Annual Ministry Update 2024-2025
Equipping parents and churches to raise children who trust in Jesus eternally
Welcome from CEO & Ministry Director
Being digitally accessible is one of our strategic objectives. Our goal is to provide all of our resources online, freely available, so that children are lovingly squeezed towards Jesus not by us but by those who are in their lives – their parents and the faithful saints in their church. The Lord has placed people in their lives who we want to help; from a distance.
With so much of what we do being far from those we serve, our On the Road events have provided a price- less opportunity to be in a room with them. It is the place where we can hear the stories that shape our efforts and feel the emotions of those we want to love. So many of those conversations have stuck with me.
In Cardiff I met an adoptive mum, dragged by a friend to our event, expecting to be left feeling cold after another Christian parenting seminar. She was startled that I began the evening by explaining that all Chris- tians are adopted by our heavenly Father. She was grateful that we do not assume that every family looks the same, with the same needs. The Lord is at work, redeeming children with all kinds of stories. Our resources need to land beautifully in all kinds of contexts.
In Guildford I met the children’s ministry team from a local church who sat smiling in the front row for the whole evening. They were so grateful for our down- loadable resources. They wanted me to pass on their thanks to the team for making our Sunday school sessions biblically faithful, enormous fun and com- pletely flexible.
In Aberdeen I met a mum at the start of her parenting journey who was desperate to hear how she could begin to have big faith conversations with her young son. She left relieved that the Lord was with her. He will be at work even when she has no idea what to say next. He loves her son even more than she does. Everything we do points to the Living God, not to us.
In Belfast I met a family who loves listening together to our Faith in Kids 4Kids podcast in their car. I asked with a smile if Northern Ireland is large enough to have enough time in the car for our podcast. They assured me that the podcast is short enough for plenty of journeys! We are always so pleased to meet complete strangers who feel like they know us from our two podcast streams. It is a privilege to be in the fabric of so many families.
This year we added to our team with two new roles. They bring skills and experience that we have never had before. Our new Supporter Engagement Manager arrived in June 2025 to help us build stronger relation- ships with our supporters and to lead our fundraising efforts. Our new Digital Lead joined in November 2024. As one of our objectives is to be digitally accessible, aiming to make everything we do available digitally to anyone, this role is vital in achieving this. He has led the work on our new website, that went live in the autumn
of 2025. Both of them are Christian parents of young children who arrived passionate for our Vision because they need no convincing of the difficulties that church- es and families face in raising the next generation trusting their Lord Jesus.
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 2022* revealed that 38 per cent of practising UK Christians came to faith by the age of 5. A further 12 percent came to faith by the age of 10 and a further 26 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 unashamed. We are ‘Jesus first’. We are about the better story; that is joyful, hopeful and 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 follow the need. We are daring, ambitious and bold in all that we do. We are not afraid to pioneer or to fail.
Our strategic objectives
1. Resources
To develop market leading resources that pursue the goal of our vision.
2. Strategic Partnerships
To develop relationships with gospel hearted organisations to unlock our vision and theirs.
3. Reaching Wider & Further
We seek to take our efforts across cultures, socio-economic divides, church ‘tribes’, denominations and across international borders.
4. Digital Accessibility
To creatively find ways to reach families and churches remotely.
5. Influencing Church Culture
Being catalysts of change in the culture of children and family ministries.
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
This year has been one of growth. We have launched more resources, delivered more training and held more events than ever before. We’ve also been intentional in going wider and further in spreading our reach geographically, culturally and across denominations. The following shares the work we’ve been doing and the impact our work has had.
Resourcing & equipping children’s ministry leaders
We have significantly bolstered the resources and training that we offer those leading and supporting children’s ministry in churches. A review of our writing processes has increased our capacity and meant we were able to launch eight different resources in 2024-25. We have seen resource downloads grow by 48% since the last financial year.
We launched Nehemiah: God’s Big Build – our first Sunday School series in the Old Testament. We sought to make this series accessible and engaging, to help show children our unchanging God and his purposes then and now. This six-part Sunday School series was brought to life with short video anima- tions to help leaders tell the story in a few minutes while keeping the key message of several chapters of the Bible. The family podcast episodes dovetailed with the resource to enable the key partnership between the church and the home.
Summer 2025 saw us launch Jesus is Here!: Good News from the Book of Mark. This six-part Sunday School series took us back to basics, to see who Jesus is and why he came. We wanted a really simple resource that could be used at the start of the year or in a new church plant to show children
the real, historic, awesome Jesus! Whether children were meeting Jesus for the first time or had heard these truths before, this series sought to challenge them to work out their answer and respond person- ally to Jesus’ big question, “Who do you say I am?” (Mark 8:29). Work has already begun on a second series in Mark, due for publication in summer 2026.
Following the successful launch of our resource Growing Up in May 2024, and based on feedback received from churches that used it, we launched Sunday School sessions that help stretch the teaching to those aged 11+.
This year, we also added to our existing resource suites for both Easter and Christmas. In autumn, we participated in the Kingdom Code hackathon and began work on a digital family advent calendar. Our Digital Lead joined us in November 2024 and worked with the team to launch The Christmas Build Up – 24 manageable moments for families to explore the Christmas story together through Advent. This was developed to fit with our popular Christmas Story Brick by Brick (Lego) resources that were launched in July 2024. The Christmas Build Up was well received with over 500 unique visitors and 320 families who completed all 25 days through the month of December to Christmas.
We are excited to develop further accessible and engaging digital resources for families.
Early 2025 saw us launch a refresh of The Wonder of Easter suite, now including an outreach event plan and an Easter all-age service to work alongside the five Sunday school sessions and the family devotional book. The Pumpkin Story was a short gospel tract created for use during harvest and halloween. This was published in partnership with Good Book Company and launched in August. More than 107,000 copies of this booklet were sold in this financial year across the USA, Australia and the UK. This was far above our expectations and we are considering how we further maximise the opportu- nity to counter the cultural rise of halloween with a message of gospel hope. These projects highlight the continued partnership with The Good Book Company and GoChatter. Aligning seasonal resources alongside the published written and video content they offer creates a compelling full suite of materials for those in children’s ministry to use.
We seek to equip those running toddler groups and 2025 saw us launch two six-week teaching series, entitled God Made Me and I Can Talk to God When I Feel. We are continuing to work on growing our offer to support the incredible outreach opportunity toddler groups provide.
Our Resource Showcase events have continued to be popular, having run these for the launches of The Christmas Story Brick by Brick, Nehemiah, Jesus is Here! and our Christmas 2025 releases.
These free to access, short lunchtime sessions via Zoom have seen 542 people attend live and recordings viewed 5000 times. Beyond highlighting the resources, these create an opportunity to foster partnership with those we seek to serve and offer ideas and inspiration for how to use these resources in their own settings.
We also participated in a variety of children’s and youth conferences in 2024/25 in order to both support and learn from each audience that we seek to serve. Our Ministry Director, Ed Drew, spoke at the Limitless Leaders Conference (ELIM) in January 2025 and was the keynote speaker at the Hand in Hand Conference in February. The latter is the largest UK gathering of children’s ministry workers, with over 600 attending. Ed galvanised those attending by speaking on Jesus’ Great Commission. Ed also delivered the keynote at the Commission (New Frontiers) Leaders conference in March, speaking on Grace for the Shifting Culture.
Training those serving in children’s ministry was prioritised in this financial year, seeing us develop and re-launch our training offer in September 2024. We developed three separate training streams: Inspire (for those leading children’s ministry), Equip (for those leading or helping in Sunday school, midweek or outreach groups) and Energise (for those teams leading their church’s toddler group).
We have seen encouraging numbers, with over 1690 participants (many of whom represent larger groups gathering around one screen), and over 347 different churches have joined us. It also shows the great and growing need there is to further train in this area. Our plans for 2025-26 include recruiting a Training Manager to help us develop and grow our training offer further.
Equipping and encouraging parents
We continue to prioritise supporting parents as they seek to raise their children to live flourishing lives for Christ. We have continued to do this through a number of in-person events as well as through our podcasts.
In 2024-2025, we took Raising Confident Kids as a parenting seminar to a further 14 locations across the UK. We reached 985 parents and carers, inspir- ing them to have conversations with their children about their identity in Christ, their bodies and their gender.
We have been so encouraged by the feedback from these events and we have had so many requests to go to further locations across the UK (and beyond!) In order to maximise the reach of this content, work began on creating a digital parenting resource for churches to be able to use in their own settings. This will comprise three short videos, session guides and discussion questions for church leaders to use with parents. Our hope is that this will further the understanding and partnership between churches and families. At the time of writing, this was due for launch in Autumn 2025.
Our hugely popular Dangerous Camping event ran for its seventh year, in partnership with Oak Hall, now with a brand new barn to keep everyone dry. In God’s amazing kindness, the torrential rain that
threatened the whole weekend was actually only for a couple of hours,mostly while the entire camp watched the 4Front Theatre Company under cover. It was our biggest year yet, with 460 dads and kids taking part. We are now considering how we expand and meet the growing appetite for this event in 2025/26.
Our Faith in Parents podcast is another important ministry in serving parents well. We have seen encouragement in the numbers engaging with the podcast and some of our most popular episodes in the last twelve months include Sibling Rivalry, Mum and Dad Guilt and Keeping Faith in the Busyness of Life. This shows us that we are at our best when we speak into the ordinary and the everyday of parent- ing, offering a Christian perspective with Biblical wisdom and real lived experience.
Our Faith in Kids 4Kids podcast has continued to be popular with series in this last year accompanying the written resources for The Pumpkin Story, The Christmas Story Brick by Brick, Nehemiah: God’s Big Build and Jesus is Here! We are encouraged to hear how these are being used to facilitate family Bible times – whether that’s at the kitchen table, at bedtime or on a long car journey.
The recruitment of our Digital Lead has helped us to strategically consider reach and growth and experi- ment with other ways such as video to engage the audience, with further plans afoot in 2025-26.
Increasing awareness with key audiences and strategic partnerships
In autumn 2024, we undertook a piece of research to better understand how we can engage churches and their leaders. This included surveying over 177 UK church leaders from a breadth of denomina- tions, networks, locations and church sizes. This work helped inform us of where the strategic opportunities are for our future impact. This research identified the speaking engagements and conferences where we could build relationships with those who do not currently know about us.
As previously mentioned, this included going to the Hand in Hand conference, Limitless Leaders confer- ence and Commission Leaders conference. We also returned to Bible by the Beach (where we oversaw the Under 11s groups) and the Keswick convention (where we delivered parenting seminars). Whether we are amongst old friends or meeting new ones, we consistently find the same story across church- es that our help is appreciated in supporting their ministries that engage families. It is a rare church or family that feels confident about raising the next generation with their own vibrant personal faith. We exist to help them.
2024-25 also saw us take a significant step in increasing our digital presence by building a new website. This seeks to improve navigation and the
user experience while we hope to continue to grow the audience we seek to serve. At the time of writing, the website was due for launch in autumn 2025. We look forward to the future opportunities for growth in reach that the new website will bring.
Training and supporting church leaders
This year saw our Ministry Director, Ed Drew, engaging with church leaders. Ed led a pair of seminars at the FIEC Leaders conference, speaking on Shep- herding Parents in a Sexually Confused World. May 2025 saw Ed speaking to the Peninsula Gospel Partnership. We continue to be seen to offer exper- tise in conversations with children about gender and bodies, with Ed participating in the Keswick Identity Conference in November 2024. Ed Drew
has also continued to lecture at both Oak Hill and Cornhill, reaching church leaders in their ministry training.
Church leaders are so often the route to seeing cultural changes in churches in the UK, so our plans for 2025-26 include us seeking to better support church leaders in facilitating their partnership with families.
We are thankful to God for all that he has allowed us to achieve for him this year. We look forward to where he will take us next.
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 2024-25 financial year, we continued to see encouraging growth of income with a 33% increase from 2023-24. In total, our income was £633,257 (2023-24: £475,072). We have been very encouraged to see our income increasing at a strong rate. The vast majority of our income (63%) comes from individuals giving one-off or regular monthly donations, totalling £397,651.
We also received £40,084 in donations from churches, £102,580 from Christian trusts/foundations, £6,737 from speaker fees, £3,364 in royalties from the sale of our books, advent calendars & gospel tracts published by The Good Book Company, £14,103 from ticket sales from our training and events and we also received £55,271 in Gift Aid.
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 2024-25 financial year, we also saw our costs increase by 25%, with a total expenditure for the year at £518,700 (2023-24: £415,415). Throughout the year we invested in two new roles, however a combination of raising more income than expected and spending less than anticipated and delays in recruitment against budget meant that a planned £1.4k deficit became a surplus for the year of £119.5k.
Our largest area of expenditure remains our staff costs (67%). In 2024-25, 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 2024-25, including pension and NI contributions were £345,722 (2023-24: £272,971). Other significant expenditure relates to the cost of freelancers for podcast editing, writing, graphic design, video production & editing and accountancy/bookkeeping support.
Our Current Work & Future Plans
At the time of writing this report we are in the spring of 2026 and are approaching the end of our 2025/26 financial year. We are still in a period of further growth and we continue to see the Lord do wonderful things.
The launch of our new website in autumn 2025 has received positive feedback and we saw a significant increase in the number of users and downloads on our website. Our Christmas offering was well utilised with many brilliant stories of impact. We also released new resources for Easter in 2026 – The Easter Story: Brick by Brick – continuing our strong partnership with The Good Book Company and Go Chatter. Other notable releases have been Donut Sunday (a donut-themed all-age service which aims to inspire the whole church family to enjoy and be excited by sharing the gospel) and James: Living Faith (a Sunday School series with accompanying podcasts that helps us all to under- stand why God wants us to live for him and to believe that his ways are best).
We launched a new online parenting resource based on our Raising Confident Kids book and seminar.
We have intentionally designed this for church leaders to be able to run as a course in their own settings and to help them facilitate conversations among the parents and families in their care.
We are just weeks away from launching our brand new suite of resources, Looking to God: Mental Wellbeing in the Psalms. We know that children’s mental wellbe- ing is a space that both churches and families are seeking support in. We are particularly excited about new elements of this series that help strengthen the church and home partnership that we seek to serve.
We are also about to relaunch our podcast streams, which will have the same content that our audience knows and loves, but with new branding and updated values to try to simplify what we offer and to increase our reach and engagement.
In this financial year our new Training Manager, Becky, joined the team.
We are already so encouraged by the numbers attending our events, the feedback we are receiving
and the opportunity there is for further strategic growth in supporting those in children’s ministry. In spring 2026, 219 different churches attended our training sessions. Plans for our Training Hubs model are also underway.
Our Supporter Engagement Manager, Vanessa, joined us in summer 2025 and has already helped us to shape ways that we can sustain and grow the income that supports this ministry. The launch of our new parenting seminar, Raising Kids for Eternity, has already been to 7/9 locations and has been a real support to parents as well as providing the opportunity
for a significant number of supporters to join us as regular givers. We are very grateful for the Lord’s continued provision and for the generosity of many individuals, churches and trusts.
We are excited by all that the Lord continues to do in our Ministry and we seek His direction in all things.
Thank You
It is in the Lord’s great kindness that another year of growth, reach and impact have been possible. By giving away what we produce freely, we believe it can reach the widest and furthest possible and bless those that need it the most.
We want to take this opportunity to thank our faithful supporters who have made another year like this possible. We are grateful for their sacrificial giving and prayerful support. We thank and praise the Lord for the newly expanded and firmly committed Trustee Board that he has given us. We give thanks for our staff team working tirelessly and joyfully in service of this ministry.
While so many have contributed to these efforts, we are clear where the inspiration, provision and impact come from:
Then Jehoshaphat stood up in the assembly of Judah and Jerusalem at the temple of the Lord in the front of the new courtyard and said, “We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”
Listen, King Jehoshaphat and all who live in Judah and Jerusalem! This is what the Lord says to you: “Do not be afraid or discouraged because of this vast army. For the battle is not yours, but God’s.”
– 2 Chronicles 20:5-15 (abridged)
To the Lord be all glory!
Thank you for being on the journey with us.
