This week we are going to be exploring three simple ways to help connect the ministry we do at church with parents at home.  At Liquid we are attempting to partner more with parents [learn more] and these are a few of the small things we’ve done in this area.

Do you keep photos of important people on your fridge?  We do.  Whether it’s Christmas cards that we keep up all year round . . . or photos of babies . . . and these three “baseball cards” with information about my kids’ small group leaders at church.

We did this as a Family Ministry department this year because we are wanting to stress the importance of this relationship and to encourage our parents’ to reach out to their child’s small group leader if they have any questions about our children’s ministry.  Here is a run down of some quick learnings from this project . . .

• We provided an email forwarding service for all of our small group leaders so their email addresses were branded to our ministry.
• Taking the photos of all these folks was a little harder than I anticipated . . . we lined up the photos over a few weekends in September.  We had a box of funny hats and such for them to put on to make the photos even more fun!
• The back of the card has a little bit of a profile on the small group leader . . . as well as contact information for the church.
• We make (encourage?) our parent’s fill out a survey about their kids so we can get them to know them better and match them in small group.  A part of what we ask for in that survey is what service they will be attending . . . on the card it reminds them what service they have committed to.
• If you are looking for the vendor we used for printing. . . follow this link.
• We mailed these card to people’s homes . . . the logic there was to try to get it closer to the fridge . . . with a cover letter from our lead pastor thanking them for partnering with our children’s ministry . . . and asking them to put it up on the fridge.
• Over the fall we heard stories of parents using these cards to reach out their small group leaders . . . mission accomplished!

What about your church? What are you doing to make a stronger connection between your kids ministry small group leaders and their parents?

On Wednesday, we’re going to talk about a small thing I did during my stint this fall filling in student ministry to help connect parents with our ministry to their students.