Well, what is your typical understanding of the term ‘Women’s ministry? A women’s ministry refers to a council or a group of women whom the Church of that respective neighborhood or cantonment appoints.
The ladies can either involve themselves in managing the affairs of the Church in terms of its day-to-day running or administration. Otherwise, the ministry council can engage themselves in social welfare activities.
For women who want a mental outlet from being cooped up within the four walls of the house, involvement in a Women’s council or ministry can be a great thing indeed. We all want to socialize and engage in group activities of one or the other kind.
We are helping you discover 20 women’s ministry ideas for small churches.
1. Poor Feeding
As you all must be aware, food famines and global starvation are plaguing parts of the Earth. As responsible citizens, we should also learn to give back while we enjoy food, clothing, and a roof above our heads. As women in a ministry, nothing can be more fruitful than donating food packets to the homeless and needy.
Bread, simple recipe soups, bottles, and pancakes can be distributed in easy-to-carry sachets or containers to the poor and the more underprivileged sections of society. This is one of the best endeavors to consider while planning women’s ministry ideas for small churches.
2. Distribution of Warm Clothes and Blankets
As the autumn season is approaching post-summer, you can expect windier days ahead. As the days are windy, the homeless need shelter and protection to cover themselves up. And, after the autumn weather, you will have the winter months setting in.
Can there be a more noble drive than distributing warm sweaters, clothes, or blankets to the poor and the needy? Not everyone can afford to hit a Walmart or a H&M to buy sweaters or thermal wear clothing for themselves.
3. Community Drives
Are you a giver rather than a taker? Then, community initiatives must be on top of your mind. Your ministry of ladies can plan community drives wherein you divide your batch mates into groups.
Each group can be entrusted with an activity, such as training the kids from poorer neighborhoods, cleaning up restrooms, or organizing medical camps near villages. Likewise, there are a whole lot of community-driven initiatives and programs you can organize being in charge of a women’s ministry.
This way, you can realistically serve the masses and render help to those who most need it. Organizing community drives can solve multiple problems for the people around you.
4. Recycling Plastic and Keep Your Neighborhoods Clean
Quite a lot of cities and countries around the world comprise landfills that are filled with heaps of single-use plastic containers. The use-and-throw plastic spoons, cups, saucers, and plates are invariably dumped into waterbeds like oceans and seas. This way, marine life is impacted badly.
To combat the issue, respective ministry groups of churches can organize plastic recycling campaigns, and plastic bottles can be recycled in environmentally friendly ways. The drive can also help keep your neighborhoods cleaner, greener, and more inviting.
5. Distributing Toys to Kids Staying in Foster Homes
Many kids in orphanages or foster homes lack parental love and affection. These kids barely get opportunities to smile or be happy. As a community-oriented ministry, you can organize toy distribution campaigns for these kids who are deprived of their homes.
Old or used toys can be collected from apartments, libraries, or garage mills. Even unsold toys from retail stores can be given away to charity to encourage such drives.
When you look at the simple joy of these kids holding their toys and dolls in their hands, one cannot use words to express the self-satisfying feeling that arises out of the same.
6. Organizing Educational Camps
Women’s ministries in Churches can drive home some of the coolest ideas indeed. On this front, educational camps can be organized for your neighborhood kids using creatively inclined ways. Your committees can organize quizzes and coloring competitions for the tiny toys. Teen kids can be allowed to take part in painting events, theater, craft-making, and storytelling. Above 20’s can have ramp walks and fashion shows ahead.
When you customize or streamline events this way, everyone can display their hidden talents or realms of creativity. As a community drive, a few prizes can be given away at the end of every event.
7. Fireless Cooking is in Vogue
Moms always struggle to keep their kids busy all through the day. Kids need constant one-on-one attention while moms have to complete their household chores in terms of finishing up with cooking or completing their laptop-related work. The tug-of-war between the parents and kids, therefore, becomes an endless thing in every single household.
Fireless cooking camps held by Churches or other community centers can be a welcome move to give these moms some ‘Me-time.’ As women of the ministry, you can include freestyle cooking classes wherein you teach children how to chop simple veggies or fruits or how to get a bread sandwich organized precisely.
8. Painting Strokes Can Be Taught to Young Children
As a community initiative, painting classes can be organized for children who are a part of your neighborhood. Through the ministry, your group of ladies can curate a curriculum that will fit into three different age groups.
For example, simple art strokes or stenciling can be taught to kids who are between 3 and 6 years of age. Similarly, portraits can be taught to kids between 7-14 years.
Finally, free-style painting classes can be held for kids who are 14 plus. As kids, you cannot have a one-size-that-fits-it-all kind of approach. Having customized classes that are age-appropriate is something you must work on! Here, parents can enroll their kids in painting classes and help them paint those masterful pictures effortlessly.
9. Chocolate Making – a Rave Initiative Indeed
Who doesn’t love to gorge on homemade chocolates? All of us love chocolates, isn’t it? As a club owner with a group of ladies under your wing, organizing chocolate classes can be a great initiative for kids and adults who would like hands-on making their very own chocolates and toffees at home.
As women of the ministry, you can curate classes on how to make white, dark, and premium varieties of gourmet chocolates. Again, separate classes can be added up to have the toppings, fillings, or decorations done to these homemade chocolates. Finally, you can teach homemakers how to package these toffees and chocolates. Certification programs can be given away to participant holders.
Apparently, women can use the certificates to build their brand of chocolates, earning their passive source of income while pursuing their passion, too.
10. Distribution of Magazines and Newspapers
Don’t you want your community to be well-informed on the latest societal trends? Or, would you not feel elated when your community members know more about the current affairs running in their neighborhoods? Newspaper bulletin booths can be set up by women organizers wherein free weekly newspapers covering the current area plus nearby neighborhoods are distributed to people. Few magazines can also be illustrated in a typical manner.
To add a more user-friendly approach to the theme, people can be allowed to post bulletin ads for jobs or for selling away their old items to people who would wanna buy them.
11. Organizing Electronic Thrift Stores
Not most of us can afford a brand new MAC Pro, paying 2000 USD. But you want your community people to be able to afford good jobs. So, how are you going to meet both ends of the bridge? Used laptops of HP, Apple, or Dell can be given away at discounted prices by running electronic thrift stores across a few outlets covering your neighborhood.
To add a more community-oriented initiative, repair centers or service centers can also be done for the laptops that are sold to people on a 2nd-hand basis. This way, the working class who cannot afford plush laptops will have electronic gadgets that are at least used but in good condition. This can be one of the more noble women’s ministry ideas for small churches.
12. Giving Away Stationery Kits to Poor Children
As women wanting to serve your community or neighborhood, giving away crayons, stationery kits, or brand-new notebooks to poor kids can help their parents a great deal. The kids can use these stationery kits for their schools or project assignments.
You can organize distribution camps using volunteers to spread the occasion of joy and enthrall with the feeling of giving before the eve of New Year, Christmas, fall, spring season, etc. This way, you utilize festive occasions to serve your community and keep your neighborhoods happy.
13. Organizing Magic Shows Can Be Exciting
To add more rhythm to the creative lineup of events, organizing fun-filled magic shows can be a great initiative. Kids, adults, and elders will enjoy being a part of exotic magic shows. Card game workshops can be taught to kids, too, so that younger ones can learn magic tricks.
Through these interactive and learn-along magic shows, you organize entertaining sessions for people in your neighborhood. As a part of your Church regulars, this is one of the out-of-box women’s ministry ideas for small churches.
Tickets can be distributed by volunteers or college-going children that can also be utilized as fund-raisers for renovating or refurbishing Churches that need repainting or whitewashing to be done.
14. Organizing Food Camps at Elderly Homes
The elderly or Senior citizens spend most of their old age living in and out of old-age homes. Now is the time to re-ignite some love and passion into the Senior citizens of your community-cum-neighborhood. You can volunteer to serve some of the exotic potluck lunches and organize food camps for the elderly population of your community.
This way, you can show your love and gratitude. After all, they have once been your parents changing nappy pads or caregivers who sent you to school. Now is the time for you to give back on what you have.
15. Fancy Dress Competitions for Children
As women of a committee or ministry, planning activities must be done on an exotic and varying scale over the mundane set of activities that happen at a Church, Club, or gymkhana. That being said, this is one of the out-of-the-box ideas the women of a church-based ministry can come up with.
On the eve of Christmas or Halloween’s day, theme-based Fancy dress competitions can be held at poll booths and parks or by organizing via exhibition stand inside your neighborhoods. The best three themes win prizes.
16. Pet-Based Events Can Be Entertaining
Would you want to keep your dogs or cats entertained? Then, pet-based events can be done on a beautiful scale indeed. Frisbee events or running contests can be held for your cute Pomeranians, while cat-based theme events can keep your kitty-cats preoccupied. Pet-friendly events must be organized so that your dogs or cats do not get injured or hurt in the process.
As women organizers of pet events, you must ensure you leave no stone unturned. Prizes and souvenirs can be handed over to the winning pets. And, you, as proud owners of your cats or dogs, get an opportunity to pose the mementos of your proud pets. High tea and dinners can be organized for the event.
17. Organizing Photography Events
Do you have wanna-be freelance or professional photographers who can take truly Instagram-worthy pics? Then, this is an opportunity you can dive into. You can organize exotic galleries wherein award-winning photographs or magazine cover photoshoots can be kept on display. You can organize charity-bidding auctions wherein photography lovers purchase these photos.
Apart from giving away cash or product prizes to the winners, you can also use the excess money for your Churches or for administering activities pertaining to a robust cash flow statement of your committee. Here, you combine talent plus make money for your entity.
18. Handicraft Stalls
Can you bring out the hidden or creative talent of handicraft artisans under a roof? Then organizing a hand-made stall near your Church or Congregation hall can be the best bet indeed. You allow your people to showcase their hand-made dolls, pottery-based artifacts, or even an exquisite variety of earthenware on display.
From the sales proceeds, you pay your ladies plus utilize the excess money for managing the affairs of your Church or Religious congregation. This is again an economically viable idea a ladies’ committee can organize, and you provide an opportunity for artisans to move up the ladder as they can sell their products at your premises and improve their income levels, plus pay up for using your premises.
19. Sports Events at Your Ladies’ Club
The ladies who work day and night for welfare activities connected with the Churches or cantonment centers also need recreational activities. So, you can organize games like Basketball, badminton, or ball events by involving all the staff who religiously work for the Church.
Food coupons and cash incentives can be given away to the winners of the groups. This way, you bring home loud clapping and cheering to your Church committee.
20. Group Prayer Meets with a Cultural Evening Set Up
Group prayers bring miracles to countries and even economies. In the favor of the Lord, you can invoke group prayer meetings and organize religious sermons for people who attend the Church meetings. Your choir teams can sing carols, and you can distribute prizes or souvenirs to some of the hard-working volunteers of your committee.
Cultural events can then be organized, followed by high tea and dinner. A typical format of an Annual Day or a Cultural Day celebratory event can be organized by a ministry composed of enterprising ladies. This way, you keep your members highly motivated.
Final Words
In total, we have seen 20 highly engaging women’s ministry ideas in small churches. We have ditched the conventional methods of engagement and added more creative themes to get things up in action and actually serve the community or neighborhood you stay in.
We must be extremely committed to taking up initiatives as planned. The resource allocation, the number of ladies who would be required to team up with each activity, and the number of participants that can be included in a program must be decided well in advance. In other words, you cannot plan what to do in the 11th hour before launching a program.
The ladies who are in charge of planning the ministry are wholly responsible for planning, strategizing, and, finally, the executive. Hence, which is the program initiative are you going to kickstart right away? We would be more than happy to learn from you!
Stay blessed!
