We’ve been asking leaders lately, “What do you wish someone had done for your parent when you were growing up?” 

The answers have been fascinating, but every answer seems to come back to this one idea . . .

If you care about a kid’s future one day, it means you have to care about their family right now. 

If you want to take your ministry to the next level, it means engaging parents.

It also means engaging parents everywhere, not just parents who show up at church on a Sunday morning. But also the parents on the soccer field, parents receiving a diagnosis, and parents looking for a counselor for their child.

Every parent, everywhere—even if they’re doing some of those things on a Sunday morning instead of coming to your ministry.

What’s at stake if we don’t engage parents?

It’s easy to underestimate the impact that engaging parents has on the lives of kids in our ministries. There are three big things at stake when we don’t get this right.

Parents’ trust in the church is at stake.

Many parents need guidance on talking with their kids about faith. When we don’t engage parents, chances are they will start to feel unsupported by the church. As a result, they will miss important opportunities to talk about faith with their kids weekly.

The church’s influence in the community is at stake. 

The church will grow in judgmentalism toward parents who aren’t attending our programming and the church will limit kid’s and teenager’s everyday faith because we don’t have access to kids and teenagers every day. We don’t spend every day with them. If we want to connect their faith to everyday moments, it just makes sense that we need to engage parents and caregivers.

The effectiveness of our kids’ ministry is at stake. 

The effectiveness of your ministry will be determined by your ability to engage parents. That’s a lot that’s at stake. It’s especially a lot for something that’s so challenging. There may actually be nothing more challenging than engaging parents. But in order to truly invest in the lives of our kids and teenagers, we must engage parents.

What’s preventing us from engaging parents?

If there’s one thing that prevents us from engaging the parents in our kids’ ministries, it’s trust. Some parents struggle to trust the church. Maybe they assume leaders are judging them or don’t understand their situations. They may doubt their place in the ministry or fear that their unique family dynamic will not be accepted. With these fears, parents may even start to think that they don’t need the church.

So, to engage every parent, we must consider ways to rebuild trust with parents in our communities. It’s important to be honest as a team about the ways you may have broken trust and brainstorm ways to rebuild it. When you come together as a team to address these areas, you will become a more effective kids ministry.

The Four C’s of Engaging Parents In Your Ministry: Using the Parent Cue App To Rebuild Trust with Parents

Here are four ideas to improve your ministry’s ability to engage every parent, and how Parent Cue App Customization can provide you the tools to rebuild trust every week.

Connect with every parent.

Imagine every parent in your community saying,“I feel alone. Can you connect me to someone?”

In our studies we’ve found that the one thing that can help parents truly be better parents is knowing someone who supports their parenting, understands their family, and understands the phase that their family is in. What if your ministry strategically positioned itself to connect parents with someone who can support their parenting efforts? Connection could change everything.

We’ve developed Parent Cue App Customization so that at the click of a button, every parent has access to important ministry information like the name of your ministry, the name of your church, your director’s name, your website, your social links, and your giving button. Anything that you want a parent to know so they can better connect with your church is right there on their phone.

Communicate with every parent. 

Communication is a part of every single thing that you do. But just imagine for a minute, every parent’s saying, “I feel really busy. Can you make it easier for me to just know what’s going on?”

Parents receive communication from so many places – school, sports, the pediatrician, and the list goes on. What if there was a way you could consolidate communication to one location so that parents always know what’s happening?

The Parent Cue App Customization helps make it easy to simplify and consolidate your communication all in one place. Every ministry’s communication can be housed in the same location right on a parent’s phone, so that it’s accessible at the tip of their finger. They have access to notifications, to registration links, to any announcements that you want to make, and they never have to wonder where that information can be found.

Cue every parent.

I want you to just imagine for a minute, parents in your community saying, “I feel overwhelmed. Can you cue me, so I just know what to do this week?”

Most parents aren’t looking for a training seminar. They don’t want another huge resource book with all the ideas of what it takes to be an excellent parent. That’s daunting. What parents oftentimes need are small cues that will move them to connect relationally with their kid or with their teenager this week so that they can create a relational rhythm in their homes.

We named it the Parent Cue App for a reason. It comes already loaded with cues every week for kids from birth through 18, just to help parents create that relational rhythm so that they can speak encouraging words to their kid every morning, so that they can rediscover their kid as they travel along the road together, to elevate their conversations at mealtime, and to connect with the heart. With app customization, you get full control to customize every cue each week.

Coach every parent. 

Every parent feels like they need help sometimes, especially when it comes to their child’s spiritual formation. When parents feel ill-equipped for questions their kids ask about faith, you can build trust by coaching them. After all, this is where your specialization meets a parent’s greatest need!

With app customization, you can coach parents to have better faith conversations every week. The app comes already loaded with Orange content from birth through age 18, so that means there’s access to memory verses, to Bible story videos, to daily devotionals that parents can leverage in order to have faith conversations at home. You can simply push that content directly to parents so that they can access it at any time, or you can customize the graphics, customize the videos, customize the content to best reflect the message that you’re sharing every week in your ministry environments.

You don’t have to have a family ministry app to engage every parent everywhere. We just think it makes some things a little easier. That’s why we build the platform, so that you could focus on the relationship. The best way to learn more about the app is to try it free at ParentCueApp.Church.

Whatever you do, please don’t stop in your effort to engage every parent everywhere. Don’t stop in your effort to rebuild trust with parents in your community. Don’t stop because your influence in the lives of families will make an impact in the faith and the future of a generation.