How Hill City Church Ministers to the Family as a whole

Tish Striegel has over 25 years of experience ministering to families. Here are her top tips for how you can minister to the family as a whole.

Chris Holland
May 17, 2021
How to Use Playlister

Tish Striegel is the Kids Pastor at Hill City Church. Tish oversees all things kid and family, which also include the Hill City Kids interns and volunteer team. Tish has over 25 years of experience ministering to families.


Here are her top tips for how you can minister to the family as a whole.


Partner with parents outside of church


It’s critical to partner with parents outside of church during their workweek. Tish frequently grabs coffee with parents. These mid-week meetups are ideal opportunities to make sure parents are equipped with the necessary resources.


If the Volunteer team at Hill City Church has a good story or image about a kid from the previous weekend, Tish makes sure to share this with a parent mid-week. This reminds parents to put church on their calendar for the upcoming weekend and gets kids excited to come back. It is also important to equip families with content at-home for when they can’t make it to in-person events.


For this, Tish uses the Playlister Video Hub to ensure that parents always have access to up-to-date curriculum:


“The video hub is amazing! Parents and team no longer have to navigate through FB or YouTube. (let’s face it, YouTube has a million distractions!  It is the ultimate flow chart from the 80’s in video form, lol)”


Quality > Quantity when it comes to family events


Family events are a great way to Minister to the whole family. But churches tend to do too many events- which makes them less impactful. Tish’s event strategy can be summed up in 3 words: quality over quantity. Hill City Church goes big on one or two events per year. These events should be scheduled when most of your families can participate, so nobody gets left out.

Equip your team

“Without our amazing team, we could not succeed in what we do every week!” Ministry is a team sport and Tish relies on her volunteers and interns to keep ministry happening. Tish does weekly 1:1s with her team members so they all stay in sync.  Tish also uses Playlister’s online playlists to help her volunteer team get ready for the weekend. These playlists run through the hand motions, content they will teach, and have guides attached as PDFs.

“I can create a playlist lesson in less than 15 minutes compared to 2 hours plus using keynote and dropbox.”

Tish also prioritizes making sure that her volunteer team is well equipped to teach in their classroom spaces. She uses Playlister in the classroom so that her volunteers can confidently present things without fear of technical glitches:

“No buying or updating computers or iPads! We were using mirror and airplay and it was constantly buffering.”

Save time in one area and re-invest it somewhere better

Tish’s schedule is centered around maximizing time for high-impact activities. You have a lot of responsibilities in Ministry, but which ones are most impactful? Which ones are just tasks? It helps to put these responsibilities in two buckets: High Impact Activities and Low Impact Activities. An important distinction is that “low impact activities” are still very necessary, however there is a way to optimize how you are doing them:


For more info on time allocation, check out our interview with Rob Chadges at Prairie Lakes Church. Rob offers advice on how to find out your church’s high vs low impact activities.


“Playlister – The best tool for Kids Ministry since goldfish!”


That’s a powerful quote right there. If you aren’t using Playlister yet, click here to create your free account and see what Tish is so excited about.

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