The 3-Minute KidMin Guide to Pinterest

If you’ve ever struggled with creativity in children’s ministry, you’re not alone. Every month, there are more than 30,000 Google searches for Sunday school lessons. There are about 3,000 searches for Sunday school crafts. And there are more than 2,000 searches for Sunday school games. And if you’re one of these folks searching Google for lessons, games, and craft ideas, you know that you won’t always find what you’re looking for.

Creativity is important, and it’s in high demand. I was recently speaking with some KidMin leaders at The Gathering conference, and the subject of finding creative ideas came up a few times. That’s’ no surprise: it can be a tough hurdle to jump!

But some children’s ministry directors have discovered a tool that helps you quickly find ideas for crafts, lessons, and more. That tool is Pinterest.

I’m not a children’s pastor, so I spoke with Ashley Medina, children’s ministries director at Chino Valley Community Church, about how she uses Pinterest for creative ideas at her church. And in the next 5 minutes, you’ll get a high-level idea of how to use Pinterest for children’s ministry.

First off, what is Pinterest, and what is it for?

(This section is for folks who aren’t familiar with Pinterest. Feel free to skip it if you’re already a Pinterest guru!)

Pinterest is a social network that launched in 2010, and it’s generally known as a place where people view and share images.

However, Pinterest is more than just a bunch of pretty pictures—it’s a platform for sharing visual, creative ideas. You can find games, craft instructions, snack recipes, and thought-provoking articles.

And to the dudes reading this: Pinterest is not just for little girls anymore. I was skeptical about it for a few years, too. When I heard “Pinterest,” all I thought of was wedding plans and cupcake recipes. Not anymore: I use Pinterest to find Bible study ideas, blogging advice, and other things that I really need to know about for work, ministry, and life in general.

Now, before we get into ways to use Pinterest for getting and sharing ideas, let’s make sure we understand the terminology. There are really only a few bits of Pinterest jargon we need to know:

• Pins are “posts.” A pin is an image (along with its caption and link) that you post to Pinterest boards.
• Boards are collections of pins grouped by categories that the board owners choose. Think of boards as bulletin boards, and the pins are the individual bits of information stuck onto them.
• Pinning is the process of adding a pin to Pinterest.
• Repinning happens when you see someone else’s pin and add it to a different board.

OK, we should all be on the same page. Let’s look at how to use Pinterest for children’s ministry!

Using Pinterest to find great children’s ministry ideas

Pinterest is a good place to find visual inspiration—especially when you’re working with a blank slate. Do you need to decorate your children’s ministry environment for Easter? You can search for those ideas and find pictures of what other churches have done. (And it’s not all high-budget, either.)

For example, if you needed to set up your KidMin environment with a stage, you could search “children’s ministry stage” and see all kinds of cool setups other churches are using.

[Photos were pinned from SimpleKidMin.com, Christian Index, and ChurchTechArts.com.]

These images are good for starters, and you can click on them to see the sites they came from to read more.

Pinterest is known as an image-based site, but it’s also a great place to find reading material. Ashley noted that if you try to find advice on leadership, children’s ministry, or rewarding volunteers by searching Google, it will take a while to find what you’re looking for.

For example, let’s say you want to find tips for managing volunteers. If you search “managing volunteers” on Google, you find this:

That’s not bad information, but it doesn’t give you actionable, practical tips for managing volunteers. You’ll have to click around on those sites for a while to get to anything actionable.

Whereas with Pinterest, you can search “managing volunteers” and find this!

Some general pieces, but mostly posts specifically about how to manage volunteers in real life—and even an infographic over there to the right!

We’re looking at one-off examples here, but what if you wanted to keep track of these ideas you come across in case you want to reference them later? What’s when you create boards to pin these ideas to!

These are some high-level ways to use Pinterest to gain creative ideas. But now we need to talk about another way to use Pinterest: sharing and organizing ideas for the benefit of others.

Using Pinterest to help others in children’s ministry

Remember how many searches there are for creative children’s ministry ideas every month? Pinterest is a good tool for getting ideas, but it’s also a fine way to give our brothers and sisters in children’s ministry a hand.

And you don’t have to be the person with all the ideas in order to do this—you just have to keep an eye out for great ideas and share them.

How to help your team with Pinterest

You don’t need to be the only one in your ministry using Pinterest. Set up boards and share them with your volunteer leaders: this helps you in three ways:

1. You’re collaborating with your team on fun ideas, which creates a lot more volunteer buy-in.
2. You’re not the bottleneck: your team can access boards for recipes, crafts, setup-teardown instructions, and more without needing to ask you to resend that email attachment.
3. You retain your volunteers’ ideas after they leave. If you’re setting up boards where your volunteers can share ideas, you and your team get to keep all those creative thoughts even when a creative volunteer isn’t available to help you anymore.

How to help other KidMins with Pinterest

It may sound odd, but you can do a lot to help others in children’s ministry by using Pinterest. There are so many people looking for awesome, creative ideas—and you can help them. Here’s how:

1. Create laser-focused Pinterest boards. There are lots and lots of general children’s ministry boards out there. There are even plenty of boards on Sunday school crafts and snacks and lessons. But you’re rarely looking for just “crafts.” You want “Jonah crafts for kids” or “Noah’s ark snacks.”
   So does everyone else! So when you’re creating Pinterest boards, be specific: you’ll be doing yourself a huge favor, and you’ll be helping others find your awesome ideas, too.
2. When you find something helpful online, pin it! Whether it’s a fun game idea or an insightful blog post, there’s a good chance other KidMins would benefit from knowing about it.
3. Collaborate on boards with other KidMins. (Unless your snack recipes are trade secrets!) Network with the other KidMins in your area. Network with KidMins in your denomination. Network with KidMins at churches with similar budgets. You can probably create some awesome boards by working together.
4. Buffer just launched a new integration with Pinterest, which means you can also push your pins to Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks—which helps those ideas spread even farther.

These are just a few ways you can help the KidMin community at large by using Pinterest.

What now?

This is a very basic, high-level guide to get you started with Pinterest in children’s ministry. Do you know someone who needs to read this? If so, feel free to share it!