Are Your Kids' Events Successful?

Kidmin Confession Time! Hear why Amber no longer does kids' events and how a family discipleship event mentality can be a win for you. 

Make sure to check out some of Amber's family events like: the Lego and Lunch, Taste and See Family Praise Event, Family Time Sticky Faith, or the Special Delivery Cookie Christmas Event. 

All of these and more can be found at: amberpike.org and church.renewanation.org

Plus... learn more about The Family Ministry Academy by RenewaNation and how it can change your ministry!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Welcome to the Kidman Huddle with Amber Pike, where children as ministry leaders get equipped, encouraged, and empowered to disciple with intentionality, growing God's kingdom one child at a time.

SPEAKER_01: 0:13

Welcome back to the Kidman Huddle. So I have a confession to make. I do not do kids only events outside of VBS. Now I've done 25 plus years of children's ministry. I think, I don't know. It's been a while, right? I've done them. I've done them all. I've taken kids to Superstart. I do summer camp. I've done trips to the zoo. I've had back when VeggieTales was popular. I mean, that's shown the age, right? I did VeggieTale movie parties. I remember doing one when the movie Brave came out. I did a whole party movie showing with the movie Brave and I made treats. I still have the recipe for the treats because they're really good. And we did like a biblical themes talk afterwards. I've done glow nights. I've had Christmas cookie decorating nights. I've had tie dye parties. I've done so many Easter egg hunts. I actually went into labor with my son during Easter egg hunt at preschool. I've done fall festivals. I have even had parties at my house. I have done kids events for decades. And about Six-ish years ago, as I was prepping for yet another Easter egg hunt, it just kind of hit me. Why am I doing this? Like, what purpose is this Easter egg hunt serving other than giving kids a whole bunch of candy? Now, I did the same things you guys are doing, trying to have, you know, a very strong gospel presentation, or I'm resourcing parents with something like I've done scripture albums or whatever. You know, there's a point they don't get to hunt the eggs until I've told them about Jesus, the purpose for Easter. Easter. But were they really listening? No. We're outside in this tiny yard with all you can see is colored Easter eggs. There's no hiding them. It's just a free for all. And the kids are just looking, you know, they might have eyes on me. I'm doing magic tricks to entertain them. I'm capturing their attention. I'm doing all this, but they don't care. They want the candy, but they could get that candy anywhere. I could just give them a bag of candy. They're getting it at school and community festivals and family stuff. So what was the purpose of the Easter egg hunt? And I was seeing discouraging numbers with fall festivals, the way that we'd been doing them. We weren't gaining people. I live in a very church town. So there are churches out the wazoo and it's a very Jesus loving town. So a lot of your kids are church kids. Wasn't effective. It wasn't gaining members. It wasn't growing kids or families in their face. It was just fun and entertainment. So I started to slowly shift what I did with kids. And I moved to a family event mentality. Now at a new church outside of VBS and taking my kids to camp because I work at Manderly Camp for our junior camp week. I do love summer camp. I don't do kids events. I'm only doing family events. So, you know, that shift was kind of slow. I started with a, I took our fall festival where we had the jumpy and the game and all that, and I made it a family event. And I had a chili lunch and there was a discipleship thing that they were making. I think that year it might've been something with a pumpkin, probably. I don't know. I can't remember what it was. And it was a really good time of fellowship, but it wasn't quite there. So it was the baby steps. I added in a couple of events. I did a I think my favorite at that last church was a family Nerf night and the parents came out. We had a bunch of Nerf guns that the youth had and the parents, they were there for that because shooting your kid with a Nerf gun, sign me up. But there was a really strong devotion application with that. And that one was really fun. So then I tried to keep shifting to where I was doing family events. Now I'm only doing family events outside of VBS. Why am I still doing VBS? Because it's a discipleship event that it's not, it is fun. I mean, I'm running around in a tutu and a cape and wig and knee socks and I look awesome. Although my littlest niece is afraid of me in the wig. She doesn't like wigs. So I could not wear my wigs this year. It was very sad. But VBS is discipleship. It's intentional discipleship. You know, it's the equivalent of depending on how often your kids come to church. It's four to five months of Sundays in your VBS week. So love VBS. But I want my other events to be family events only. Why? Well, I want my events to be discipleship focused. So all of my family events have a purpose. And it's not just a, hey, let's all get together and have a bonfire. Not knocking it if that's what you're doing, but I want there to be a discipleship element to the event that I'm doing. So the first one that I kicked off at this church that I'm at now, I've been at for about two years, which is actually the church that I grew up in, that I was called into the ministry in, equipped in, all of that. So I went to that church from birth to 21 And then now I'm back. Took that middle section off to go and get equipped and experienced and all that in children's ministry. And then came back home when I moved out of full-time children's ministry staff. So the first one that I did was a Lego and lunch. I am Baptist. So you feed them, they will come. And I made it around lunchtime. And it was just an easy like sub sandwiches kind of deal. Why did I do it at lunchtime? Because families are busy. They're already at church though for Sunday. So if I'm just keeping them after church and I'm providing lunch and it's something the whole family does together, I have a greater chance of families coming. That first event, I had all of my families in attendance. Mom and dad for one kid couldn't come, but grandma and grandpa did, which was even awesome. Awesome-er. Totally word. So this event was lunch. I had some like Lego coloring sheets on the table and they had a little bit of free build time. But then we moved into the activity portion of the event. It was decorated and all that because, you know, Legos. So there were so many builds that they did, just kind of a challenge. And then there was the big build where families working together were given a gold brick, a four by four and instructed to build a house. The gold brick had to be somewhere in their house, but I didn't tell them where or why. So I gave them time. And then we went to the devotion part of it and which was talking about the cornerstone. You know, if we moved your gold brick, would your house fall apart? Well, we need the cornerstone to be Jesus in our lives, in our homes, in our families. And then they were resourced with a thing to go home to learn more about Jesus and in the Bible. And it was all themed and cute and fun. We had from age like two to 80 something there building with Legos and learning about Jesus, the cornerstone. It was a great event. So much fun. So the discipleship component was strong. It's there. That's the point of the event. the fun components there, but we can add in the fun. We're Kidman leaders. We can make anything fun, right? The thing that I don't broadcast to my families is that I'm actually using these family events as a training opportunity for them. I am training mom and dad on how to lead without saying, hey, come out to this training event that you need to hear. Now, absolutely do some training events, right? But But I decided kind of going into this position, if you've heard the what and the why of it, I'm volunteer. I hadn't even been there a year, but they kind of grandfathered me in because I'd grown up in that church. So they knew me like most of them knew me from before birth. So I couldn't really come in. I didn't feel as not staff and say, you all need to be parenting the way that God commanded. So I wanted these events to be a intentional yet less harsh training and I'm modeling it. So during these family events, they are leading their kids. They are seeing how to lead their kids. Then they're being sent home with something to then go and lead their kids with. So it's that safety of seeing it, doing it with someone instructing it, that encouragement to take it home and do it, and then the stuff to go home and do it with. So it's discipleship focused. I'm training parents. I'm doing a resource piece. So every event that I'm doing, there's something that they're taking home that they can then go and do. And it is scripture driven. That is one of my increasingly, I don't know, vibrant pet peeves. I don't know what the right word would be. But one of my getting much stronger pet peeves is all of the kids' resources, the family resources out there are not scripture driven. They are person centered. Think about the resources that you've sent home for families lately. Did it look a lot like this in the page? Verse, paragraph of the author's thoughts, and a scripted out prayer. That's a lot of them. And I don't want that model. Sometimes it's a horrible model in that the verse really has nothing to do with what the person is saying. And it's not growing a family's faith. I want it to be scripture driven. So I have, I being a checklist person, My family, you know, being raised by me, also checklist people. I started with Renew a Nation and I started really learning what I thought I knew about family ministry, but I didn't quite know all the things I thought I knew. That was one of the things that Dr. Josh Mulvihill is very strong about. We're overscheduling families. How can they lead at home if they feel like they have to be at church all the time? So I do events very sparingly, which honestly really works for me as a Kidman leader, who that's not my full-time job. I'm volunteering. So I'm volunteering to be a full-time Kidman leader on top of working a full-time job, which does involve some travel and raising my two kids and homeschooling them. And plus I have like a book obsession. So I read a lot of books. That's a lot. So if I were trying to do an event every month, but then think of moms and dads. Like if I look at my family's calendar, my kids are homeschooled. My daughter does ballet. That's it. We don't have sports things. We're not going to 14 birthday parties. We don't have school fun. functions. We live a simple life. There's like two free weekends, all of November and December already. It's September and the rest of my year is already filling up. Think about families with multiple kids who are involved in their school, who are playing sports or activities. Do they really have time to come to all of these events? Probably not. So I love, I'm loving doing less events. I'm trying to aim for like one a quarter. Then I'm resourcing families out home to where they can lead at home, but I'm not just overly taxing them with all of these events. And then I'm also taking a look at the church calendar. What else is going on in the church calendar? We are Baptist. We do potlucks. Now I am probably like a church faux pas. I'm having my next event. My fall event is happening right after a chili luncheon. So it's one weekend is the pastor's appreciation chili luncheon. And then I'm going to be gone on vacation. And then it's an event. But the way the schedule worked out, it had to happen. So I'm not overly scheduling families. But then reason number five, why I like family events, is it's also creating some really great intergenerational ministry. We see in Titus that the older generation is to pour into the younger generation. Family events have the opportunity to do that. Now, my church has a little bit of uniqueness in that we have some adoption cases where older members of the family are raising children. So we have a great grandma who's helping raise a daughter. She's helping, so great grandma is helping her daughter raise her great niece because that was the closest family to be raised when her parent passed away. So I've got the sweet, wonderful lady in her 80s coming in as kind of like mom. That's awesome. Um, we did a couple of months back. I did the sticky family time, sticky faith, and it was a pancake themed event. A lot of my events have food around them. What can I say? It works. So it was a pancake event during the Sunday school hour. And the purpose of this was to help parents pass on their faith. It was training them on how to pass on their faith. I don't know if my sister-in-law listens to my podcast, but she was excited about it because she's like, yes, I would love for someone to kind of show me how, show me how to do this. So I loved that event and the really fun part for that is my mom, I'm tattling on her, but I don't know if she's going to listen. Sorry, mom. When I pitched the event to her before, because she is one of my sounding boards, her and my husband, and she's like, oh, that event sounds really boring. I wouldn't go to it, which is totally my mom's personality. She is of the, I don't need that. I can just do it. She's like, I don't need something to teach me how to pass on my faith. I'll just do it. So she was like, no, I'm good. Well, it just so happened that that Sunday that we were doing at her Sunday school class got canceled and she She came to peek in because, hey, it's her daughter. It's her grandkids there. And she ended up staying. She's like, can I stay and finish for you? And she was frying the extra pancakes because those littles were like eating the pancakes up. And then she joined in. So we've got grandma passing on her faith, who grandma who didn't plan on staying, but just stayed to serve and passing on her faith. Now we see because my mom has been coming in. We have one of our girls at church sits with my mom now. I don't think she realizes she's not one of the five granddaughters that my mom has. We got, there's six grandkids, one boy, five girls. And so now like friend is coming in. I don't know that she doesn't realize she's not Theda's granddaughter. And she gets a kiss on the head and an I love you every Sunday, just like the other girls. Intergenerational ministry is happening because we are together. We are talking to each other. You've got parents of different ages. You've got grandparents coming in. We have some active grandparents at our church. It is beautiful and wonderful. And these family events are are helping that to happen. You also see the benefit of relationships being formed with other families, which you need. You need to have families, not just connected to the church via the pastor or the kids pastor. There needs to be multiple touch points. If your church is cliquish, it happens. My last church was family events where families are mingling together. Great for this. I did a fifth Sunday prayer breakfast where every fifth Sunday we, I made breakfast for my families and we just sat and we prayed about each other's kids. And we kind of just touch base, like what's going on in your family's life. That was a great, it was an intentional time of prayer because prayer, but it was also great to see families get to know each other when maybe they were a grandparent being the spiritual leader of their family or a grandparent raising a grandkid or whatever. It was great. I love family events. I see the success of family events. I just put up a sign on Sunday for my fall event that I'm doing and my kid I don't always give my personal kids all the information. I'll tell them when they need to know, right? And they look at the sign and they're like, do we get to go to this? Like, yeah, kid, I'm planning it. But take a guess. Do you think it involves food or not? Absolutely, it does. So my next event is called Taste and See. It is a praise-filled family event. And I'm super duper excited about this. I've been on a praise kick, little teaser for you. There is a scripture-driven, not Amber-centered, devotion coming out all about praise and so it's just kind of been on my mind like teaching kids praise and teaching the goodness of god and so this event is coming out of that and as you can see if you're watching it on the cover is little pies we're making pie i like pie so i'm very excited about this family event where they're going to be making pie together i've got a fun little game that's going to kick it off and it's talking there's a praise activity in it and then that leading hey, mom and dad, you're leading the devotion during the event. I'm right here. I'm going to walk beside you. I'm going to kind of facilitate it, but you're leading it. And then they're going to be able to go and take it and do it at home themselves. So it's that, do it in a safe environment. Okay, you did it. You got it. Now go and do it in your home. And then they're being resourced. I made recipe cards with scripture passages that are talking about praise and the goodness of God. And I'm super excited about it. My kids are all excited too. They all saw the sign and they're like, yes. So that's happening really soon. I challenge you to think about your events. What do you have on your calendar? Have you planned out through the end of the year? Have you planned out the next calendar year? Look at your calendar Are the kid only events, like one, how's this affecting families? Think of the amount of things you're asking them to come to, especially when you're balancing it with the church calendar. If you have kids in different areas, maybe you have a separate preschool ministry and an elementary ministry and a middle school ministry and a youth ministry. What if they're a family that has kids in all of those? Are they at the church every single day of the week? Especially if you factor in serving, you know, worship team practice or yada, yada, yada. What does the average family at your church look like time commitment wise to the church calendar? Then two, look and see, is this event effective? How are you measuring success and effectiveness though? Is it just numbers? Awesome. We had a ton of people come out. It was great. Is there something else maybe that would be a better definition of success other than just numbers? Is success going to be defined by discipleship or growth? Is this maybe something that this is so new and radical? Ooh, we can't cancel everything. Maybe you want to just try it with just one event. Make a switch to an existing, maybe even an existing favorite of yours. So let's take Easter egg hunts. Most of us are doing Easter egg hunts. I am not. I've not done one for several years and I love it. I did last year. Last year, I think instead of an Easter egg hunt, I did during the Sunday school hour when families were there, families made their own Holy week stones. This was a kit from Vanessa Myers, family faith builders, and they made their own Holy week stone. So I bought river rocks and paint markers and I printed out all the cards and they had to draw a certain image on the cart on the rock. And then it went home with them in a bag with these cards. And that was their Holy week devotion. So they got to make it. And then take it home and use it. It was super fun. So maybe instead of your Easter egg hunt, maybe you're doing that. Less eggs to stuff. You know, give them a goodie bag to where they go home. Make a little shift. Or plan an event like my family time sticky faith or the taste and see praise filled pie delicious event. Challenge yourself to be honest, have some in-depth conversations, evaluations, maybe some awkward conversations. Maybe there is that event that has been going on since the dawn of the church and you need to cancel it. What does success, what do you want success to look like? Is it just numbers coming to an event? Because let me remind you that we can have fun doing absolutely anything. Or do we want to see families living out the command to disciple? Moms and dads discipling families in the word together, growing in their faith. I had decided that is what I want success when it comes to events to look like. And I'm a couple of years into doing family only of event VBS because it is a discipleship event, but family only events and I'm loving it. And I see, do not see in the future me going back to kids only events. So a couple of resources for you. If you're looking, definitely check out amber pike.org, go and check out church.renew a nation.org. Both of those places have some really cool family events. the lego and lunch event that i talked about so much fun buy you some off-brand legos because they're cheaper get to building i've got the nerf night on my site this taste and see is brand new coming out and by the end of the year if you don't want to do it now but it's not fall themed but could totally be made made fall but pie is good anytime if you want to wait until my new family devotion book comes out this is a wonderful resource that would couple with that new book so put this on your 2026 calendar family time sticky faith pancake event perfect when whenever. I even have a Christmas one, a really easy Christmas cookie one based similarly to my family cookbook devotional. So check out amberpack.org, church.renewnation.org for some family events. Like I mentioned, Vanessa Myers, the Holy Week Stones, super fun. Family Faith Builders has some great stuff too. Kidman Corrine's got some stuff on her site, Deeper Kidman. Go check some family events there. And then I really encourage you to look into the Family Ministry Academy. We are getting ready to start our next cohort in October. This This course changed how I view ministry. I had already been loving family ministry, teaching on family ministry, trying to do family ministry. But going through this course as a faculty member has changed me. That was what made that big hard line of, nope, I'm not doing kids events anymore. They need to be family. It was that practical side of, well, you're overscheduling families. It is going to change how you do ministry. Registration is getting ready to close soon. We have scholarships available. Please reach out to me. I would love to tell you some more about it. You can find it on church.redonation.org. Find out more about it. Amazing ministry. But my friends doing children's ministry. Amazing is good and needed, but we need to be doing children's ministry with a family first kid men mentality. So when you're thinking about your events, are your kids events successful when it comes to discipleship and family? Ponder on that question this week, my friends. Reach out if you have any questions. You want to chat, bounce some ideas. If you've got a great event for families, I'd love to hear about it. And remember, what you do matters.