Categories: Leadership

Visiting a church for the first time can be super overwhelming for families, and the way we set up the Sunday-morning experience plays a big role in that. The systems you have in place for check-in and for visitors can make or break the family's experience and decision to return (we talked about this last week here). So this week, we're sharing some tips from a Sunday morning check-in expert: Dan from Kidddo. Kidddo is a check-in and label-printing platform built for children's ministries and childcare programs, and Dan shares some common problem areas to be aware of + easy fixes to help things run smoothly...  Think about the last time you walked into a building you'd never visited. Now add a diaper bag, a toddler on your hip, and the quiet fear of handing your child to strangers. That's Sunday morning for a first-time family. Most...

Grandparents Day happens every September (this year it's September 13), but it doesn't have to be one Sunday where you hand out flowers and call it done. If you treat it as just a single moment instead of a doorway, you're leaving the biggest untapped discipleship resource in your church sitting in the pews. Grandparents aren't a nice bonus to family ministry. For a lot of your kids, they're one of the most consistent faith influences outside your ministry. They often have more margin than busy parents. They have decades of stories about God's faithfulness that no curriculum could ever recreate. They babysit, pick kids up from school, come to ball games, spend weekends together, and pray faithfully behind the scenes. Parents are often shaping faith in the everyday rhythms. Grandparents have the unique opportunity to reinforce those rhythms with...

I'm so excited for our Canva Confidence online workshop happening this Thursday, August 20 as we dive into the basic principles of good design, discover time-saving Canva features, and create ministry resources you can actually use right away. (Save your spot for the workshop here). We've partnered with Church Visuals for this workshop, and we're excited to share a guest blog post from them this week... Kids are visual learners, and every visual is communicating something, whether you intended it to or not. As ministry leaders, we have the greatest message ever told. Our job isn't to entertain kids; it's to communicate the Gospel as clearly as possible. Quality visuals help remove distractions so kids can focus on what matters most: Jesus. Whether you're creating graphics in Canva or another design program, I want to give you seven...

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css=""]You can have a solid curriculum, fun games, and the most organized (or at least the fullest) supply closet in the building, but if you're not factoring in who today's kids actually are, the amount of supplies you have and prep you do doesn't matter. Here are five realities shaping how Gen Alpha learns, connects, and grows in faith, and what that actually means for your Sunday: They're digital first - For this generation, screens aren't a tool. They're the environment. Kids are learning through videos, apps, and short-form content from a very young age, and it's shaping how long they can focus, how fast they expect an answer, and how they process anything that isn't moving. Faith formation is now competing with constant stimulation, which means a kid can know the Bible story and still struggle to...

Every kids ministry has seasons. Sometimes you’re swimming in 4th graders. Sometimes everyone moves up to the youth group at once. And sometimes, like at Trinity Church in Larchmont, NY, your nursery suddenly becomes the most crowded room in the building. I chatted with Kathleen Jaoudi, a DKM Vendor (find all Kathleen's resources here) and the Children’s Pastor at Trinity Church, about the baby boom they experienced over the last year. “We average 35 to 45 kids on a Sunday,” she told me. “Those stats have flipped in the last year from mostly 1st to 5th graders to mostly 0 to 4 year olds.” When Kathleen returned from maternity leave, she started hearing pregnancy announcements. Then more. Then she and her team started counting. “We realized we would have 8 babies born between February and June 2025, including a set of twins,”...

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css=""]When you turn learning into an intentional habit, your leadership grows. Podcasts are one of the simplest ways to keep growing and learning as a leader without adding more to your plate or using any of your budget. Podcasts are also great tools to use with an intern! Here are some of my favorite podcasts for kidmin leaders in 2026:[/vc_column_text][vc_btn title="Download Printable Version here!" align="center" css="" link="url:https%3A%2F%2Fdeeperkidmin.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2026%2F04%2FDKM-Podcasts-every-kidmin-leader-should-listen-to-.pdf|target:_blank"][vc_column_text css=""] KidMin-Specific Podcasts: Kids Ministry Circle with Lauren Jackson The KidMin Huddle Podcast with Amber Pike The Lead Ministry Podcast with Josh Denhart Stained Glass Kids with Yancy The KidzMatter...

What if the secret to better Sunday mornings was hiding in a stack of printed articles on a Wednesday afternoon? My friends joke that research is one of my spiritual gifts, and one of them claims that research is my parenting style (they're not wrong). So when I heard about a kidmin leader who does intentional research as a weekly habit, I knew I had to learn more. Meet Andrae Jones. Andrae is the Kids Pastor at One Community Church in Plano, TX, a multisite church with six campuses, where he oversees nursery through 4th grade. He'll tell you he's working with a lean team but that they have some of the most amazing volunteers ever. Andrae is also doing something that not enough kidmin leaders are doing. He's learning and researching. Consistently. Intentionally. Every single week. And it's changing how he leads. How It Started Andrae has always...