Do you know how to know when the economy really, really stinks? When college students are so poor they can’t afford wiper blades. Today I was out at our local university doing some work. (They have faster internet!) As I got ready to get in my car, I noticed that the car next to me had a sock over both wiper arms. After a little bit of sleuthing, I determined that the wiper blade had finally given up the ghost and in place of a blade, they were now using the closest thing that was most absorbent: a sock. I was so humored by this that I completely forgot to take a picture to share, so I recreated the situation using my own car. It’s not nearly as funny, but it communicates my point.
That got me to thinking: that guy would be a great children’s pastor. He could probably rebuild the entire used sound system from “big church” using gum, duct tape, and some old socks. (Admit it, you’ve used creative tools before.) Children’s pastors seem to have a unique knack for making something out of absolutely nothing.
So in celebration of that spirit, we want to know what the most creative thing you’ve ever done to stretch your ministry budget was. Whether it was giving every kid half a Tootsie Roll Midgee for being quiet to building a new children’s ministry building using only popsicle sticks and glue sticks, we want to hear about it.
As a little incentive to get you to share, we’re going to have a giveaway! Just put in your name and email below (your email won’t be seen but anyone but us!), then tell us your budget-stretching story. On March 7, I’m going to pick the most outrageously creative story. You’ll win a children’s ministry music prize pack, containing at least 6 CDs, and more if we randomly decide to! Make sure your submission is in by 11:59 PM EST on March 6, or it doesn’t count. We all look forward to seeing your crazy ideas!
My first few years as CP, at Christmas people would donate candy for the Christmas sacks for kids. We received a lot of Hershey’s Kisses in holiday colors. I would separate the colors, give the silver ones for Christmas, the red ones for Valentines and the green ones for St. Pat’s day. That made our candy stretch to non-candy donation holidays.
I love asking for free stuff! It’s amazing how many stores will give you $20 worth of merchandise (or more) if you bring in a church letterhead explaining what you’re trying to accomplish and how the store can help. I try to use the word “partnership” instead of “donation” because it sounds more like the store is doing something “with” us, instead of “for” us. After the event is over, I like to send the store a photo of the event that they helped to make happen.
My wife and I needed a good curriculum, so we went through our last pastors’ wife’s old boxes from 10 years earlier. We found one that sounded good, but wanted to do something memorable to replace the daily skits. She and I did the voices of the characters, and I created actual 3-minute cartoons for each skit, having just learned to use Adobe AfterEffects at work the month before. If you’d like to see the result, go to http://www.youtube.com/robforgod.
At the end of the quarter, we recruited the pastor and his daughter, and the three of us acted out the scripts with a jeep i drew, cut and painted. Here it is: http://www.flickr.com/photos/robswork/3327022474/
When I was involved in a church plant, I delivered 10,000 telephone books in order to fund our Bible School in a local park. In the process I burned out the brakes on my van, so we didn’t make as much as I was hoping. 10,000 phone books weigh a bunch!
Just last week we needed two pairs of chaps for a skit. We priced them out and could get them for $15 a piece. Someone on my team suggested old bath mats. He got the idea from the movie Parenthood. We cut each bath mat right down the middle and duct taped one half on each leg. Well, not only did they work…they were a hit!
Our church planned a huge family “festival” in our church’s yard by going to local businesses, explaining what we were doing and how it would help the community. We went to one business that we knew was owned by Christians, asked them to sponsor a game/event, and this gave us leverage to go to other businesses in town and ask them to do the same (“Such-and-such business is sponsoring a game…”). This fueled competition between local businesses, and gave us the money to put up an inflatable moonwalk, a water balloon launcher, a dunk tank, and several other games (including some small ones for little kids). We put up signs by each event saying “Sponsored by________.” Our church put on a very successful community event for only $24.00 out of our budget. Even the food was donated by a local restaurant!!!
I use an overhead projector to make large props for children’s church. I do this by running off an overhead transparences of a picture and then use it on the projector to trace off on cardboard. Recently I did not have any more tranparcences, so when I went to buy some I found they were $30. Being a children’s church leader I was not going to spend the money. When cooking dinner one night I was using clear plastic wrap and…Wow what and idea. I now trace the picture off on the clear plastic wrap using a permenent marker, it works even better than the transparences because it never moves. Saves a lot of money.
So we have a “High Attendance Day” every quarter and, quite frankly, there is only so much stuff you can give away. So in order to save money and to get the kids to bring friends, we started offering things that I would do if the kids reached their “goal.” For instance, I once kissed a goat on stage in front of all the kids. Ironically, the goat was so enamored that it decided to “relieve itself” right there on stage. Another time, if the kids brought enough friends I would eat some things found on Fear Factor. We let the kids vote on what I would eat. Needless to say, I ended up eating a LIVE Madagascar Hissing Cockroach, LIVE worms and cooked cow intestine. The cockroach made me sick for 2 days but since then, I have a reputation and have eaten LIVE crickets, LIVE worms and cow intestine for more than one event. Oh, the things we do for our kids…(and to save a little money)
I had planned a “Family Pirate Party” for kids to invite their parents to. We were watching clips from the Veggie Pirate movie, playing games together, eating pirate grub and ending with a 5 minute parent-only “meeting” where I sent home family “wrap-up” sheets for them to take the learning home and into their week. Unfortunately, several weeks before the party, our staff was put on a spending freeze . . . . so we adjusted some of our activities to use recyclable items. The most notable was the pirate hat craft. Kids created pirate hats from newspapers, colored a pirate logo (we created, copied & cut-out) to stick to the front of their hat and added stickers, feathers, etc. What a riot . . . preschoolers through 4th graders had a blast . . . no cost to us!
Each year we have an Easter Egg hunt for our community. We stuff the eggs with Bunny Money and allow the kids to go to the store for prizes. There is NO way we would be able to give away as much “stuff” as we do on our budget. So each year I go through the Oriental Trading magazine and cut out pictures of the items I’d like for the store. I then paste the pictures on “Bunny Store Sponsor” cards and lay them out for the church folks to see. They pick the items they’d like to sponsor and turn in the cards with the money. It’s amazing the response I’ve gotten. My budget has been cut recently, but people are still willing to give for this event. And when I “do the shopping for them” it makes it a lot easier. I’ve even been able to use things from the left-overs for prizes throughout the year.
The most ridiculous thing I ever did was buy 8 boxes of grape nuts, 2 bags of tootsie rolls and 2 cat boxes. I poured 4 boxes of grape nuts along with 40 microwaved tootsie rolls in each cat box. (Note when you microwave tootsie rolls they get soft and easily attach themselves to grape nuts.)
Then the kids had to dunk for tootsie rolls with their teeth. The result was hilarious.
I needed some streamers that would attach to kids hands for a movement song. I took the plastic can holders off of the top of several 6-packs of diet coke and cut them into three…two holes for each one. I found old rolls of plastic table coverings (the unused pieces that were not long enough to use on tables anymore) and cut different colors of strips and tied them across the center “spine” of my two plastic holes. I put several strips on each one. Then you have the child wear it across the back of their hand…their pinky finger goes in one of the holes and their thumb in the other. It cost me absolutely nothing yet it was great colorful streamers!
Our church just built a three new rooms for the kids in our church and a new gym. In our budget we didn’t put enough money to design our new rooms. All we had was freshly painted walls and new carpet.A couple weeks ago we had our big Grand Opening, but nothing on the walls. Our pastor got creative and asked the GAP store in the mall for their posters of kids they were going to throw away. GAP not only gave us the posters, they gave us all kinds of neat pictures of kids and a container to hold them! We put them up all over our children’s ministry rooms and halls! The posters added so much more life into our rooms. We got thousands of dollars worth of professional pictures and posters for free!
Having absolutely NO budget for decorating a new children’s small group classroom but plenty of creativity, I approached a local wallpaper/paint store and requested their outdated wallpaper sample books. Using the “fun” prints in the books we created fun child-friendly silhouette art for the walls. The kids loved it and it made a dull room fun and colorful.
Having the same budget at the same church and wanting to supply plenty of creative opportunity for the kids during a VBS, I requested newsprint roll ends from our local newspaper office. (These are the “left overs” when a roll of news print gets too near the end during printing. There are many many feet on these roll ends). We had enough paper to roll out on the folding tables (table cloth style) and create a “competition” among the different groups for the best banner. We used the thousands of crayon pieces that had been accumulated and stored in the church storage room. Walaa!! No cost!
We had a $0 budget for the preschool ministry I was involved in, so we took home all the 100 year old crayons and melted them in muffin tins to make big, multicolored, easy to hold, fun crayons!
We just recently cleaned out our storage closet and pitched or donated all the odds & ends that have been left over from projects from the past 10 years(?). Allowing us to go from three large storage areas to two smaller closets. Anything that was in bulk, we decided to keep – popcicle sticks, beads, foam shapes. We decided, as a team, that any crafts we do this year will planned by heading to the closet and pulling out what we already have and, well, getting creative.
Bibles. I always run out of Bibles for my Children’s Church. of course my budget has been slashed… like 50%… so no money for Bibles. This year I threw myself a birthday party (yes, I know… I always do this, it gets all my friends together and the expense is mine)… On the invite card this year I put.. please bring no presents, but just $7 for a Bible for Kid’s church). My friends responded so sweetly and we raised enough money to buy 48 bibles! How cool is that?! I’m so happy!
We wanted to make the walls in our children’s area unique and eye catching but we had no money. So we asked the children to donate a matching set of clothes – pants (or skirt) and shirt. We then stapled them up to the wall in various different poses and in different groupings. The kids were excited to see their clothes hanging there and it gave a great 3D effect.
I make preschool puzzles,books, toys, and other supplies go further be rotating the stories so that no group does the same sotry on the same day. This works especailly well in VBS. Class 1 will do Mondays story on Monday but Class 2 will do Tuesday’s story on Monday. ect. This way I need only 1 puzzle for Jesus feeding the 5000 instead of 5. Preschoolers are not concerned about the chronoligical order. Also the teachers can pass the gathered supplies to the next one in line and this saves time. Often there will be “leftovers” so the teacher will have even less preparation. Save time and money! I have been doing this for 18 years. If I have a teacher that is uncomfortable then that one gets the “proper order” most of the time they are very happy with the idea.
I had to lower my budget for 2009 by $8,000! We’ve started so many new programs that do involve prize-giving. So I went to Goodwill & other thrift stores and bought prizes for 10, 25 & 50 cents each. They’re new toys! Needless to say, the boys aren’t happy with me since I forgot to take the goodwill price tags off…so I had to make a run to Walmart last week to raid their $1 “boy” toys.
this years fall fest. i ask all our parents to bring any old toys their kids dont want or dont play with.we set up games go fish,bag toss,ect. gave each kid alot of tickets.and they had a ball winning used toys. made parents glad to clean house and kids had a ball.no cost at all!but the fun is priceless.god bless children church leader.
I work at a camp and put on our children’s program camps. Our budget was low this year for decorations, so we pulled out old decorations and made them new. There were large cups made out of styrofoam that we cut into rocks. Large blocks of colorfully painted styrofoam were made into fruit. The green carpet that was going to be thrown away made a great grass lawn. Cotton batting made wonderful clouds with white christmas light stars.
Last year we did a artic theam for Bible School and we are a small church and like so many others no budjet so after Christmas I went around to every store I could think of to see if they would donate anything and we hit the jack pot! There was one store that gave us everything they had left over including 60 rolls of paper and 100 boxes of candy cains so to strech the funds even more we had a action one Sunday following our PM service and we raised funds by sailing the paper and the candy cains. We are also doing the same thing for Easter. We have enough free stuff that every child will recive a nice Easter Basket and they we even have enough that the children are going to fill baskets to bring to a local nursing home along with home made cards. God is good! He gave to us and now the children can give back to the nursing home!