Coming up with Children's Ministry names and logos for your kid's environments at church can be exhausting. There are two approaches I see and they are similar to what is seen outside the church.
- Option 1 – House of Brands – This option is where the church name itself is one brand, but it contains a bunch of other brands. This was our approach originally as I'll outline below.
- Option 2 – Brand House – This is where the church name and brand is represented throughout. This option is what we moved to and I love it for reasons I'll share below.
Children's Ministry Names – House of Brands Approach
When our church launched in 2006 we divided up our children's ministry into 3 groups with 3 separate, connected brands. They were:
The water theme obviously connected them all and our physical environments were designed to match their theme. Since the beginning, we've also used our favorite curriculums, My First Look for preschool and 252 Kids for elementary. At that time both curriculums did not tie into a specific theme, so it worked well with our brands.
But, as you can tell, it was the House of Brands approach. It was one house (Community Christian Church) that held a bunch of different, disconnected brands.
Children's Ministry Names – Brand House Approach
The Brand House approach is where you take the brand that is the church and use it for everything. Life.Church does this with Life Kids but then deviates from that with Switch, their ministry for students (as opposed to Life Students, which would follow the Brand House approach).
Orange Curriculum Change
If my memory is correct (big if), 252 Kids started using themes along with the monthly focus in 2009. We started to decorate our elementary environment around those themes and because of how awesome our elementary director (Lisa Molite) is at doing that, it added great value to the experience. But, our Discovery Island brand no longer made sense because the theme almost never fit on “an island”. This prompted our thoughts about changing our brand and children's ministry logo.
One New Brand: C3 Kids
Since then we have wanted to rebrand all of children's ministry names to something that was not theme-dependent. We knew we would be moving buildings (eventually), so we intentionally waited until then to make it happen. We brainstormed tons of ideas and ultimately landed on a very simple one: C3 Kids. Our church is Community Christian Church (CCC), and we had already been using the “C3” language with our student ministry. Our church logo has always had 3 connected spheres, like a molecule, so our new C3 Kids logo simply plays off of that.
Why I Like This Approach
I like it because it's simple, connects to the church logo and theme, and isn't tied to a separate theme. I also like it because it makes sense to guests who were totally confused by our old names. Our elementary environment now looks like a warehouse, and our preschool environment was designed to mimic the look of the teaching videos from our curriculum provider, which is a backyard/treehouse theme. If that ever changes, we can easily change with it and not worry about the name. This is in line with the Brand House approach, where the “brand” of C3 and the molecule logo is extended to our children's and student ministries.
Our Children’s Ministry is branded the same way as well, Nick, as is our student ministry. In fact both our children’s and student ministry when I started had incredibly tacky names and designs that were of no significance to our church or our community.
In addition, it’s a lot easier for parents or students to say “my kid goes to Cypress Crossings Student Ministry” instead of “yeah, they go to Radiate at that one church off such and such street”. Less details, quicker information. We like it too because it makes the entire church feel connected and more family oriented than ever before.
Our student ministry had been using C3SM, as in C3 (community christian church) Student ministry. But, we’re rebranding that to just C3 Students as well, for the same reason. Even our regular attenders may not know what C3SM is just by looking at it.
That’s exactly what ours has been doing except we are C4SM. Our church is Cypress Crossings Christian Church so it’s a mouthful to say that.