We recently held an event designed to increase Bible engagement for families at our church. We sent emails, insisted on a pre-service slide, fought other ministries for time in weekend announcements, and made posters and invitations (with QR codes!) to register.
One week before the event, we had three families registered. We were disappointed—we had envisioned well over 50 families learning how to study God’s Word together. We wanted to announce to our church staff and leadership our success in numbers, and 3 didn’t sound quite impressive enough. Not enough lives impacted. The numbers of registrations couldn’t justify the budget numbers and staff hours.
While numbers are people, and people matter to God, I am sure that the Holy Spirit’s metric of impact has more to do with the immeasurable than with the spreadsheets we work to fill.
A 2021 Barna study asked the question, “How easy or difficult is it to evaluate the impact children’s ministry is having on children?” They asked 600 children’s ministry leaders, and 3% said “very difficult,” 48% said “somewhat difficult,” 40% said “somewhat easy,” and 8% said “very easy.”
I believe the trend toward the ambiguous “somewhat” answers is an indication of our dance as ministry leaders between assessing our ministry as successful based on the concrete numbers, versus the intangible, often years down the road, development of faith in children.
Certainly, any children’s ministry leader could tell you the number of baptisms or dedications in the last year, their record-breaking numbers for summer camp or VBS, the number of people serving on their volunteer teams, or the average weekend attendance in their ministry. But what if we shifted to a metric that accounts for the intangibles?
My persistent prayer for our kids is that God would grow ever bigger in their eyes, not because God changes, but because our kids have a deeper knowledge of who He is and what He can do in and through them.
Measuring the Immeasurable in Children’s Ministry
Shift from who showed up to how they showed up.
Your volunteers matter. I am a firm believer that the Lord of the Harvest will bring us more kids and families when we faithfully recruit and steward volunteers, because those statistics—steady growth in volunteer numbers and steady growth in attendance—will correlate in a healthy ministry.
But our weekend’s success is truly measured in the moments of how those volunteers showed up. I can’t tell you the exact number of volunteers that served last Sunday, but I can tell you stories of moments when I saw kids running in to find their favorite leaders, volunteers praying for kids, and the mutual excitement when a child discovered a truth about God and the volunteer affirmed it.
I see the moments when a volunteer is patient with a child who needs extra time or slows to listen when behavior is communicating a need that they could meet with love or peace. You could try to account for each of those moments, but some of the most precious ones would remain in the precious intimacy of a moment of prayer or a gentle comfort in the nursery.
Shift from managing the space to fulfilling the mission.
We changed our volunteer shirts from a design that simply named our ministry to a design that states our mission: “Making Passionate Disciples.”
This intentional move was made because we wanted our mission at the forefront of everyone’s minds, more than just naming the place they were serving. We must manage a space—databases and spreadsheets are important parts of keeping order, and God is the God of order. But what if all of it—the logistics, the check in, the baby rocking, the wondering with preschoolers, the worship with kids, the truth seeking with elementary age kids—was done with the firm filter of your mission overlaying the framework?
What if the question at the end of the day was layered not only with the number of kids who attended, but also with how passionate disciples were formed? One of my favorite comments that a co-worker made about our staff kids’ ministry operations lead was, “You can tell how deeply she loves the kids and wants to make disciples by the passion she has for keeping them safe and accounted for.”
She managed the space well but had shifted her focus to fulfilling the mission.
Shift from what the kids know to how they know Jesus.
Sometimes I think it would be fun to give our kids a test, and ask them facts about stories from the Bible, then follow that test up with a second test: asking them to write a list of the things they know to be true about God.
My hope would be that the second test would not only be a long list with more “correct answers” than the first test but would also result in more delight and joy as the kids recount who God is and how they experience his love and faithfulness.
I would rather spend my time seeing kids respond in worship to the God they know, than to show off the facts they know about the size of Noah’s ark or the order of Paul’s journeys. My persistent prayer for our kids is that God would grow ever bigger in their eyes, not because God changes, but because our kids have a deeper knowledge of who He is and what He can do in and through them.
Shift from reading the words to loving the Word.
One of my sons was an incredible reader and verse-memorizer at an early age. His brother was not so interested in reading, and memorizing was hard for him. While both of them love Jesus and his Word now, the reader and memorizer often got more recognition for his accomplishments—more candy, more prizes, more awards.
His brother, however, loved the story of redemption in the Bible. He was delighted and passionate about listening to the stories in the Bible and could tell you the stories and the verses in his own words. He truly loved—and still loves—God’s Word, though it was never measured in “Bible bucks” or candy.
Our ministry is planning to do a survey this year of Bible engagement in families, to try to measure numerically how families are engaging with Scripture. I am convinced that we need to teach our smallest children to love the story of redemption told in the Bible—the only one of its kind—so they know how loved they are and will want to read and explore the Big God Story on their own as they get older.
We can give the external rewards for reading and memorizing, but the more important outcome is the internal rewards that children discover as they learn to love God’s Word because of what it teaches them about God.
This week, our Bible engagement event was the win I announced to our staff leadership team. In the end, we had 15 families attend. We have no way of multiplying that number by the years these kids who attended will follow Jesus and love God’s Word. We can’t see into the future and know how they might share what they know with a friend, and how lives may be changed because we decided 15 families was enough to pour our budget and time into.
We showed up, focused on the mission to make passionate disciples, listened as they discovered new truths about God through His Word, and smiled as they delighted in reading the Bible together.
As the families studied Mark 2, one of the 5-year-olds in the room declared the message she got from reading the story was to “Be near to Jesus.” That was exactly the metric I needed.
Wonder Ink’s 3-year, 52-week children’s ministry curriculum offers kids space to fully find their place in God’s Big Story. Children discover they are Known by God, Loved by Jesus, and Led by the Holy Spirit.
