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Sunday, 9:30
Kids Community. Play, friends, snacks, safety. Parents are in a group or a class, and the kids are making the friendships that keep them coming back at fourteen.
Free playbook · Nothing gated
The Multiply Week: Kids.
The whole method for a kids ministry week... what a church actually publishes, who each piece serves, and the honest hours it takes if you build it by hand. No form at the bottom. Run it yourself.
Pastor, the kids hallway is where most church strategies quietly stop.
I confess I helped make that true. For years I built the grown-up week... the sermon page, the clips, the devotional, the whole polished thing... and then handed the kids team a folder of curriculum PDFs and wished them well. Different story, different vocabulary, different week entirely. A family drove home on Sunday with two unrelated Sundays sitting in the same car, and I called that a good weekend.
So here is the method, free, all of it. This is a real kids week, the one that runs at Christchurch Miami, and I am including the hours so you can decide honestly whether you want to carry it. Some of you will read this, run it yourselves, and never need me for kids ministry again. Good. That is the whole point of writing it down.
One rule makes this Multiply instead of curriculum.
The kids week is drawn from the same message the adults are hearing. Same Sunday, same story, one family on one page. And because the words are already written, a volunteer leader walks into the room without a leader stressing over prep, and a parent gets handed language they can actually use at dinner.
What gets published
Four things go out. Every week.
Not a content calendar. Four artifacts, in order, each one handing off to the next.
→01 · Lesson
The page
One story pulled from the adult message, with a title and a hook a nine-year-old repeats on the way to the car. A real one: Sarah, God brings us laughter. It opens, "She laughed at the promise. Then she laughed because it came true. Same woman, two completely different laughs."
→02 · Verse
The memory verse
One verse. One translation. Short enough that a five-year-old lands it by Wednesday. For Sarah's week it is Genesis 21:6, "God has made laughter for me." It shows up on the page, in the room, and in the parent's hand.
→03 · Table
The family handoff, both directions
The verse plus three or four questions a parent can ask at the dinner table or in the car. Written in parent words, not curriculum words. This is the piece that decides whether Sunday survives the drive home.
Then it turns around. The handoff ends by naming what's coming: next Sunday's story in one line, and one question for the drive back in. A six-year-old who knows the church is about to tell them about the boy with the lunch is a six-year-old who wants to go. Parents aren't the only ones who need a reason to come back... and almost nobody tells the kid.
04 · Screen
The episode
A short kids video carrying the same story, plus the storylines and missions that run alongside it. It is what a kid watches on a Tuesday and what a grandparent in another city can watch too.
Every week gets its own page. Open this week at the top, past weeks underneath. That archive matters more than it looks. A family that misses two Sundays in a row can catch up without asking anybody for a favor, and a parent deciding whether your church is safe for their kid can read six weeks of what you actually teach before they ever walk in.
The rhythms it feeds
Three gatherings. One story.
The week publishes into rooms that already exist. You are not adding a program... you are giving the ones you have the same script.
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Sunday, 11:00
Kids Worship. Age-group Bible teaching, real discussion, activities. This is where the week's story gets taught, in the same hour their parents hear it upstairs.
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Wednesday, 7:00
Mission Possible Kids. Learning to live as missionaries where they already are, with seasonal family nights so parents are in the room instead of the parking lot.
Underneath all three: nursery through fifth grade, three rooms, three teams, everyone background-checked. That last part is not a feature. It is the price of being allowed to do any of this at all.
Who it serves
One week. Three people.
Gets a story, not a worksheet
One story a week, told well, with a verse they can carry. The same story their parents are talking about, which is the first time for a lot of kids that church stops feeling like the place where the adults do their thing and the kids do theirs.
Gets the words
Most kids volunteers are not teachers. They are a mom who said yes, a college student, a retired guy who is good with a room. Hand them a written lesson and a plan for their age group and they teach beautifully, without a leader stressing at eleven o'clock on Saturday night.
Gets a way in
Ask a kid what they learned and you get "I don't know." Ask them why Sarah laughed twice and you get a conversation. Parents do not need a curriculum. They need four questions and permission to be the one asking.
"A kids ministry that a parent cannot participate in is a babysitting service with a Bible verse on the wall. I have run one of those. It was clean, it was safe, and it discipled nobody."
Jeff Reed
The honest hours
What it costs to run by hand.
I am not going to pretend this is light. If you build the week yourself, here is roughly where the time goes.
Building the week
5 to 7 hours
Pulling the story out of Sunday's message and deciding what a child can hold, about an hour. Writing the lesson page and the hook, two to three. Age-group notes for three rooms, one. The video, one to two if you keep it simple and do not chase production value nobody asked for.
The family handoff
50 minutes
The verse, the four questions, and the line naming next Sunday. It is the shortest task on the list and by far the hardest, because writing four questions a real parent would say out loud takes longer than writing forty minutes of teaching. This is also the piece that gets dropped first, every single time.
Call it six to eight hours a week, held by one person, every week, in a season that includes Christmas, VBS, and a stomach bug going through the nursery. That is the real number. Anybody quoting you two hours has never written the questions.
Before you try it
What breaks first.
Churches do not abandon this. They erode out of it, in a predictable order, and knowing the order is most of the fight.
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The handoff goes silent
Week one it is there. Week five the questions are generic. Week nine there are no questions, just the verse. Nobody notices because the room still ran fine... and the room was never the point.
02
The alignment drifts
Somebody is short on time, so they grab a lesson from the old curriculum shelf. It is a good lesson. It is also a different story than the adults heard, and now the family is back to two Sundays in one car.
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The archive stops updating
Past weeks quietly end in March. Every parent who checks learns something about how the church keeps promises, and none of it is what you wanted them to learn.
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The leader page thins out
The written plan becomes bullet points, then a text message on Saturday. Volunteers start improvising. The good ones cover for you and the nervous ones stop signing up.
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The one person burns out
All of it lives with one volunteer who never asked to be a publisher. Then they move, or have a baby, or just get tired... and the whole week leaves with them.
Watch which one hits you. If it is number five, you do not have a curriculum problem, you have a capacity problem, and no new box of lessons is going to fix it.
This is the kids half of one week. The adult week and the youth week come out of the same Sunday, on the same rule, and they are written out just as plainly. If you would rather watch it happen to your own sermon than read about mine, the demo takes about a minute.
And Pastor, hear the honest version of my pitch. If your team can hold six to eight hours a week, every week, through Christmas and VBS and the stomach bug... build it. Steal every word on this page. I would rather your kids get the week than get nothing while you wait on a budget line. Multiply exists for the churches that want the week and cannot hold the hours, and for the ones where breaks number one and five already happened last spring.
So here is the question I would ask if I were sitting in your office. Pull up last Sunday. What did the nine-year-olds in your building hear... and could their parents have named it at dinner that night? If the answer makes you wince, that is not a failure, that is a starting line. Tell me what your week looks like and I will tell you which piece I would build first.
Bring us one sermon.
We will show you the kids week it becomes... the lesson, the verse, the questions a parent asks in the car. Thirty minutes with Jeff. No deck, no pitch.
Book a meeting with Jeff →