Smart Kidmins Learn to Recycle Their Best Stuff

Sometimes recycling doesn’t just help the environment, it can boost your ministry like nobody’s business.  Take this summer, for instance.  Every summer, we do a huge production for families called Who’s In the House.  We pull out all the stops, big dramas, complex dance numbers and laser-focused teaching designed to reach the whole family. 

Except for this year.  

This year we just didn’t have time.  We were in a race against the clock to pull off a complete make-over of all our Children’s Ministry environments, and we had to do the bulk of the work ourselves.  So, this year, we said no family production, but opted to host a simple drive-in movie night in its place.  It was definitely the smart thing to do but we knew we were missing the creative horsepower our families had grown to expect during a typical summer. 

So then we realized, “Hey, wait a minute.  It’s summer.  Why don’t we show some reruns?”  Because Who’s In the House is held in our church’s adult worship center, the whole thing gets captured with state-of-the-art camera equipment.  We have hours of footage from the past eight years just sitting on a hard drive gathering dust. 

That’s when www.whosinthehouse.com was born.  It’s really, really, really simple.   

Each week we post a classic clip from one of our past productions and put three discussion questions on the page below it. We’ve challenged families to go back each week for ten weeks, watch the next video and talk about it.  We called it “The Big Picture Show Summer Movie Challenge” and had giant tickets printed up that told families all about it.  We passed them out in our weekend environments and at our drive-in movie night. 

That’s it.   Not much too it, and very little work on our part.  What’s so awesome, though, is that our families love it.  They’re totally eating it up, because for many of them this is either totally fresh content or the opportunity to relive some of their favorite moments from past shows. 

Best of all it allowed us to do something creative during a hectic season when our team had little to no margin to create new stuff. 

So, here’s my question.  What’s sitting around in your vault that you could dust off and repurpose for the families in your ministry? 

It doesn’t have to be video content or anything flashy.  But we all have favorite lessons, crafts and games that we could tap to save us some work down the road.  Maybe you could take your favorite VBS from a few years ago and use it as summer curriculum.  Or how about taking your best weekend lesson and using it during a big family event?   Sometimes the most original thing we can do is repackage our best stuff in a new way. 

How about you?  What can you recycle this year to make creative use of your best stuff?