A little over a year ago, my wife got a phone call that would change the direction of our family in ways we never expected. Our pastor asked her to step up and help coordinate the children's program at our young, growing church.
If you know my wife, you know this made sense. Her faith has always been the center of who she is, and she's long believed something simple but powerful: when a child's faith is strong, it doesn't just shape that child — it shapes the whole home. Kids who love coming to church have a way of pulling their parents along with them. A child's excitement about what they're learning about Jesus has a ripple effect that reaches the whole family. So when the opportunity came to help build that kind of excitement into our church's children's ministry, she said yes.
She'd never done anything like it before. But she was handed a mountain of resources and told to build the program however she saw fit.
That freedom sounded like a gift. It turned into a burden.
The Overwhelm Nobody Talks About
Here's what nobody tells you about starting a children's ministry from scratch: the hardest part isn't the passion — that's there in abundance. It's the sheer volume of stuff. Curriculum options everywhere, most of them fragmented, some pricier than a small church can justify, others so long and dense they'd take a full-time staff member just to organize. My wife wasn't short on heart. She was short on hours.
I watched her spend evening after evening at our kitchen table, buried in printouts, trying to piece together something coherent for a group of kids who deserved better than a rushed, cobbled-together lesson every Sunday morning. She wasn't failing — she was drowning in options, with no simple path through them.
As someone who's spent his career building and running businesses, I couldn't just watch that happen without trying to help. So I started asking questions. What was actually working? What wasn't? What did she wish existed but couldn't find? Slowly, a picture started to form — not just of what our church needed, but of what every young, growing church probably needed.
What We Built
What came out of those kitchen-table conversations was something simpler than anything either of us had seen out there: a curriculum split cleanly into two tracks — one for younger kids (through 5th grade) and one for older kids (6th through 12th grade) — built around one unified message each week.
That last part matters more than it might sound like at first. Because the lesson doesn't stop when the kids walk out of the classroom. It's designed to travel home with them — to become a conversation at the dinner table, a question a middle schooler asks their dad in the car, something a 2nd grader brings up unprompted while brushing their teeth. When the whole family is talking about the same thing, faith stops being a Sunday-morning activity and starts becoming part of the fabric of the home.
That was the gap we set out to close. Not just "here's a lesson plan," but "here's a way to bring your whole family into the same story, the same week, the same walk with the Lord." That's the thinking behind every piece of the curriculum toolkit — from the Teacher's Master Guide down to the Weekly Parent Plan that carries the lesson out the church doors.
Why It Matters to Us
I'll be honest — neither of us set out to start a business. This came from watching someone we love pour herself into something she believed in, and wanting to make that load a little lighter. It came from believing, the way she does, that a child's faith can be the spark that strengthens an entire household.
Build Kids Faith exists because we know we're not the only ones who've felt this. If you're a pastor, a volunteer, or a parent trying to build something meaningful for the kids in your church — especially if you're doing it in a young or growing congregation without a big staff or budget — we understand exactly where you are. We've sat at that kitchen table too.
Whether you end up using our curriculum or one of the many other wonderful resources out there, that's honestly okay with us. What matters far more to us is that the message gets to the kids who need it, in a way that doesn't burn out the people volunteering to deliver it.
Because at the end of the day, we believe building a child's faith is one of the most foundational things you can do for their entire life — and it deserves to be simple enough that it actually gets done, week after week, with love.
If you're leading or starting a children's ministry...
...we'd love for you to take a look at what we built.