Our children are our most priceless possessions. I don’t know anyone who would dispute that fact. Our job as church leaders is to provide a safe, welcoming place for these children to come experience the goodness of God.
No matter your church size, planning childcare and children’s programming is a large part of the gig. So how do you ensure the children left in your care are being cared for, protected and poured into week after week? The answer to that is relatively simple…paid childcare.
Volunteer-led Children’s Ministry
Currently, the majority of churches, regardless of size, rely heavily on volunteers to staff their children’s ministry areas. Volunteering is no small ask. Our families are busier now than they have ever been.
Ohio State college conducted a study examining burnout rates in parents in 2022 and found that more than 57% of parents are actively experiencing burnout. Commitments to work, children, social lives, PTA boards and so much more have left our families desperate for respite and hungry for help. Then those same families come to church and are asked to give more of themselves for the sake of the Kingdom. It is hard. It takes vision casting and solid relationships. It takes time.
While you are building that volunteer bench, so to speak, what do you do? Another Sunday is always around the corner. Children’s Ministry is not an area you can backfill or ask just anyone to jump into. It’s essential for anyone present in your Children’s Ministry or Church Nursery to be carefully and thoroughly screened.
Volunteer Benefits
The most obvious pro to volunteer-led Children’s Ministry areas is cost effective buy in from your congregants. While volunteers are not free (think cost for care and training), they do seem to be the more cost-effective option when compared to paid childcare. Additionally, as ministry leaders, we want buy-in from our congregation. Church leaders don’t want a congregation who views the church as a “one-stop shop” to get what they need and get out. The hope is that congregants see the overall vision of the church and are so on fire for what the Lord is doing, they can’t help but join in.
Volunteer Challenges
If you are currently in a position where your Sunday morning or weekday evening is solely staffed by volunteers, you have likely experienced a few common challenges :
- Finding the right volunteers: As mentioned, recruiting volunteers is a long game. As ministry leaders, we want volunteers who are excited to serve alongside us and our mission for the ministry—as opposed to being guilted into service. To create that excitement, you must have time to create strategy, cast vision, and create opportunities to serve.
- Screening your volunteers: Children’s Ministry is the one team you can’t backfill. Background checks must be run in advance and additional safeguards must be put in place to protect our children.
- Planning for backup volunteers:, Despite your best efforts to schedule, community, and plan, callouts and cancellations are a weekly occurrence.Your Plan B (and C, D, E, F) is always on the forefront of your mind when managing volunteers.
Once you’ve found the right volunteers, screened them, and scheduled them, your time and effort shifts to caring for them: making them feel seen, valued and appreciated. Caring for your Children’s Ministry volunteers is essential to ensure they don’t experience burn out in your ministry.
Caring for your Children's Ministry Volunteers
Volunteer care may involve weekly encouragement, meeting up for coffee and/or lunch, holding events to thank them and so much more. Managing and caring for church volunteers is at least a part time job, if not a full time role depending on the size of your church.
On average, congregants consider themselves active church members if they attend church once a month. For instance, let’s say our congregants attend twice a month. With ten rooms needing to be filled every week, two people per room to uphold ministry safe expectations as well as to abide by ratios, you are looking at 20 volunteers for any given Sunday. If congregants attend twice a month, we can assume they are not serving both times they are attending. So a congregant will serve once per month. This means, you could, in theory, be recruiting 80 different volunteers a month.
I have yet to find a ministry leader with the bandwidth to recruit, train and effectively care for that many different volunteers each month. And as your Children’s Ministry grows, so will the dedicated time required to recruit, train, onboard, and care for your increasing number of volunteers. Where does that leave us? It leaves us with a major deficit and concern for consistent, reliable and quality controlled childcare.
Paid Child Care Benefits
What if you had a way to alleviate some of the responsibility on your volunteers?
If there’s one thing I’ve observed in my years of Children’s Ministry, it’s that parents of children 0-5 years old are in survival mode. Regardless of how many additional children are at home, these parents are all working to survive learning their new little one during a time when the physical exhaustion is real.
What would it look like in your church to give families the gift of not needing to serve until preschool, kindergarten, or elementary? Supplementing volunteers with paid childcare could be just what your young families need to catch their breath in this season of life.
At Peachtree Church, this has absolutely been the case. We provide a space for our exhausted young families to come on Sunday morning, and entrust their child(ren) to background-checked, experienced, quality childcare providers who delight in holding babies and playing with toddlers, while mom and dad are free to attend to service and receive spiritual nourishment.
These families are released from additional pressure on Sunday mornings as they get their footing. They don’t have to be concerned about their ability to manage six crying babies at once when it is their turn to volunteer. All they have to worry about on Sunday mornings is being present. What a gift that is.
Three priorities for Children’s Ministry
As Children’s Ministry leaders, we need three things for our ministry to run smoothly: reliability, consistency, and quality control. There is nothing worse than waking up Sunday morning to several texts from volunteers calling out. Nothing worse…except for begging people via text on Thursday afternoon to fill a need over the weekend, only to be shot down again and again.
Reliability
Every Children’s Ministry needs reliable volunteers and/or paid staff to function. Peachtree Church has found paid child care providers to significantly reduce the stress of frequent cancellations. I cannot begin to tell you the blessing it is to know that our nursery ministry is covered every week thanks to paid childcare. All I have to do is post the number of positions I need on SitterTree at the beginning of the month, and then choose from a list of qualified, experienced, background-checked candidates.
Consistency
Once you have a bench of reliable volunteers and/or paid childcare willing and available to serve in your church nursery, you can start to tackle consistency. We know that consistency is the foundation for felt safety for both children and adults.
When we have a new family enter our ministry, the best advice I can give to them related to drop-off is to be consistent with church. We feel safe when we show up week after week knowing what to expect, and not being surprised by major changes. Children operate the same way. Consistency equals safety equals comfortability.
As much as children crave consistency—so do I, as a Children’s Ministry leader. Our Children’s Ministry runs far more smoothly when volunteers and/or paid childcare providers know the names of families and kiddos, understand the schedule, and know the drop-off/pick-up protocols for our church.
Quality Control
Quality control looks different for each ministry team. In preschool or elementary ministry, you will be looking for all your volunteers/teachers to be aligned with the curriculum being taught. In outward-facing ministry teams you will be looking for volunteers to be hospitable, knowledgeable and kind. In the music ministry, you will want volunteers who have musical abilities that match that of your team. So, what does it look like in church nursery ministry? You are looking for teachers who are consistent and reliable, and even more than that, experienced and comfortable caring for young children.
Children’s Ministry teams need volunteers and paid childcare providers who understand child development, who know how to calm a child down, who are experienced in separation anxiety and who love being around young kids. In short, you want volunteers/paid childcare providers who want to be there—and have the necessary experience to be there.You want individuals with knowledge of infants and experience working with your youngest and most vulnerable littles. As we have agreed, our children are our most prized possessions and caring for them well must be our top priority.
So, what does it take to secure the right childcare for your church?
In conclusion, what is the solution for finding reliable, consistent, quality individuals in your nursery or children’s ministry? The answer is likely a mix of volunteers and paid childcare. While volunteers may support your church nursery to an extent, paid childcare can ease the burden on children’s ministry leaders to have reliable, consistent and quality volunteers ready to go week after week. Additionally, it can ease the burden for your families who are desperate for rest.
With paid childcare, you have the opportunity to increase your ministry’s success by showing families the consistency, reliability and quality control they are looking for when it comes to their children.
If you’re ready to try paid childcare, SitterTree may be right for your church. SitterTree for churches offers children’s ministry staff an easy way to find, book, and pay experienced child care providers who are aligned with your church safeguarding policies, including background checks, ID verifications, and many child care providers who have completed sexual abuse prevention training through organizations like Ministry Safe. Let SitterTree partner with you to take your ministry to new heights. Sunday is coming, book today.
