check-in System Machine

A good check-in system can be a productive intersection between your database and safety and security policy. Regardless of the size of your church, you will need a plan for the following:

These can be addressed by your check-in and checkout system. Your system might be as simple as a sign-in sheet at the door of each classroom, with cell phone numbers to contact parents and a numbered sticker for parent and child, or it might be as complex as having sign-in kiosks, bar codes, printed name tags, and claim tags.

How do you know when it’s time to upgrade to a more sophisticated system? That’s easy. When the one you’re using begins to slow things down to the point that parents are missing out on either Sunday school or worship. If it takes a family more than ten minutes to check in one child, it is time to modify your system. Modifying your system might be as simple as moving check-in from classrooms into a foyer or entryway so parents can sign in all of their kids at one time rather than individually at each class.

There’s nothing wrong with handwritten name tags or attendance rosters, but electronically generated ones will always speed up your check-in process. So, if you are seeing long lines of frustrated parents, it is time to investigate some more technically advanced options. It’s just one more way that we show our families that we care about them.

Facilities and Equipment Maintenance Machine

One of the most frustrating things a children’s ministry volunteer can experience is to plan their lesson around a particular piece of video content only to discover that the technology in the room doesn’t work. No matter how you feel about incorporating video into your ministry, I’m sure you can understand the panic that sets in when the equipment teachers are depending on lets them down. We worked hard to get those volunteers, so the last thing we want to do is to create frustration for them!

There are two simple things that you can do to avoid this situation. First, have a simple feedback form in each classroom. I’ve included a copy (see “Weekly Classroom Feedback Form”) in our online resources (ivpress.com/sustainable-children-s-ministry.com).

Ask three or four questions to get feedback on the lesson, children, and equipment. Pick it up every Sunday after church, and look it over to learn how things went and whether there are toys or equipment that are broken or need attention before the coming week.

The second part of your facilities and equipment maintenance machine is to build a weekly check-in into your routine. Choose a day, and take ten minutes to check every piece of electronics. Turn things on and off. If something is broken, it is better to learn that on Thursday than Sunday morning.

At this point, if you’re starting to feel overwhelmed, don’t worry. It takes most churches months or even as much as a year to get all these simple “machines” in place. Give yourself plenty of time, and tackle them one by one. It may take you a couple of years to get some of these working the way you want them, but you will discover that each one of these machines—just like a lever or a pulley—will increase the leverage and magnify the impact of your ministry.

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