Annual Ministry Update 2023-2024
Equipping parents and churches to raise children who trust in Jesus eternally
Welcome from CEO & Ministry Director
It has been another year of serving parents and churches, seeking to encourage them in their partnership to raise children to know Christ as their Lord. We are passionate about equipping those parents and churches to confidently reach their children with the Good News of Jesus Christ.
Our strategic desire is to equip them from a distance, delivering all of our resources digitally. This is so that it is not us, but the parents and the local church who are engaging the children they know and love. This means that we usually do not get to see the impact of our efforts personally. Instead we are reliant on hearing stories from others who have seen God do miracles in the lives of those they love, through our efforts landing in their families and communities. This has been my favourite letter of the year. Hear the joy in it!
I just wanted to thank you for the ‘Who am I’ series – both as a mum of three under 5s and as a children’s leader. I lead the kids’ work at our local church in Cardiff – we’re a 6 year old church plant in a multicultural area of south Cardiff and have about thirty under 10s each week. We had a session with the kids leaders last week to talk about ‘Who am I’, watch the training video together and pray – people seem to have really captured the vision so I’m excited that we’ll be starting it with the kids this Sunday. I’ve been binge listening to the podcasts whilst washing up and folding the laundry – thank you so much for these. They are so helpful and fun to listen to. Keep up the good work!
This speaks of so much that we are trying to achieve. We want to reach those smaller churches, who have less time, fewer resources and often slightly more chaotic groups! We can make a difference for them. We want them to feel able to use our resources flexibly, so that our work lands well in the lives of those they know well. They know their brothers and sisters better than we do!
We are grateful to God for all that he has enabled us to do this year. Please read through our annual report, feel encouraged and thank God for what he is doing in young lives.
Ed Drew
CEO & Ministry Director
About Faith in Kids
Our vision is to see confident parents and thriving churches working together to raise children who trust in Jesus eternally.
We do that by encouraging, inspiring and equipping the influencers of faith in children with support, training and resources.
Research in 2017* revealed that 40 per cent of prac- tising UK Christians came to faith by the age of 5. Sixteen percent came to faith by the age of 10 and 19 per cent between the age of 11-18. This means that three quarters of those in our churches today came to faith as a child or young person. Investing in children’s ministry is strategically vital.
Our values
Gospel hearted
We are unashaned. We are ‘Jesus first’. We are about the better story; that is joyful, hopeful nand found in Christ.
Relational
We are wired for partnership. We connect to those we serve. We listen and we want to understand.
Courageous
We will the need. We are daring, ambitious and bold in all that we do. We are not afraid to pionoeer or to fail.
Our strategic objectives
1. Resources
To develop market leading resources that pursue the goal of our vision.
2. Stragetic Partnerships
To develop relationships with gospel hearted organisations to unlock our vision and theirs.
3. Reaching Wider & Further
We seek to take our efforts acrros cultures, socio-economic divides, church ‘tribes’, denominations and across international borders.
4. Digial Accessibility
To creatively find ways to reach families and churches remotely.
5. Influencing Chruch Culture
Being catalysts of change in the culture of children and family ministires.
Parents
We believe parents are God’s ‘plan A’ for their children. We want to encourage them as they bring faith to life. We want to walk alongside parents, providing inspiration and support that points them to the God who equips them. We produce a range of resources, created with parents of all stages in mind. These resources include a popular podcast, a parenting book, family devotionals, in person events, videos and blog posts. We plan to offer a parenting course in the future.
Kids Leaders
We seek to help kid’s workers connect families to church. We want to equip them to lead well. We offer training and a whole range of resources to be used in church and as outreach, including Sunday school series, all age talks, holiday club materials, seasonal ideas, toddler group stories, lesson plans and school assemblies. Our material is designed to work in churches of all sizes and dynamics. Our teaching ideas are springboards to allow the leaders to do the heart work of engaging with children, families and fellow leaders to point them to Jesus.
Church Leaders
We want to encourage church leaders to keep making the effort to support families and disciple children in their churches. We want to give church leaders the support, wisdom and guidance they need to take on this hard but important task. We provide articles, blog posts and training sessions that are relevant to church leaders and are exploring the production of new resources for this group.
Achievements of the Year
We’ve made significant progress against our strategic objectives and the following demonstrates the impact we’ve had.
Resourcing & equipping children’s ministry leaders
We primarily resource children’s ministry leaders by making our written resources for churches freely available. With a Project Manager and an Editor hired, this saw our process improve and our capacity grow. We launched six different resources in 2023-24, including Easter Explained, Dangerous Camping materials and a brand new holiday club resource, Shipwrecked!
This year also saw the launch of Growing Up: God’s Good Story, a resource created to build on the work of Who Am I? (launched in late 2022). Podcast episodes, training videos, take home sheets all accompanied Sunday School sessions that stretched to 11-14s. Resources Showcase events have proven to be a successful way to both launch and help navigate the resources we have on offer, with 500 individuals having attended these in 2023/24. Training has also been a key way to support those in children’s ministry, with the team providing keynotes at a variety of external conferences such as the National Playtime Conference as well as through our own online training streams. In this financial year, we have seen our resource downloads increase by 147% and our training attendees increase by 167%.
Equipping & encouraging Parents
We continue to be convinced of the need to support parents as they seek to raise their children to live flourishing lives for Christ. We seek to do this through a number of in-person events as well as through our podcast.
We took Raising Confident Kids as a parenting seminar to nine locations across the UK, with 731 parents reached and inspired to have conversations with their children about their identity in Christ, their bodies and their gender.
Our Dangerous Camping event, in partnership with Oakhall, continues to prove extremely popular with 181 dads and 239 kids reached and encouraged.
Our Faith in Kids for Parents podcast has continued to be an important ministry and feedback on episodes accompanying the Growing Up resource was particu- larly encouraging. We intentionally ran these ahead of a series that was produced for the Faith in Kids 4Kids podcast so that parents were equipped to confidently have those conversations with their children.
Increasing awareness with key audiences & strategic partnerships
This financial year has seen us make progress in seeking to go further and wider to reach more diverse audiences. This has been through conferences, speaking engagements, publishing partnerships and growth in our digital presence. Conferences included Spring Harvest, Bible By The Beach and Big Church Festival.
Our warm partnership with The Good Book Company continued this year. A short gospel tract, The Pumpkin Story, was produced with The Good Book Company and was released in August 2024 selling almost 34,000 copies in the UK and US. The Christmas Story Brick by Brick resources were released in July 2024 and are a result of a collaboration with The Good Book Company and Go Chatter. We have enjoyed the creativity and shared commitment to faithful Bible retelling.
2023-2024 saw us take significant steps in trying to increase our digital reach to go wider and further. We have embraced the opportunity that a Google Grant provides in enhancing our SEO. This has seen traffic to our website grow by 201% and our email subscription list has increased by 41%.
Training & supporting church leaders
|With the strategic goal of influencing church culture, the research we conducted last year (Ages & Stages, June 2023) taught us how vital engaging the church leader is in order to effect change. In the last financial year, Ed Drew lectured at both Oak Hill and Cornhill, reaching church leaders in their ministry training. With a particular thematic focus on gender and identity, we sought the opportunity to speak at prominent events such as the Keswick Identity workshop (Nov 2023), the Growing Young Disciples conference (Jan 2024) and at the South-West Youth Ministries CPD day (Feb 2024).
Our impact
Resources
Downloads
Podcasts Aug 23 – July 24
Podcasts Produced
Podcast Downloads
Podcasts Produced
Podcast Downloads
Videos
Video Views
Training
Events
Attendees
Financial Review
Income
During the 2023-24 financial year, we continued to see encouraging growth of income with a 41.7% increase from 2022-23. In total, our income was £475,072 (2022-23: £335,284). Considering the ongoing impact of the cost of living during this financial year, we have been very encouraged to see our income increasing at a strong rate.
A key financial aim for us is to increase our regular giving from individuals to ensure greater financial resilience and sustainabili- ty. During 2023-24 we had 165 new regular monthly supporters, which was a net increase of 146 monthly supporters, taking our total to 444.This provided a regular
ncome from individuals of £153,041 (2022-23: £107,208), increasing our overall regular income (including churches and trusts) to £181,924, an increase of 46% on the previous year.
Our primary funding sources are:
- Individual donors (including major donors) – monthly & one off
- Trusts and grants
- Donations from partner churches
- Royalties from book/calendar sales
- Income from training/events
- Gift aid on eligible donations
Expenditure
During the 2023-24 financial year, we also saw our costs increase by 28.2%, with a total expenditure for the year at £415,415 (2022-23: £323,941). We had originally planned to recruit in order to reduce our unrestricted reserves, however a combination of raising more income than expected and spending less than anticipated meant that a planned £47k deficit became a surplus for the year of £60k.
Our largest area of expenditure remains our staff costs (66%). In 2023-24, we added an additional two members to the team in order to help us reach and support more families and churches throughout the UK. Our staff costs for 2023-24, including pension and NI contributions were £272,971 (2022-23: £212,854). All other costs associated with running Faith in Kids totalled £142,444.
Our Current Work & Future Plans
At the time of writing this report we are in the spring of 2025 and approaching the end of our 2024/25 financial year. It has been a time of continued growth and we continue to see the Lord do wonderful things.
We bolstered our The Christmas Story Brick by Brick resources package with our first ever digital advent calendar, which over 500 families participated in daily during December 2024. Brand new resources have been launched in 2025, including our first Old Testa- ment Sunday School series in Nehemiah, God’s Big Build. Each lesson is accompanied by an animated video and feedback has been very positive. We’ve launched two new Toddler Group resources that have been welcomed and May will see the launch of a new Sunday School series in Mark, Jesus is Here!
We are continuing to seek further strategic partner- ships as well as continuing work with The Good Book Company and Go Chatter on an Easter resource for 2026. Ed is also continuing to write a second parenting book, due to be published in summer 2026 by The Good Book Company. In this financial year, Ed has spoken at a wide range of events including the FIEC Leaders Conference and Limitless (ELIM). Next year we will continue to seek to take a strategic approach to be even more intentionally diverse in our reach. A research project on Church Engagement has been valuable in helping to shape these plans.
We have also refreshed our Children’s Ministry online training offering based on the clear need we identified in the last year and this has been reflected in the
number of attendees. Some sessions have seen over 300 participants. Our plan for our Training Hubs model is still underway.
Our Digital Lead, Jason, joined in November and has already started work on revamping our website, bolstering our podcast offering and building new digital products such as an online parenting course. Watch this space! We look forward to Vanessa joining our team as our Supporter Engagement Manager this summer. Her skills and experience will help us as we look to sustain and grow the income that supports this ministry.
We are excited by all the Lord continues to do and seek His direction in all things.
Thank You
We are so grateful for the Lord’s provision. 2023-2024 was another incredible year for Faith in Kids in terms of growth, reach and impact. We remain convinced that giving away what we produce means it reaches those that need it the most. This is only possible thanks to the hundreds of individuals and families, churches and trusts that partner with us by sacrificially giving and prayerfully supporting us. We are also grateful to the Lord for the committed staff and Trustees that he has graciously given us.
We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labour prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.
– 1 Thessalonians 1:3
Thank you for being on the journey with us.
