What It Really Takes to Reach Young Families (Part 2)
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Who is responsible? When kids’ attendance numbers are down, senior leaders can tend to blame the kids’ pastor.
But the truth is that the children’s pastor has very little control over creating the necessary environment for reaching young families. The church’s leadership and vision are big factors.
Before Tony Morgan’s tragic passing in early September 2024, we had recorded the remaining podcast episodes in this series on “What It Really Takes To Reach Young Families.” Tony was passionate about this topic and had so much practical wisdom to offer. We’ve decided to release the remaining episodes of this series over the next few weeks.
VISION & LEADERSHIP
In Part 2 of this series, Tony and Amy had a conversation specifically about the aspects of ministry vision and leadership that are essential to the success or failure of kids’ pastors in their roles.
- Becoming a multigenerational church
- Designing weekend experiences and facilities
- Next steps for leadership to take
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Transcript
Sean:
This is the Unstuck Church Podcast. And I’m Sean, your host today. If you’re a regular listener of the podcast, you likely already know that the next few episodes for us will be a bit different. If you’re new to the podcast, though, before you listen, it’ll help you to know before today’s episode that tragically the Unstuck Group lost our founder and good friend Tony Morgan recently. If you’re interested in hearing our statement about Tony’s passing, you can go back to our September 11th podcast or our website, theunstuckgroup.com to learn more. Before Tony’s passing, we recorded the remaining episodes in this series of podcasts on what it really takes to reach young families. And this is a topic that Tony was passionate about and had so much practical wisdom on. So we’ve decided to release the remaining episodes of this series over the next few weeks. You’ll hear Tony’s voice; you’ll hear Tony’s passion for churches. Tony’s life mission that he lived out so well, was helping churches be more effective at accomplishing the great commission. And we believe his thoughts and voice in these next episodes will help your church do just that. So here’s episode two of our, What It Really Takes To Reach Young Family Series with Tony Morgan and Amy Anderson.
Amy:
Well, Tony, we’re in a series on what it takes to reach young families, and in this first episode, we wanna set a foundation for where we’re headed. And that’s this, that you have to decide to become a multi-generational church focused on reaching young families if you wanna reach them. But before we dive in, you know, I, one of the things that made this week kind of fun, Tony, you know, when I worked in ministry, when I was on a church staff, I always said my payday was the baptism days because it was just seeing the fruit of what God was doing on people’s lives. But man, several of us, we were talking about it in our Slack channel. Got multiple texts and emails from churches this week just are, that are doing so well. I’ve been working with the church for I think, three years now. In fact, I’m going back there next February, and they have broken through attendance levels that they’ve never seen before. They had baptisms. In fact, I think like 90% of the people that got baptized were the mission field that they were trying to reach. So it was just so fun to hear from them. And then you had a church too that reached out to you?
Tony:
Yeah, a couple of churches. One, big multi-site church. They broke 7,500 in attendance for the first time in the history of the church.
Amy:
Wow.
Tony:
So that was pretty exciting. And, you know, they’re reaching a lot of people. Amy, it’s just so fun. It’s not just the attendance numbers, but I’m hearing stories from them about people crossing the line of faith and number of baptisms they’re celebrating is pretty fantastic. And then another church that I think both of us served, this would’ve been several years ago, Southern Baptist Church. And I believe now they are the fastest growing Southern Baptist church in the country. So we just got that update from that church just in the last couple of days. And so it’s just, it’s fun to see the churches that we’ve had an opportunity to engage with are experiencing a lot of wins. A lot of wins in the season. And that those are the churches I love serving because they’re healthy.
Amy:
Yes.
Tony:
They’re thriving, they’re reaching people for Jesus, and they wanna continue to reach more people for Jesus. And it’s just fun to come alongside those churches.
Amy:
You know, as you’re sharing that, I’m just thinking, I think it was five churches we heard from this week, just out of the blue sharing these kind of amazing results. They’re all churches that have engaged, been engaged with us for years. And I think that’s important for our listeners even to hear that, because while our process is a three month process, I think we have to remind our pastors that doesn’t mean you’re gonna arrive in three months, it’s gonna take years and just a steady process of working your plans faithfully year after year. But these churches, that’s what they’ve been doing, and we’re seeing the fruit on the other side of it now.
Tony:
Yeah. I don’t know. This is gonna give away my age, Amy, but do you remember, decades ago there was a video out, I think it was called the Seven, the Seven Minute Abs or something like that. Am I remembering that correctly?
Amy:
Yes, yes.
Tony:
Just in just seven minutes you can have abs of steel.
Amy:
That’s right.
Tony:
If it only took just seven minutes. And I mean the reality is, we can’t totally help churches transform their ministry in 90 days either, but as you just suggested we’re trying to help churches set a foundation for future kingdom impact and several stories this past week just to celebrate that ongoing commitment to the mission and then the ministry strategies that these churches know are gonna help them reach more people for Christ.
Amy:
Absolutely. They step outta the whirlwind and they think about their plans, and then they do another run. Well, let’s get back to our conversation now on that multi-generational church focus on reaching young families. And I wanna kick it off with something that I know I’ve observed. I’m curious if you have too, sometimes when church’s numbers are down, I think there’s a tendency to think that it’s an issue with the kids’ team or the kids’ pastor, when the reality is the kid’s pastor really doesn’t have a lot of control over parents bringing their kids. Now they have some influence, obviously, but it’s really the higher level leadership that has to drive some of that. Do you agree?
Tony:
Yeah, I do. So, today, I actually, this whole episode is about things that the children’s pastor has no control over, but directly impacts, the number of kids and young families that churches are reaching. As children’s pastors are listening to this episode, I hope they don’t hear, I’m totally off the hook because there are certainly some contributing factors to the health of churches, and specifically the kids’ ministry that children’s pastors are certainly they need to be responsible for. But the whole conversation today, kids’ pastors are gonna be, they can just kick up their heels, listen, say amen as often as they want, because you really have no control over the topic that we’re gonna hit today. And I, Amy, I just thought it would be fun for us to brainstorm that list that kids pastors can’t control, but are still essential to the success or failure of reaching young families and specifically families with kids.
And so, let me just begin with this. We actually, I think we talked about this a little bit in previous episode, but for this to work for you to reach young families and, especially families with kids, there has to be an ongoing commitment to multi-generational church. In other words, we’re not just reaching one generation, whether that’s millennials or boomers or builders. We are gonna commit to being a multi-generational church, hopefully, with a focus on reaching the next generation, because if we, if we just focus on the older generations, eventually we’re gonna miss reaching the youngest generations. And over time, the church is going to die. So we need to commit to being a multi-generational church, but hopefully with a focus on reaching the next generation. And what that means, we’ve talked about this in the past, is you can’t truly be a multi-generational church if you have services that are designed for older generations. If you have discipleship strategy designed for older generations, if you have events on your calendar that are really only designed for older generations, and you think you’re multi-generational because you hire a young adult’s pastor or a children’s pastor and just kind of create programs for young adults or programs for young married couples or programs for kids, that’s not going to work. You actually have to be a church that is thinking multi-generational across every aspect of your ministry, including services, including programming, including discipleship strategy. You need to have that multi-generational focus.
Amy:
I think what I’m hearing you say, though, is that yes, a multi-generational focus, but what I heard you say is you really need to design your weekend experience around the next generation, around those young adults, around those millennials. That’s gotta be your first filter. Because if you’re doing it through the filter of older adults, older generations, we’re probably not gonna reach ’em.
Tony:
Yeah, that’s right. So it includes, services, but it includes all the aspects of the church’s reach strategy and spiritual formation strategy. But since you open the door on weekend services, I do think you need to create services that primarily it’s millennials. If you’re wanting to reach young families with kids, it’s the millennial generation right now that’s in their thirties and early forties. And that’s the generation primarily that’s having children right now. And so if you’re designing your weekend services, you have to keep in mind that that’s really the primary generation we need to consider.
Amy:
Yeah.
Tony:
Amy, you know this to be true. We’ve seen this time and time again in the churches that we’ve worked with, when churches have weekend services, that older generations love. And the music is really designed with older adults in mind. The teaching is targeted more towards older adults. Older adults will go to those services, but younger generations will not. It’s inverse, though. It’s interesting when we’ve seen churches design services where the music, the video, the teaching specifically targets younger generations, then what we see is churches not only reach those younger generations, but the older generations also engage in those services. And so specifically around weekend services, I think this includes making sure that we have that millennial generation specifically represented at the front door of our church. They’re represented in the guest services team. That’s, we have millennials on the worship team on the platform, and then specifically, either the teaching needs to be complemented with millennials, or we need, and or we need to make sure that the teaching that happens on Sunday mornings is hitting topics that millennials are wrestling with. Some of those millennials actually have kids. And because of that, if we’re targeting our teaching to millennial adults, not only are we gonna reach those that are single and those that are newly married without kids, but we’re also going to reach the people that we’re talking about reaching, which are the millennial adults that have kids in elementary school, preschool, high school, middle school. Those are the families we’re gonna reach, but we have to design our weekend services with that, that young adult in mind.
Amy:
Yeah. I would even add for lead pastors that are maybe young at heart like us, to get around some millennials in their sermon planning, to, it’s not to assume this is what they want to hear, but to even get their feedback on messages to make it more and more relevant. My husband is a lead pastor, and our kids are beginning to shape some of his illustrations, some of his stories, just because they’re in the target market. I wanna add another one, Tony, that I think, I’m not sure kids pastors have total control over this, but leadership does. And that’s the investment in the facility, in your building and in your kids space, and how much you give to that generation, to those kids. And what it looks like, how it spills out into the lobby. When I go to churches, I can tell almost instantly when I walk in a building if they’re reaching young families just by they design in the feel of the gathering space. And I don’t even have to see the kids space yet, but I can just tell because kids stuff kind of spills into that lobby and it says, kind of yells, we love kids. So I don’t know anything you’d add to that one on the facility side?
Tony:
Yeah. Only that it seems that there’s an inverse relationship between the amount of beige in a church’s building and the number of kids that they’re reaching.
Amy:
Oh, that’s hilarious. So hilarious. You know, and the other challenge I see for some churches when it comes to reaching this next generation is that they have a preschool, and they share kids space with those preschools. I don’t have a resolution for these churches, but the more your rooms look like classrooms, the less appealing it will be to kids. And if it’s not appealing to kids, parents are following those cues. So you gotta you gotta keep working on that one too.
Tony:
Yeah. And Amy, the reality is I’ve actually tried to talk a lot of churches out of preschools and elementary schools on church property, because what ends up happening many times is you end up with a school that has a church rather than a church that has a school. And I think what you’ve just referred to as far as priority of facility space, always seems to drift towards serving the school families, in the school itself rather than the impact that the church is trying to have in its mission.
Amy:
Yeah, I see that a hundred percent of the time. And I think ’cause they have legal things they have to do in the schools that the church kind of gets handcuffed to.
Tony:
That’s true.
Amy:
So that’s why it’s a, it’s not an easy solvable, but I do the same. I try to ask every church that has a school, what’s the purpose and to wrestle that down, because I think a lot of folks think we’re gonna reach those families and they’re gonna come to church, but the data just doesn’t support that. They’re just probably a really good preschool.
Tony:
That’s right. So, let me circle back to services, weekend services for a second, for another one here. And that’s thinking about when we’re doing student ministry, because what I’ve seen is when student ministry happens on Sunday morning rather than sometime during the week it impacts our ability to reach young families with younger kids. And let me explain why, high school students, when they’re meeting on Sunday morning, what you’re doing is pulling them out of any opportunity to be serving in your kids’ ministry on Sunday morning.
Amy:
That’s right.
Tony:
And honestly, that is one of the strongest pools of potential volunteers that you have in your church to serve in your kids’ ministry. And any kid’s pastor that’s listening, will say, getting volunteers to serve in kids’ ministry is a nonstop process. I mean, you just can’t. You always have to be thinking about how do we get more volunteers in the children’s ministry environments?
And if you have high school students meeting on Sunday morning, you’re basically encouraging them to choose going to student ministry over serving in kids’ ministry. And again, I will just say, what I am seeing not only my kids, but also hearing from other parents, is it’s been the serving opportunities in church that have made the biggest impact on their students’ lives. And so, let’s not deny that opportunity. Secondly, with middle school, I get it. And actually I encourage churches to have middle school environments on Sunday morning, because there just needs to be an age appropriate place for them to engage in worship and teaching at their level. So I get it. However, what you need to be cautious about with middle school students is that however, whatever number of services you have, you have to offer middle school opportunities, middle school services at every one of those weekend services.
Otherwise, if, and I’ve seen this happen many times, if you just offer middle school ministry at one service, you’re basically forcing every young family to go to that one service. And there’s only one option. Because it’s pretty rare for a family these days to only have middle school students. Typically, it’s a middle school student, an elementary school student, and maybe a younger. And so, if you only offer middle school ministry at one service, you’re limiting the options for those young families to engage in your church on Sunday morning or whenever you hold your weekend services. So just be thinking strategically about when we’re doing student ministry, because indirectly that will certainly impact the health of your children’s ministry as well.
Sean:
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Amy:
So here’s another thing that I think churches need to think through, and that is the requirement to have great kids services on the weekend, right? Of course. That’s the minimum. But then they add a midweek for children as well. And I just think that is, again, you have to think about the purpose of it. Who are we actually reaching? But we’re really our staffing, our kids team for 52 events a year, you know, the weekend service. And so when we stretch them into having to do that again on a Wednesday, which again, what I see, and I, maybe I’m wrong, but I often see a lot of church kids looking for a Wednesday night program. So it’s a totally different set of kids.
But going back to this ongoing, it’s never ending to be recruiting and getting people engaged in kids ministries. You’re also doubling the volunteer pool that you need to run those two ministries. Most of the best volunteers would prefer to serve on a Wednesday night. They typically have a passion for whatever that is, AWANA or whatever. They want to go deeper with kids. And so then our Sunday experience, our front-door experience where young families are checking this out for the first time, we have closed rooms. We don’t have enough volunteers. I actually was just talking to my daughter. She has a 2-year-old and a five-month-old, and I said, now that you’re connected with the church, what do you look at as a young family entering the church when it comes to your kids? The first thing that poured out of her, she said, leadership. When I walk into that area, is someone in charge? Are there leaders there that know what they’re doing and have a plan and will keep my kids safe? You just have to build a rich volunteer team on the weekend because kids are a precious commodity to these young families. They’re worried about dropping them off. I just think two programs weekly waters down the overall effectiveness of kids’ ministry.
Tony:
So Amy, it was AWANA specifically at this church. It’s been a few years ago, but they had a huge AWANA program that was happening midweek, and there were so many church kids involved in it, that was the priority for their parents and all of the adults that were serving and volunteering. As a result of that, they were unable to staff the kids’ environments on Sunday morning, which is when the church was trying to reach new families. They were prioritizing what was happening for church kids midweek. They were struggling to have volunteers available to serve on Sunday morning to reach the people that the church said that they were trying to reach. Just making sure that we’re thinking strategically about how we’re leveraging our time as a ministry, is it possible that good things that we’re doing in this case, the AWANA program was fantastic, there’s no doubt. It was helpful.
Amy:
No ministry is bad, but they’re not all equally fruitful.
Tony:
Especially when it comes to whatever that primary mission is of the church. Along those lines, we just see churches not thinking specifically about all the commitments that they’re asking adults to make. Because of that, they have adults engaged multiple times a week in Sunday school class on Sunday morning, in groups during the week in men’s ministry, women’s ministry, couples ministry, and then coupled with some just big events that they’re doing for adults in different areas throughout the year. Every time we ask an adult to either attend or serve in one of those adult environments, it’s pulling them away then from saying yes to serving in our kids’ ministry environments. This is really more about the spiritual formation strategy of churches. We want to help Jesus followers take their next steps towards Christ, no doubt about it. That needs to be a priority. But we can’t neglect reaching new families specifically and our spiritual formation strategy, whatever that looks like. If we’re constantly keeping people busy in different ministry programs and events, it’s going to impact in the long run the number of adults that can be serving in our kids’ ministry areas, specifically Sunday school. It’s not uncommon for churches to have, let’s say a nine o’clock service and 11 o’clock service, and if they have Sunday school, very typically adults are gonna choose to go to Sunday school, and they’re gonna choose to go to a service on Sunday morning and what’s gonna get neglected. . .
Amy:
And then they’re done.
Tony:
Is the volunteer opportunity. There’s just no time for it. And so thinking about our spiritual formation strategy and how that informs our reach strategy as well.
Amy:
Hey, before we wrap this up and talk about some next steps, the last thing I wanted to touch on, and I think it was in our second quarter report a year ago when we did some intensives on staffing allocations to kind of see how churches allocate their staff. If I’m remembering right, churches, I mean, almost all churches, unless they were really small, are dedicating about 22% of their staffing allocations. So of their full-time equivalents, 22% are dedicated to this next generation ministry. Do you remember that? Can you say a little bit more about that?
Tony:
Yeah. I don’t remember the specific numbers, but you’re spot on, Amy. The larger the church, the more likely they were committed. They were committing a larger percentage of their staffing budget to Next Gen ministries. It’s one of the reasons too, why we just see churches that are healthy, thriving, growing, and part of that health is reaching young families with young kids. They’re prioritizing staffing in the kids’ ministry area over student ministry. I think, again, it’s because there needs this intentionality about what needs to be happening in our kids’ ministry environments. We can get a just a great student pastor to be kind of a pied piper. You get the right students in the mix, you can reach a lot of students. I don’t want to say that’s easy, especially in this generation. I get the challenges of student ministry. So I don’t want you to hear Tony said, never hire student pastors. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying, the priority we see in healthy, thriving, growing churches is with children’s staffing. Children’s ministry staffing. And it comes out in the data too. The larger the church, the churches that are seeing growth are churches that are prioritizing next gen staffing, but specifically in the kids’ ministry area.
Amy:
And I would just add, as churches are looking for leaders in the next gen ministries, just a quick reminder that you’re really looking for team builders. That’s who you’re trying to hire, especially in birth through fifth grade. We’re looking for leaders who can engage the body in the ministry of the church. We’re not just looking for someone who’s passionate about kids, if that makes sense.
Tony:
And it’s not somebody that’s necessarily passionate about curriculum for kids, which is another mistake that we’ve seen churches make with staffing. When you have limited staffing dollars, don’t pay people to create curriculum. There are a lot of great curriculum options out there. Pay people to do what Amy just talked about, to engage in relationships to build teams and to get ministry done in kids and student ministry through other people.
Amy:
Exactly. Alright, well, if we have the right framework now to enable kids ministry to thrive, based on what we’ve been talking about, now we can talk about some more practical aspects, I think, of what a thriving kids ministry looks like. So as we wrap this up, Tony, what would you recommend as a next step for church leaders who are listening and they’re thinking, man, we’ve got some work to do in our kids space.
Tony:
Yeah. So first, don’t blame the children’s pastor. That’s the message for today. However, you should pull the children’s pastor into this conversation. I think it would be good for your entire leadership team. Think all aspects of your ministry, the worship and creative arts area of your ministry, your adult ministries, missions, I mean, every aspect of your ministry. Pull in those leaders and set aside a day for strategic planning on how you are going to be a multi-generational church that has this focus on reaching millennial adults. And I want to just narrow it in. How are we going to reach those 30 and young 40 somethings? Because if you can figure out strategically how to do that effectively, you will become a multi-generational church, not reaching Gen Z. That’s right. Millennials, gen Xers, the boomers, you, that will happen. So set aside a day for strategic planning, and ask this question, what are the strategic priorities for creating the right framework to become a church that reaches young families? I’m gonna circle back to what Amy and I talked about at the very beginning of this conversation. Know this, you need to create a plan. You need to work that plan. But there’s no overnight fix to this. This is something you’re gonna have to commit to today. And then in the years to come, you’ll begin to see the fruit.
Amy:
You will. And it’s a Seth Godin thing. He talks about how you need to create raving fans. You need to start to reach some millennials that are gonna become raving fans that will start to invite their friends. And that flywheel will just take a little bit of time to start clicking, but I was just at a church, just got home last night. They have grown 39% year over year, and they are reaching 25 to 32 year olds in the most amazing way. And their flywheel is humming. But it didn’t get there overnight.
Tony:
That’s right.
Amy:
All right. Well, Tony, this is a fun topic. Any final thoughts you have before we wrap it up today?
Tony:
Well, there are certain topics that we have that you can tell I have a real passion around these topics. This is one of those I want the church to be reaching young families. And I think it’s because I love my kids so much, maybe. But I want churches to really commit to this and be passionate about this. And it’s not just because we think young people matter more than old people. They don’t, we believe God’s called our churches to be multi-generational churches, and that means that the church has to be continually reaching the next generation as its leaders and members of church age and mature over time.
Sean:
Well, thanks for tuning into this week’s podcast. Here at the Unstuck Group, our goal is to help pastors grow healthy churches by guiding them to align their vision, strategy, their team and action. In everything that we do, our priority is to help churches, help people meet and follow Jesus. If there’s any way we can serve you and your church, reach out to us today at theunstuckgroup.com. Next week, we’re back with another episode. So until then, have a great week.
