183: Church Spotlight: Building a Church-Wide Team - Involving All Ages in Children’s Ministry | with Heather Harkins

In this inspiring episode of the Small Church Ministry Podcast, host Laurie Graham talks with Heather Harkins about transforming children's ministry in a small church. 

Heather shares practical strategies for increasing congregational involvement, breaking down traditional ministry barriers, and creating meaningful intergenerational connections. 

Learn how her church reimagined children's ministry by 

• Involving senior adults
• Creating church-wide events
• Developing a flexible, inclusive approach that works for churches with limited resources

Whether you're a children's ministry volunteer or church leader, this episode offers creative solutions for building a vibrant, supportive ministry that engages the entire congregation.

Connect with Heather Harkins:
www.facebook.com/groups/smallchurchministry

Join our free Facebook Community: www.facebook.com/groups/smallchurchministry


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Transcript

Laurie Graham: 0:01

Hey, welcome to the small church ministry podcast, where we help volunteers and ministry leaders experience less stress, more joy and greater impact as we share strategies that actually do work in smaller churches. I'm your host. Laurie Graham, let's dive in. You. Hey, hey, welcome back to another episode of the small church ministry Podcast. Today. We are talking about children's ministry, but specifically how to increase congregational involvement, support, volunteers and so much more. And as often happens, one of the favorite places, most effective places to learn how and hear from, is actually somebody in a small church who's been successful at this and has gone from where some of us are to where maybe we want to be. And she is going to be sharing just a story of what's happened in her church over the last couple years, as she's been trying new things out of the box, which, of course, has my heart in all places. So this is Heather Harkins. She's coming in to join us from Alabama. So Heather, do you want to tell people just a little bit about you and your love for children's ministry and maybe a little bit

Heather Harkin: 1:21

about your church. So I guess I am not your typical age for a children's minister. I'm 54 just celebrated last month. Love of children started, I guess before I even had children, I was serving at church in children's choir when I was in high school, and then that just kind of morphed into where I am. Now, it's kind of crazy story, but our church, I originally got married at our church, and then God called me to other places. They relocated in that time frame. And have, we have relaunched probably a couple of times, you know, in that so we are trying in the midst of rebuilding. So we usually average,

Laurie Graham: 2:06

so you have, you know, small churches. Yes,

Heather Harkin: 2:10

I think when, when we first came back, was before the first relaunch. And there was, there was probably, we were probably pushing the 200 but, you know, COVID happened, all of that. So now we're rebuilding again, and we're up to around 125 Yeah,

Laurie Graham: 2:28

yeah, that's awesome. Okay, so first off, I have to go back and say you're not the typical age for children's ministry. I honestly think you might be these days. You know, especially in smaller churches, we have so many people who join us, and they're in their 60s and 70s, in retirement, and retired, and they're the ones leading the charge in children's ministry. So we know that at any age, it works. The one thing that you said you really wanted to talk about on the podcast was increasing involvement of the congregation. And you went from where many people are right now, the same old people doing the same old things, the families who are involved are usually over serving. And how do we mobilize people of all ages and all stages in our churches? So share, tell us what you did and how you've seen some changes. So part of

Heather Harkin: 3:13

that I found was, I guess, rebranding or renaming your events. We do a large event in February for our kids and our families, and we used to label it we're rich kids, so we used to label it that, but invite the whole church, but they would never come. So then we changed it to church wide, and I thought, Okay, well, how else can I get people to come? Well, if they have to do something, then they'll be they'll be involved, and they'll come and so we encourage these small groups. We usually do different games or different things with the kids, so we put the small groups in charge of handling those. And that has made a world of a difference. It's amazing what one little thing will do.

Laurie Graham: 4:01

Okay, I just have to say, this is so significant. And you're talking like it's, this is just kind of a normal, easy thing to do when you had a, you used to have a children's ministry event, and you said that as soon as you started calling it a church wide event, it's, really is for the kids, but everybody comes now. Like, what have you seen happen with like, relationships and even people's view of, you know, other ministries and things like, what have you seen with relationships with the kids and families and the rest of the congregation since you made that change of calling the event a church wise event?

Heather Harkin: 4:36

So our church has always been a very loving and inclusive Church, but the way our building is set up, and I'm sure it's the same way in a lot of other places, if you're a senior adult, unless you happen to be in the children's department, you're probably not going to see except for a glimpse of those people in service, and you don't have time to interact and worship. Service. So it's an opportunity for them to see and meet, sit and talk, get to know those families, and then they're looking out for them when they're passing each other in the hallways.

Laurie Graham: 5:15

Yeah, yeah. I love church wide events. At our church, we've been calling our potluck community day potlucks, and there's always things for all ages. But this is, this is, like, a, I think it's a prime thing small churches can do to build community and build support for all ages. Of Ministries is bringing everybody together. Like, honestly, larger churches can't do it the same. Small churches, like, we're like, masters at it. So I know you've shared that that has really upped a lot of the connection and even some of the volunteerism. So how is it that not everybody's doing the same things anymore? Like, how have you involved? You've mentioned the senior adults. What's been unique about that for you?

Heather Harkin: 5:54

Well, we, we have a lady that offers to our preschool class during the beginning of worship, when we start children's church, she does the lesson. She can't get in the floor, interact with the kids and take care of them, but she goes in and she does the she does the story with them and an activity and gives them goodie bags to take home to remember their lesson. So that's her contribution, and she hates it. If she misses her babies, we have another couple who's fixing to come in and start doing worship music with the preschoolers at some point. And then I found that I had several once we started doing these events, and we were sharing, hey, I need volunteers to help. And they were like, okay, but I can't get in the floor, I can't run around. I was like, we just had an influx of new babies, and so some of my senior adults get really excited to come in and rock babies, and then, if not, they come upstairs with me for children's church. So they don't have to get in the floor, they don't have to run around. They're just crowd control. And they they hate missing a week. So it's I have learned that you have to figure out what works for your particular church and where they're at. So you might can take some of these and then tweak it, and then it's just kind of like, for like, Miss Linda, who does our lesson that just kind of fell in my lap. So that's been a blessing.

Laurie Graham: 7:21

Yeah. Well, this is so key, especially with children's ministry, and honestly, probably with any age ministry, is we've gotten in our minds that there's a certain position that we need to fill, like we need to fill the teaching position. And by the way, the teachers have to be a jack of all trades, because they're dealing with lessons, behavior, management, crafts, games, music, you know, attendance rosters, everything where, really, when you break this down into some smaller pieces, it gives the kids an opportunity to get to know a whole lot of different people, and it gives more people in your congregation a chance to be with those kiddos. And sometimes it's unlikely people, has there anybody that surprised you with how they got involved, or how they just kind of fell in love with different kids or or serving in certain ways? If there is, I'd

Heather Harkin: 8:08

love, there's been, there's been a couple in the I think I mentioned to you, there's one other big ministry that we do. We do a student prayer partner ministry. So when school starts, we have packets of information on each one of our kids, from babies through college, and then the our congregation can come through and pick 123, however many they want to pick four to pray for over the school year. And we give them suggestions based on the ages, so we encourage them to interact with that family, to support that child. But I have a couple. I have one lady that is one of our big she's one of my personal prayer partners who I can always go to, but she has two siblings, and she made, she cross stitched and made them from one of her grandmother's quilts, Christmas stockings, and that happened to be a brand new family in our church, and she just won them like they are, just like attached to the hip, like when she sees them down the hall. And then on the other spectrum, we had an older man who got partnered up with one of our youth, and they found out that they both have a love for collecting knives. And so they started doing stuff together on their own, going hunting and sharing their their love of knives. And so it's just, you know, that might not have happened otherwise they wouldn't have necessarily been in contact enough to learn that information about each other.

Laurie Graham: 10:12

You know, you're talking about really impactful things that don't also don't cost a lot of money. Like, I think sometimes when people talk about, like building a children's ministry and building more ownership, and, you know, involving more people, they're they're thinking of doing very expensive things a prayer partner ministry. There's no money involved in that, other than maybe printing off the card. And having pictures of the kids, if you even do that. But like, there's so many things churches with limited budgets and limited staff, right? Or no staff at all. These are things that we can do, but I agree we've got to think outside the box, because typical children's ministry is Sunday school, midweek event, monthly events, fun stuff, you know, bringing in outreach events and those things can be so exhausting. And if you major on the majors and do a little less, sometimes we're building better relationships than we ever would have had before. I agree with

Heather Harkin: 11:04

on that, and I think we, we unconsciously, even if we don't think we're doing it, we try to compare to the big churches, and think we have to do all these events, but I've learned, at least with our congregation, that less is more. Their life is already busy. We don't need to add a bunch of events. For sake of doing events, we we do this one big event in February, we do VBS in the summer, and then we do stuff as a as a church wide, stuff at Christmas, but we try to keep it lean and mean, because, like you said, there's limited resources, money wise and people wise, so we just need to meet our families where they are, yeah,

Laurie Graham: 11:45

yeah. I think doing less is also super important to avoid burnout. Like we wonder why people are burning out, or we're like, oh, how do we how do we do all this ministry without causing others to be burned out? We're burnt out. Well, it's an easy fix. Well, it's simple. Might not be easy, but it's a simple fix. It's doing less and getting more impact from the things that we're doing. So Heather, I want to ask you personally, if you can remember back to when you didn't have as much involvement you were. You weren't calling the kids a community wide event or a church wide event. You weren't doing you know these other edges where people are coming in, taking little pieces of teaching. Do you remember how you felt being in charge of children's ministry, and how you feel now? Like has there been a change of your own thoughts and feelings toward being in charge of this ministry. Yes,

Heather Harkin: 12:37

I knew God called me to it, but they were there were a lot of times those words that you just said, like feeling overwhelmed. I can't I can't keep trying to fill spots every week with volunteers like this is overwhelming, having to jump in and just handle stuff yourself, and feeling kind of a I mean, it wasn't a bad disconnect, because, like I said, our church is very loving and inclusive and but the, you know, the people that were not seeing the kids on a regular basis, you know, you just don't think about what You don't see, so they just didn't realize what was going on in those rooms or what needed to happen. But I will say, because I'm going to give you a shameless plug, that doing my first kid men conference changed my thought process. And the biggest one was with

Laurie Graham: 13:31

our, you mean, our small church, kid, man, youth ministry

Heather Harkin: 13:35

conference, my first one was I was at that point where I was like, okay, these spots, like it was a struggle every week was two or three spots I'm trying to fill, and I'm like, I can't keep doing it this way. Why? Because it's not working. And one of your one of your sessions was about volunteers and about you made the comment, and I'm not gonna get it right, but you made the comment that God gives you exactly what you need, so whatever you have will work. And so I had to go back, like you said, and look at it. Okay. Well, this is what we have, and as we know, in small church, ministry, that means sometimes combining classes and yeah, that's not the perfect scenario, but I will say it does. It's it's a process. It's a slow process when you've got, like, even now, we have first through sixth grade together for children's church, and that seems daunting, but it works. Our younger ones are learning how to how they should behave. It's a process. Like I said, you have to constantly, that's why the helpers help. And then the older ones are learning to mentor. And so you just gotta keep your eyes open, yeah, and be willing to look at it differently than you,

Laurie Graham: 14:54

yeah? And there's beauty, yes, yeah, there's beauty in that. Like, when you can get people of different ages together in the same spot, there really is a lot of beauty. Sometimes you have to look for it because it might not be exactly how you wanted it to go. But I just, I love that our conference made such a difference in you. I didn't know you were really going to bring that up. So that's, that's really beautiful. And I love that you talked about, you know, God gives us what we need. I was just talking to somebody else. People are probably going to get sick of me saying this. But I've been watching Top Chef lately. You know, the top chef cooking? Competition show, I know, and one of the things I know I'm learning so much about ministry from Top Chef, I can't even tell you, like I'm using it illustrations everywhere. But one of the things is when they're just given ingredients, or had a competition to get the ingredients that they're allowed to use, and they're told make something beautiful with this. And if we could just look at our small churches like that, like these are the ingredients we have. It might not be what I would have chosen or what I would have thought about, but if we can get out of the box, out of the box, and do some creative thinking, there can be something really beautiful here. And when I look at that with small churches, it's not just beautiful. It's completely unique. Because what you have at your church is not what I have. It's not what so and so has. It's not what Dee has, it's not what Barbara has. It's not, you know, it's not at all what Herman has. It's not what this person has, but it's uniquely beautiful. But then there's that, there's that responsibility of, oh, shoot, I gotta, I got to create something, and when we can tap into having fun with that. So was that fun for you at the beginning, or was it a struggle? Because it seems fun? Oh, it's

Heather Harkin: 16:40

fun now, the struggle was real, because on top of that, when I came into that position, I just helped previously, and our previous Minister left, and God called me into that position. We had to do a lot of behavior modification. Are working on simple, short rules for them to they were not accustomed to having, you know, to do certain things during class and behave a certain way. So that was definitely a process. But me and one of my main teachers the other day were just talking about how far they've come. Like now we're to the point, and this was a process. We're now to the point that most of the time they like looking up and reading out of the Bible, whereas before we were mixing it up, we would do that, we would do a video, we would act out. We still do that, but they're learning in their small group time how to use their Bibles and find everything so they get really excited about now. Three years ago, they wouldn't have cared. So, yeah, you got to kind of be you got to be gracious. As my daughter would say, you got to be gracious with yourself in the process. And I was gonna mention, you know which it kind of goes to life, because I say this all the time about stuff, because I am a to do list, check it off, make it happen person, and so when things don't go how you can't just give me 1234, to make that event happen. That is scary on one end to have to be unique, because it would be so much easier if you could just follow a game plan, but there's growth and figuring that out, so you just got to keep trying things till you find what works for your situation.

Laurie Graham: 18:24

I am literally taking notes while you talk. I don't know if you see me writing furiously, but like this is a whole other thing about about us as leaders, being willing to think outside the box. I love that you brought up fear, because there is scariness in that. I love that you brought up the culture really, when you talked about the behavior of your kids, you're changing the culture in your group. And I love that you talked about that that wasn't fast, no, that it, it has taken a while, and I really think we've got to quit looking for the quick fixes, because they're in life's frustration when we think we can fix a culture, because kids do learn the culture of your church, and if they're used to getting yelled at and misbehave misbehaving, I don't even I have issues with Saying misbehaving too, because behaving differently is based on, sometimes their their their own makeup and how God created them to be, and oftentimes, their schools, their cultures at home, and all of this and so. But we do build a culture of behavior and inclusion and welcome or positive or negative, like some of our Sunday schools, we wonder why kids aren't coming, because that's a because it's a terribly negative place to be, like, I wouldn't want to come there, you know? And so I think when you're talking about cultural change, that's the way you talked about that was so beautiful. I really appreciate

Heather Harkin: 19:45

I mean, we've even noticed that, like I said, since we have senior adults that help up in children's church and we we've had some ladies that help during small group time. One of them mentioned to my teacher. She was like, you let them do that. And she was like, this is a process, because we do have, we do accommodate at times, because I do have family. I have a niece and two nephews that are in my ministry, but not just them, but we have a couple of kids that sometimes get sensory overload. I mean, I'm like that with sound, and so sometimes they just have to sit at a different table that we call it. They put themselves in self imposed time out. They just need to not interact with everybody, but they're listening. And then when it's time to answer questions, they are over game. So you kind of kind of have to learn your kids and figure out. About why the behavior is that way, which just takes time too.

Laurie Graham: 20:36

Yeah, and you're changing the culture for the volunteers too, because, as you said, you know, this older person said you let them do that and to be able to have that discussion. So yeah, we do, because there's, you know, they're just getting sensory overload, and they're, they're actually really happy at that table, whether they're coloring or whatever, they're still listening. We do allow that because, you know, we we have learned and grown a lot as a society, understanding, brain development, personalities, you know, so many things Sunday School shouldn't look like what it used to look like,

Heather Harkin: 21:06

sitting in a chair. Still, just

Laurie Graham: 21:08

a lot of, a lot of people weren't, yeah, yeah. Weren't learning, weren't being loved, really, weren't staying connected to church, at least not in the way that that we would love people to stay connected now so well, okay, we have. We've covered a lot already, and I just want to highlight, like, some of your main things you wanted to mention. One was thinking outside the box. One was involving more people in your congregation. You talked about personal growth in your own leadership style, being willing to do things that are a bit scary. You talked about the prayer partners staying connected with kids from preschool all the way through even college. Is there anything else you wanted to highlight before we we say goodbye. I didn't

Heather Harkin: 21:57

think just, just keep at it and you, if you're not already using the Facebook community like that has been that's been great. You know, when you're struggling with something, or you have an idea, but you don't know if tried you get on there, because I've even connected with somebody from the Facebook group, and we've had a call on her own, and she's helped me with something. So, you know, just keep connecting with other people in your in your profession, and get help.

Laurie Graham: 22:28

Yeah, and you've talked several times now about our communities, our Facebook community that I know you're talking about right now, creative solutions for small churches, coming to the small church, Kidman and youth conference, and I think there is a lot of power in connecting with people in smaller congregations, because we don't always have that. There's a lot of encouragement, there's a lot of idea sharing, and there's a lot of forward movement when we realize we're not alone, and something does work, but it's not always what we keep trying over and over again that we've always done right? I would agree. So yeah, I love it. Heather, thank you so much for being on the podcast like what a delight it is to talk to somebody, yeah, yeah, in a smaller church, who's seeing things that work and enjoying ministry in a different way. Now, would you say it's it feels different, and it's lighter and it is? Yeah, I love it. Hey, y'all, let's just keep doing this. Let's build our small churches to be what God created them to be, which is very intergenerational, very relational. And yeah, sometimes there's hard things, but we can do them the easy yoke way with Jesus, the easier way to do some hard things, being creative, stepping outside the box, looking to other small churches that are finding success and joy in ministry in so many ways. And Heather, you're one of them. Thank you. How does it feel to know like right now, you know, I mean, somebody could be listening to this, you know, the week it goes live or two years down the road. And how does it feel to know that you're one of the ones that's being a light to encourage other people in small churches? How does that feel to you?

Heather Harkin: 24:19

Humbling, overwhelming, but also exciting, because then I won't, because then somebody else might go, Okay, well, I can do that too. Like we're really just sharing, we're really just having conversation. It's just getting out to a broader audience. So, yeah, exactly,

Laurie Graham: 24:37

exactly. And someday you'll get an email or a message from somebody and say, oh my gosh, I heard you on the podcast, and this helped me so much. And you'll be like, Wow. Like, I think there's just so much power in knowing, so much encouragement. Yeah, power to like. It just feels like, wow, like I am making a difference, and it makes us want to do it more. I think, yes, most definitely. So that's awesome. Well, Heather, yeah, thank you for being on the podcast. Thank you for shining your light, sharing what's been successful in your church, and even being a little vulnerable, vulnerable about when it wasn't so great, and, you know, having to step outside, and, you know, do some different things. So I love it. Thank you for sharing with us. And if anybody wants to connect with Heather Facebook community, right? Heather, they can probably tag you in the Facebook community. Yeah. Yep, awesome, and hear more stories, and we'll keep sharing together, y'all. So I'm just gonna say be like Heather and be a light talk to you next week. You