summer Archives - Kathie Phillips

What I’m Working On This Month (August 2026)

08/05/202608/16/2026 Kathie Phillips Leave a comment

Happy August! August is usually a busy month for me, and this time around is no different. Here’s what I’m currently working on:

Promotion Sunday

In early September, we promote our kids to the next class based on age or grade, so we’re busy preparing for that. Stay tuned for an upcoming post with a more detailed look at how we prepare.

Building a Key Leadership Team

One of the key missing pieces of our children’s ministry is a team of leaders who can step into the next level of leadership. I’ve decided to call these folks “Team Champions”. I’ll share more details in a future post, but my goal is to have each of our ministry areas represented with the intent of strengthening our ministry overall and better serving our volunteers and families. Very excited about this and who I’m inviting to serve in this way!

Summer Volunteer Schedules

During the months of July and August, we invite parents and other members of our congregation to serve with us while our school year leaders take some much-needed time off. This year’s call-to-action has yielded a great response (honestly the best I’ve seen in years), with most of our serving opportunities being covered. However, we have a few opportunities left, so I’m working to secure coverage for our remaining needs.

Next Gen Team Meeting Schedule

Our Next Gen staff team will resume our monthly meetings in a few weeks, so I’ll be working on outlining our meeting content for the next few months.

Blog Refresh & Content For the Next Three Months

Speaking of content…After several years away from this platform, I am eager to jump back in and have mapped out my blog content for the next three months. Now comes creating that content so that I stay ahead of the game. I am also playing with a few layouts to give the blog a fresh look. Stay tuned!

A Few Loose Ends

As summer winds down, I have a few loose ends to tie up – things such as providing our VBS debrief/evaluation notes and budget analysis to the planning team, submitting work orders for a few needed projects for our kids’ area, finishing September curriculum edits, preparing back-to-school family resources, and tidying our resource closets (we have several). I’ll be sharing a resource closet must-have list as a free download very soon, so stay tuned for that as well.

Lots of things keeping me busy! Now it’s your turn. What are you working on this month? Any specific content you’d like to see me cover?

Summer Lovin’: Switching Things Up

07/01/201408/16/2026 Kathie Phillips

The following post is part of a series of summer-related posts.

Today, we’ll look at changing up your programming during the summer months.

Our ministry’s ‘summer’ began on Father’s Day, so with God’s help we have successfully survived 3 summer Sundays without our school-year volunteers (who serve Sept – mid June and get the summer off). Because we invite parents, members of our congregation and students to serve during the summer months, we wanted to restructure our ministry to still provide quality programming with the fewest amount of volunteers.

Here’s what we did. and how it’s been working so far:

EARLY CHILDHOOD

During the school year, we provide individual classes for 2-yr olds – Kindergartners at each of our two services (eight classrooms). During the summer months, we decided to offer a class for 2-yr olds (using Group’s Hands-on-Bible curriculum) and a mixed-age group for 3-yr olds – Kindergartners (using Orange’s First Look curriculum). This mixed-age room will be a large group/small group format that will include engaging arrival activities, large group time (live worship and Bible story, on DVD) and mixed-age small groups for application activities (crafts, games, etc.), playground time, snack and prayer. The response has been so overwhelmingly positive from children, parents and volunteers that we are considering continuing this format this fall.

ELEMENTARY

Since we bid our rising 6th graders a fond farewell a few weeks ago, we have again decided to combine our rising 2nd – rising 5th graders for the summer. (We’ve done this for the past few years and it’s worked very well). Our summer programming will be just seven weeks this year, as our elementary students worship with their families during the month of August. (Take a look at how we introduced this last summer here). Usually I order the summer XP materials from Orange but the materials they offered this year was a repeat of materials we used last summer so I began praying and asking God to direct me to what materials we should use for the seven weeks of our Sunday programming. I landed on teaching the kids about Moses since our VBS will focus on Moses in the wilderness with the Israelites.

On Sunday mornings, we set up a few arrival activities and lead the children in a large group game to introduce the lesson for the day. Then we move everyone to our large group space for a fun, interactive countdown, worship, prayer, and our Bible story (led by a main storyteller). When our large group time concludes, we split the group into 3 groups and allow the groups to rotate through 3 activity stations, which has included object lessons, memory verse activities, crafts, games and snack. The slightly different format has worked so well that I’ve signed up a few volunteers to serve with us this fall!

In our ministry, attendance fluctuates during the summer months, so we like to take risks and try some new things in the summer. If something’s a hit, we include it in our programming for the new ministry year.

Related article: “Should Kids Ministry Take the Summer Off?“ by Brian Dollar

What does programming in your kidmin look like during the summer months? What ‘risky’ things are you trying this summer?

{From the Archives} Summer Lovin’: Recruiting Volunteers

06/18/201408/16/2026 Kathie Phillips

The following post was originally published in June 2013 and is part of a series of summer-related posts.

Today, we’ll look at recruiting volunteers.

For the past few weeks we have been busy making the transition to Summer Sunday school. Our ministry gives school-year volunteers the summer off to rest and recharge. Because of this, we heavily rely on parents, middle and high school students, college students and others in our church to step in and serve.

Some of our recruiting strategies this summer have included:

Online sign ups. Last summer we used Sign Up Genius to keep track of our volunteers. This was an easy, convenient way for folks to sign up to serve. We are using it again this summer. I like that Sign Up Genius sends reminder emails to those who sign up through its program. That is a huge help.
We also used bulletin ads, upfront announcements, email and e-newsletters to the entire church body. Some say that these are not effective recruiting strategies but I feel that they can get the word out to people who would otherwise not be aware of our needs.

Despite all of our best efforts, I found it increasingly frustrating that we were not seeing the type of results that we needed to ensure enough coverage each weekend. I went to bed one evening last week with this on my mind and was awakened early the next morning with a God-given thought (at 5am!).

While we were asking people indirectly, we had not directly asked. Duh! So…I wanted to try that. I wasn’t sure the idea would work but I thought, “We don’t have anything to lose.” Here’s what we did:

We set up two tables in strategic areas in our children’s areas, so strategic that parents could not get to their destination without passing one of them. We decorated the tables with summer-themed items such as beach balls, pails and shovels, cups and crazy straws, citronella candles, balloons in fun colors and life-sized popsicles (my daughter made those). These items sat on top of fun flip-flop tablecloths. Because food definitely draws people in, we placed donut holes on the table, too. The purpose of the decor was to draw attention to the tables so that parents could stop over, check us out, and sign up.

The last thing we added were sign-ups sheets, pens and signage. I asked several ladies on my team to stand at each table to answer any questions and assist in the sign-ups. This added a personal element to our strategy.

The results…we had 50 – yes 50! – sign-ups that day! God blew my mind yet once again.

Here’s what I learned through all of this:

Pray that God will provide. Pray that He will show you creative ways to bring people into your ministry.
Use various methods of recruiting. One solo method will likely not bring the desired results.
Bring a personal element to your recruiting strategies. If you’re using an electronic method, tell stories of how volunteers might be impacted. What might they experience? If you’re using an on-site sign-up, have someone there to greet and ask questions. It’s hard to walk past a smiling, friendly face.
Bring others into the process to pray and brainstorm. Do not carry the burden of recruiting by yourself.
Take a risk. The idea that you have may not work – but then again, it just might! Go for it!

What are some of your best recruiting strategies? Let me know in the space below.

Summer in our KidMin

03/07/201408/16/2026 Kathie Phillips 2 Comments

Depending on where you live, this winter has been extremely long, dreary and snowy. Many of us are ready for things to warm up a little bit. Good news – summer is right around the corner and for those of us in KidMin, we’ve been thinking about summer for some time now.

I recently did an interview with Children’s Ministry Magazine’s David Jennings on what summer looks like in our kidmin. You can read the article here.

I’d love to know – what fun things does your ministry have planned for this summer? Leave me a comment below!

Tag: summer

What I’m Working On This Month (August 2026)

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Summer Lovin’: Switching Things Up

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Summer in our KidMin

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