We serve a God of celebration. One of the first things God did when he led His people out of Egyptian slavery and into the Promised Land was give them days and times of celebration. Times to stop the ‘every day’ or UR (usual routine) to celebrate God’s goodness, to launch into a new season, get a do-over, and even refresh for the next season.

Promotion Sunday is a great way to celebrate the end of the summer and acknowledge the natural rhythm of your community when school starts. It builds energy as you invite your families to gather at church. We celebrate Promotion Sunday on the Sunday after the local school system begins. On Promotion Sunday our team of servant leaders prepare themselves to teach and lead, and our children move up to the next age-level with fanfare. It’s a big deal! A theme helps that. We are inviting families to STEP UP TO THE PLATE on Promotion Sunday 2019.

Marketing information:
• McEachern Kids is ready to STEP UP TO THE PLATE. Come on by The Treehouse as we are ready to help you and your family start the school year and knock it out of the park!
• Promotion Sunday will be on Sunday, August 4 when McEachern Kids will move up to their new classes and meet their new teachers. Wear your Braves gear as we all STEP UP TO THE PLATE to follow Jesus! Come to the Pep-Rally in The Treehouse to meet your new teachers and be escorted to your new classrooms.

Our creative team has prepared a photo space and we’ve ordered foam fingers and pompoms for the children to help with the visual aspect of the festivities for the pep rally. We’ll have huge bowls of Cracker Jacks and mini Tootsie Pops to hand out for take-aways. The youth department is selling tickets to the Atlanta Braves game at 1:20pm that day after church. The adult Christian education department will be setting up displays of ‘next step’ opportunities in discipleship as they, too, STEP UP TO THE PLATE.

Every child will get an information packet which will include a family survey, registration form to update information, a new school-year ParentCalendar (2019-20) with all the dates of anything outside of Sunday morning, and a layout for what is the next step in discipleship for each age level. We want to keep our families informed of what is offered for their child at each stage of their development. It shows our intentionality and gives them a heads-up on what their church has chosen to be the priority and investment in our partnership to love their kids to Jesus.

Rising 1st Graders

Rising 2^nd Graders

Rising 3^rd Graders

Rising 4^th Graders

Rising 5^th Graders

How do you celebrate this milestone of a new school year?

“If God is clear about one thing, it’s this: What is good, true, right, and just will last. Everything else won’t.” Maria Goff from Love Lives Here: Finding What You Need in a World Telling You What You Want, pg 166

Summer is the perfect time to offer something special to families to have fun, to make new friends, and to have some sticky church memories. We invited every little girl who had completed kindergarten through completed 5th grade to bring their mother, grandmother, significant woman in their lives for some paint and praise. Here’s what we did.

Promotion in bulletin and through social media: All little girls (completed K5-5th grade) are invited to bring their Mom to share in some paint and praise.
Thursday, July 18, 7-8:30pm
This is not a drop-off event, but a shared big girl/little girl event in Oaks Hall. Register today at ….

A fabulous elementary school art teacher of 40+ years prepared the space with an amazing team of teachers and dear youth. We prepared trail mix and fruit water of lemon and oranges. Mrs. Glover guided our gals to use brushes and paints like professionals. We prayed, we hummed, we followed along, and some decided to do something a little different.

Mrs. Glover shared testimony of her relationship with her mother who is now in Heaven and her daughter who is serving in the mission field in Asia having just graduated from college. She spoke of her teaching past students who were in the room as well as how much she enjoys teaching worship art to our 4th & 5th graders in Sunday school every other month (awesome plug to come back for Sunday school!)

The supplies were an investment as we will indeed do this again. I thought of doing the pizza-box-converted-into-an-easel trick, but I had four other special happenings that week and I knew my limitations.  Here is our supply list beyond the light refreshments, wet-wipes, paper towels, cups of water, and such:
Easels
Brushes
Canvases  (11X14)
Paints

We listened to praise music in the background thanks to a long-play YouTube channel coming through the room speakers. We charged $5 per person and registered everyone online.  This gives me data to use in promoting other events during the school year like encouraging parents to ‘step up to the plate’ on Promotion Sunday to make Christian education a family priority. One mom asked if we could do this around the holidays. Another posted about it on her well-known weekly blog. Many a little girl spent time with her mom away from laundry, away from other distractions, and we didn’t really see any cell phones until the end to take pictures of their masterpieces together.

Last month we offered a Big Guy-Little Guy Nerf Games with a total of 22 big guys and 23 little guys. Close to 50% were boys who had only attended Vacation Bible School and/or Recreation Ministry. The Paint & Praise Party had 25 little girls and 24 moms. Close to 30% were little girls who had only attended Vacation Bible School and/or Recreation Ministry. We could have made this a church-wide endeavor, but the little girls would have been lost. The goal was to let the girls spend some time with their moms while meeting and growing in relationship with other mom-girl teams. That’s how tribes are built. Summer is the perfect time.

“Whatever your goal is for the summer, be intentional with it.” Becky Kiser, from Sacred Holidays: Less Chaos, More Jesus, pg. 88

The email last April gave the staff and specific laity a week to complete a space audit. By definition, an audit is an official inspection of an organization’s or individual’s accounts typically by an independent body. What brought this on was a lack of dedicated space for our ministry to youth whose previous space was given to a new worship service. Rather than just finding space, the entire campus underwent this amazing endeavor.

Each ministry lead was asked to answer inquiries in three parts:
Part 1: Current Utilization
A. Name or identify the area(s) currently used by your ministry area.
B. Identify the schedule(s) of your current ministries, per areas identified in 1-A.
C. Identify the maximum and minimum number of people using the spaces in 1-A.
Part 2: Projected Future Space Needs of Your Ministry Area
A. Do you anticipate that your ministry will need more, less or the same space in five years?
B. If you identified “more” space, what area(s)might be ideal to accommodate the growth?
Part 3: Your Professional Opinion
In your professional opinion, are there spaces/areas (whether within your ministry area, or not) that are currently underutilized and/or need to be reconfigured to better accommodate the church’s overall ministry effectiveness – current and future?

Once everything was submitted, the trustees enlisted the help of professional organizers beginning in May to evaluate all of the space including storage. Everyone was instructed to clean out their spaces and at least three huge dumpsters were set up in the parking lot to take all the debris.

This was awesome and took great courage. Every church has things lingering in the corners, under the stage, and above the closets. There are sacred cows that moo from the last century. I recall the tongue lashing I endured for removing a brown cotton banner from a stairwell at a previous church I served. This banner hung from a stick, had children’s hand prints from the 1970s and was probably a white sheet to begin with. Anybody else with similar experiences?

Negotiations have begun for the cleaned-out spaces through the professional organizers which is genius because we all know how that could go if initiated by staff. We have laughed a lot through this process because I discovered there were two storage areas in another building that belonged to children’s ministry. I had no idea! (I’ve been here two years on August 1st.) There was also a great workroom that was not claimed by any ministry because three ministries thought it belonged to the others. Ha! We ended up getting that space. How did we know? It was the one area that was not cleaned out after all the dumpsters left.

In the process, we’ve lost space, gained space, gained storage, and made a classroom out of another ministry’s storage space. It’s the only room we do not share. Yep, we share space. We share with weekday preschool ministry, recreation ministry, nursery ministry, and worship ministry. Using space and sharing space is what we do. You probably do, too. Yet if feels so much lighter, just like it feels when you might clean out the garage, the basement, or that closet upstairs that no one opens anymore.

Would your church benefit from a space audit? Ours has!

“But everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way.” 1 Corinthians 14:40

Preparing for a new school year in the local church is like celebrating New Year’s Day. It’s a new year of planning, recruiting, vision-sharing, and hopefully more laughs than tears. If you’ve already reached out last spring to those who were on your team last February/March, you are a huge step ahead. If you’ve got your school year calendar ready for publishing by mid July, you are a great gift to your families. If you’ve been editing your excel worksheet of everyone who has EVER served on your children’s ministry team with those who have done ANYTHING this summer, you are ready for the ask.

What’s the ask? Would you prayerfully consider serving on the Children’s Ministry Team this school year? Be sure to add to your email/letter celebrations of how the Lord is growing the ministry and a few teasers of what is new and updated. Everyone loves the energy that comes from starting something new. Be sure to add new parents/grand parents of kids to your excel worksheet/database of potential champions who’ve become involved over the last year. People get involved in a local church because they WANT to get connected. Invite them!

“As we prayerfully prepare a new school year for McEachern Kids, I hope you’ll consider coming to a free training dinner on Wednesday, July 17 5:30pm-7pm in room #F147.  We’ll TACO-bout the many different opportunities to serve Jesus on the McEachern Kids team. This is for you if you’re all in, if you want to get more connected, and even if you’re just curious and unsure of making the commitment.” There’s the ASK and the INVITE to TACO-bout it. We will use Moe’s Southwest Grill to cater a taco bar and mustaches for everyone!

Promotion Sunday for us is the first Sunday AFTER school starts, so we’re on a mission in July to champion ministry with children like a Dallas Cheerleader without the uniform…with joy, in every conversation, with personal stories, and an elevator pitch.

Prepare an email to go out after July 4th. I include a Parent Calendar for the upcoming year. The calendar is the greatest challenge of having it ready and prepared to share by mid July, but so worth it. With our calendar in the hands of the parents first, our parents have gone to task with the PTA and their kid’s schools to change their dates and it’s worked! Print several hard copies of the email and the calendar to hand out to folks you see on Sunday mornings or who the Lord brings to your mind. Pray, “Lord, who?” then act on it. Don’t argue with your Holy Spirit. Know that you’ll have to coach and do it well and often. Prepare for the ask. It’s what we’ve been called to do, invited to do, hired to do, and expected to do well. If this has you hyperventilating, order a copy of Sustainable Children’s Ministry. A blog post of this amazing resource can be found here. If you serve in North Georgia (or can get here), come to the Children’s Ministry Institute this fall so you won’t be hyperventilating next year.We’ll cover this exercise at the last meeting. You can do this!

Want a copy of our email and calendar sent just last night? Email me directly at dedereilly@comcast.net.

“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” Ephesians 2:10

It is an ugly, awful, terribly misguided myth that churches can’t grow during the summer. Don’t listen to it. Don’t buy into it. Don’t settle for it. Summer is the perfect time to try new things, change up each week, and be so invitational it makes your hospitality team wonder where you came from.

It’s not just about VBS week, but the weekend after and every day until fall programming starts. I know of too many churches offering amazing Vacation Bible Schools as ‘outreaches’ yet plan nothing special to offer afterward to continue to build relationships, connections, and faith-formation experiences beyond a laid-back Sunday morning. We put in all that work, all those resources, and we’ve dropped the ball. We take a summer break. We think since most people are gone during the summer, we just can’t pull it off. I’m not gone. Are you gone?

Think about it. Reserving space is easier in the summer. Using shared space is easier in the summer since preschool, recreation leagues, and even some Sunday school classes take the summer off. Smaller groups of kids thrive in relationship-building during the summer. Summer is a great time to teach and lead new volunteers and leaders into a glimpse of how your Sunday morning team works and its logistical systems. Summer is the perfect time to get to know your volunteers better, hang out by the Gaga Ball pit, playground, and make friends with folks new to the church and community.

This is why we use incentives to recruit our summer Sunday morning volunteers who take over so the regular school-year servant leaders rest and refresh with ‘first 10 to signup get a logo-ed tervis tumbler’ and ‘free ticket to the ice cream truck coming on campus after services on National Ice Cream Day (July 21).’ This is why we offer Faith Field Trips for small groups of students to learn about Jesus, share in an outdoor experience with other kids their ages, and partner with other local churches in our districts. This is why we offered summer events like Nerf Wars and the upcoming Paint & Praise Party which helps us ‘fuel a warm community’ (from Growing Young, by Kara Powell, Jake Mulder, and Brad Griffin). This is why we celebrate each Sunday as a special Sunday in June and July.

Flipping Church is a book of amazing stories of Wesleyan church planters who have collaboratively broken the rules and fought the battle of church myths, struggles and successes for the called to share the gospel in multiple contexts. In it, Rev. Olu Brown, pastor of Atlanta’s Impact Church, affirms this challenge to the local church to ‘become known as the church of summer excellence.’

How do we pull that off? Rev. Brown writes, “In order to grow during the summer months, each church must PLAN FOR SUCCESS in the summer.” (emphasis mine) He continues, “Truly, if you don’t do something unique and creative over the summer, the likelihood is that your congregation will go into decline in both people and money.”

Rev. Brown invites the reader to consider the following:

• Variety and innovation inspire worshipers to attend during the summer because the local church actively works to engage their attention. People have a ‘need for novelty and desire to have fun during the summer.’
• Offer incentives to encourage attendees to be more consistent and invite others to join you during the summer. It’s not about watering down the mission of the church, but rather ‘good evangelism in the 21st century.’

School begins in the Atlanta area in August. Plan for summer success in January to be the church of summer Children’s Ministry excellence. What is your local church known for in the summer?

“But those who plan what is good show love and faithfulness.” Proverbs 14:22b