The all new Kidology.org has just gone live, and we were having fun showing Luke the walk-out videos (linked below) and Sara was trying to explain to Luke that this website is Daddy’s job, and he just made a new website. Luke took one look at the web page and said, “Looks like a binkey.” At first we thought, “Huh?” but on a closer look, we could see what he was talking about:
I guess our logo does look a little like a binkey, after all!
We hope the new website will pacify many as they seek to reach and teach kids for Jesus!
I’m still feeling the effects of Yosemite Summit 2009. It is difficult to describe this event to someone who has not gone; it is truly a wonderful trip on so many fronts. But it is my prayer that some descriptions, some pictures, quotes from the guys and a video might help you get a glimpse of the unique experience Yosemite Summit is for the guys who take the time away from ministry to invest in their walk with God and a few other good men who share their passion for children’s ministry.
After the neat group of guys God brought together for the first Summit, I honestly was a little worried that the second year might feel different, but again God brought together a group of men who all got along great and seemingly instantly we were like old friends. I now get to pray the same for 2010!
There is simply no way to describe the grandeur of the vistas at Yosemite National Park. Pictures can’t even come close to capturing the awe of looking out from one vista to another across the sprawling valley below. It is like you can reach out and touch the presence of God.
One of the highlights of Yosemite Summit is getting some time alone in magnificent places to think, pray and journal your thoughts. All the usual distractions of life are hundreds of miles away… and somehow God’s voice is just so much clearer, if not louder.
Thanks so much for an awesome week! It was a real joy to hike with fellow CPs. I was blessed by each guy sharing each night and energized by the encouragement and new ideas shared. The spiritual challenges from Karl, were spot on and a great tool for God to work in my life. I look forward to continuing our new friendships. God Bless each one of you and may your lives and families and ministries never be the same!
We often were together as we hiked, but then had times to split up for some solo time as well. The balance between fellowship and solitude is not managed strictly, but seems to just naturally unfold as we hike at different paces, regroup at the most spectacular sites, and gather for meals along the trails.
How do you describe the feeling of standing at the top of a mountain? While we always stayed a safe distance from truly deadly or dangerous drop offs, you are often near places where the ground soon gives way to sky where hawks and eagles drift by. To be looking straight across at a water fall that is pouring hundreds of feet to a valley below you is awe-inspiring. While the falls seem distant, often you can still hear their roar as they crash into rocks thousands of feet away below and across the valley.
While much of what is experienced in Yosemite remains here or in our memories, the time invested in journaling helps take much of what God stirs within us back home. I love rereading from my Yosemite journal and then closing my eyes and remembering the place where I wrote those words.
Yosemite Summit met all my expectations and I came away feeling like it was one of the best things I could have done for my relationship with the Lord and my ministry. I love the idea of allowing retreat, re-create times to rekindle my love for God, my family and my ministry.
Because of today’s technology, it is wonderful to be able to have worship music playing in head phones as we hiked, journals, or just relaxed. At other times, walking in silence and allowing God’s creation to be the sound track was equally beautiful. With the distant roar of countless water falls, the chirping of birds, rustling of leaves and the occasional scurry of an animal broken only by the steady plodding of our footsteps, Creation offered us the most fitting background music.
I never in all my 20+ years of ministry had taken a “real” break away where I could focus on my relationship with Christ. Because of my time at Yosemite, I have committed that I would take a break regularly because of the impact this has had on my ministry, family and my relationship with Jesus. Yosemite Summit gave me the opportunity to refresh my soul, to renew my spirit and to come back home with a new resolve to fall in love with Jesus more, to serve him with a wiser focus and to honor him with the way I lead my family and my ministry. - Tom
I loved seeing the guys relaxing and can’t help wondering, how often do they truly get to relax back home - where they totally and completely let go of everything and just enjoy the presence of God?
There is nothing like the opportunity to get away, on your own, with no distractions while you listen to God’s voice. The memory will not quickly fade. Jesus made many different times to get away. He even took 40 days before beginning his ministry. How much more do we need to get away and just be with God? Yosemite Summit is this strategic opportunity. - Steve
One of the ways I worship is through the lens of my camera. While no film can capture the majesty of this place, it sure is fun trying. At least you get to take glimpses of it home to enjoy over and over again. Around every turn is yet another “perfect shot” that for some segments of the trip, I had to simply put my camera away and soak it in knowing that being there is better than any picture from there.
While we don’t do any ‘real’ climbing with ropes and gear, there are plenty of rocks that whisper, “Climb me!” And once ascended offer either a better view, or simply a satisfying feeling of having accomplished something worth relaxing and soaking in.
Nothing makes the heart pound like being near the edge of a cliff. And while our wives may fear our curiosity, we were always safe and looked out for each other. But nevertheless, sitting near an edge is a profound way to realize one’s humanity and to appreciate every day God grants us to worship and serve Him!
One of the highlights of Yosemite Summit is a hike that will most likely be included every year, the Mist Trail. There is a stretch where you’d get drenched to the bone if you didn’t wear a poncho! The mist from the thundering waterfall becomes so thick it is almost blinding and the sound of the water fall thrilling. Plus, realizing you will soon be standing at the top at the very edge (behind a railing!) makes the countless stone stairs worth every step.
This is Taft Point, one of the highest vista look out points in Yosemite (and one of the few with a railing) where you can peer straight down over 3500 feet! It was while hiking back from here that I was nearly stuck by lightening in a hail storm that rushed in on us!
The time away at the Yosemite Summit gave me the encouragement I needed, the time I needed to confront the hard issues I had been pushing back, and the conviction to embrace who I truly am in God’s eyes.
Yosemite Summit is an event that will recharge you as a child of God, a husband of your wife and a father of your children. The investment is worth it because the event will impact your walk with God and your relationship with your wife and kids. I can tell you that this single week will have an impact on the rest of my life.
Yosemite Summit 2009 may be over, but it’s impact will last a life time. It is now time to start praying about whether God would have you join us for Yosemite Summit 2010!
Yosemite Summit was a huge blessing and a very worthwhile investment in helping me be refreshed in my relationship with God and helping to keep me centered in my relationships with my wife, kids and my church. Walking by yourself part of a day through towering Sequoia trees praying to God and enjoying his handiwork after having spent time being encourage by and with 8 Christian guys is priceless! - Scotty H.
2009 Highlight Video:
The song in the video is Stop the World, by Matthew West, on the CD Something To Say
As I hear about churches cutting budgets and individuals tightening their financial belts, I just want to remind you that Kidology.org remains your BEST INVESTMENT in tough times.
For what you would pay for a magazine and one good children’s ministry book, Kidology.org gives you access to more help, ideas, resources and fresh content than you’ll probably ever be able to take advantage of! Not to mention all the money you’ll save with member-only discounts in our online store on the BEST children’s ministry resources on the market. Whether you are looking for a new ministry in the Job Center, selling your own stuff in the Garage Sale or taking advantage of FREE Online Training or free ToyBox Tale downloads - Kidology.org is here to EQUIP and ENCOURAGE you! All for a low ANNUAL fee that doesn’t even hint at all that it will unlock for you.
So tighten your belt, but JOIN KIDOLOGY and unleash the power of Kidology.org to help you SAVE MONEY over the coming summer months!
This is my last blog post until AFTER Yosemite Summit! No more Facebook, no Twitter, no e-mail, no cell phone, no work! I’m disconnecting for an entire week. I’ve been praying, planning and preparing for a year and its so exciting to see the eight guys that God brought together for this amazing week in Yosemite. They’ve been coming in over the last two days, and tonight we all gathered for our first meal all together before hittin’ the road in the morning.
Steve, Matt, Tom, Scott, Karl, Scott, Marc, Brent, Pat
(Canada, TX, PA, SD, IL, CA, VA, OK, OH)
Please pray for each of these guys that God would really do a work in each of our lives during this next week. We each come from a different state and one from Canada. Each is leaving family and ministry behind to focus on their walk with God. Each understands that the best thing for their ministry isn’t another idea or resource but a closer walk with the Lord. Pray for safety and for an openness to what God has in store for us. I can’t wait to get started! So time for me to sign off and shut down. No worries, I’ll be blogging pictures and stories afterward! Until then,
Remember? Remember when you first got in to children’s ministry? Remember the calling God gave you? The burden you had for children? The awesome responsibility you accepted? The urgency you felt? Back when it was about reaching lost kids and discipling those who had accepted Christ? Remember when the stories were about changed lives and your conversations were mostly about the kids rather than the problems? Remember when you spent a ridiculous amount of time on some minor, but fun aspect of the ministry just so you could see the faces of the kids light up when they arrived? Remember when you didn’t even notice how exhausted you were?
What changed?
You went into children’s ministry because you wanted to be a shepherd of children – and all too soon you became more sheepherder than shepherd. Just getting the kids where they need to be and hoping to have a reasonable adult-to-child ratio became a weekly battle. Managing volunteers, appeasing parents, buying supplies, keeping the senior pastor as well as the janitor happy, answering voice mail, e-mail and snail mail and countless meetings gradually took over. Before you knew it, being a minister gave way to being an administrator. And somewhere the kids got lost in the shuffle. Oh, the kids, are fine. But you feel your heart for ministry fading and you secretly miss when you were just a volunteer and not in charge of the whole operation.
It doesn’t have to be that way!
Children’s Ministry has gone nuts. Seriously. It’s less than a hundred years old and yet we’ve made it into an empire more daunting and menacing than the Galactic Empire! How did the Church survive for so many generations and produce such godly saints without all the trappings of our modern ministry? Perhaps all our advances are a part of the problem. Could it be that all we have created to help has in part become a hindrance? An entire industry of resources and programs (and websites!) has exploded and what do we have to show for it? Just statistics that seem to suggest that kids are worse off spiritually than ever before. How can this be?! Where have we gone wrong?
Getting worn out in ministry? Discouraged? Here is a little known passage of Scripture to encourage you, or that you can reprint to encourage others. (found in my archives tonight)
Sometimes it is fun to paraphrase Scripture a little to shed fresh light on the message it contains, as I did once to encourage my leadership team by posting this passage:
There was a children’s worker all alone;
she had neither partner nor team member.
There was no end to her toil,
yet her eyes were not content with her ministry.
“For whom and I toiling?” she asked,
“and why am I depriving myself of enjoyment?”
This too is meaningless - a miserable ministry!
Tow are better than one,
more than two even better!
because they have a good return for their work:
If one falls down,
his team members can help him up.
But pity the children’s worker who calls
and has no one to help him up!
Also, if two or more work together,
they will keep encouraged!
But how can one keep encouraged alone?
Though one may be oeverwhelmed,
a team can help each other.
A cord of many strands
is not quickly broken!
Perhaps you have had trouble with kids running at church, or at least, with grown-ups complaining that the kids are running too much! Well, I once made some fun signs that I posted around the church with some Bible verses instructing kids to “WALK” - granted, they were a little out of context, but it got some fun responses and got the topic of WALKING around the building into people’s minds:
So I continued, “What you are doing is not right. Shouldn’t you WALK?”
- Nehemiah 5:9
I am God Almighty, WALK before me!
- Genesis 17:1
Observe what the LORD your God requires: WALK.
- I Kings 2:3
I was cleaning out some old file draws at my office and came across these, and thought others might get a kick outta them. Please, don’t take it too seriously! It’s all in fun. Post on the walls of your church at your own risk!
By request via Facebook, I’m posting the family show I did at my church last weekend. A volunteer did the video from the back so the audio is the best, but you can hear the show fairly well. It was an after dinner show so unfortunately there is some ambient noise from the clean up going on back where the camera was, etc. but for what it’s worth, you’ll get to see Gus and some of my other puppets, including the scary baby routine, and some unique “Chapel only” humor as Gus picks on the whole multi-church format of our church a bit. This coming weekend our church is launching simulcast broadcasting so the opening routine with the magic drawing board has a little fun with that, to explain the context.
But with no further ado, here is the entire program in seven parts:
PART 1: Magic White Board Option for Multi-Site Churches
PART 2: Baby Fred and it Stinks to be a Baby
PART 3: Karl and Snowball
PART 4: Gus on Multi-Personality Churches, er Multi-Site
PART 5: Gus Invents WWID (What Would I Do?)
PART 6: The Gus Raps (Kids in the Word & Yo God!)
PART 7: Gus Becomes a Ventriloquist (and the Clean Room Rap)
Hope you enjoy the show! It was a fun evening and the kids seemed to respond really well. This was the first time since High School that I did an entire program with just puppets, but they had a magician last week and I thought it would be too similar to do a magic show, so I decided to do something different. Seems Baby Fred ended up being the most popular, surpassing even Gus in comments afterwards.
Kidology.org to release an exclusive clip of the all new Angel Wars next Tuesday!
If you have not seen AngelWars.com you have missed one of the very best Christian animated series for children. Think Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and super heroes all blended together into one visually stunning animated show that mixes awesome music and eye-popping animation so well, you might get goose bumps just watching the trailer. And that’s before you even sit down with the pop-corn to enjoy the entire show!
I’ve been a fan of the original trilogy since it came out, but am excited that an all new feature length version (90 minutes) is coming out NEXT TUESDAY…. and…. that Kidology.org will be releasing an exclusive clip of the show in our newsletter on the same day! Be the first to see an exciting scene from Angel Wars: The Messengers never before seen!
That’s right! While you can view the official trailer at AngelWars.com and there are a few clips here and there, Kidology.org’s free newsletter subscribers will be treated to an exclusive glimpse of the video NEXT TUESDAY, the day of the release! If you are not a Kidology.org newsletter subscriber, join the thousands of others who know where to get the inside scoop on children’s ministry today! Subscribe now so you don’t miss it! We will also be hosting an online Q and A with the creator, Christopher Waters.
But what IS Angel Wars?
Angel Wars is a visually exciting, kid-friendly rendering of spiritual warfare that allows children to imaginatively and visually engage with the spiritual realm. While they are not exactly ‘biblical’ in the literal sense (nor claim to be) they do allow children to imagine what life could be like for angels. However, I imagine real angels may envy the hover boards, gadgets and space ships these imaginary angels get to enjoy! For those who are concerned with aspects that do not perfectly match biblical descriptions of angels, such as the angels having free will, it is important to realize that in any fiction, for the sake of a story, often a few of realities rules must to broken to establish a premise for a story. From that point on, a shared world view can exist in harmony. In Narnia, animals talk. In Lord of the Rings, great evil power can be embodied in a piece of jewelry. In Star Wars, there is an impersonal but guiding and empowering ‘Force’ which binds the galaxy together. VeggieTales not only has talking veggies, but they can pick things up without hands, and no one seems to have an issue with that. In the same spirit, Angel Wars grants a few exceptions to the idea of angels to create a spiritual world (and beings) that kids can relate to, and that allows for some powerful moral lessons. Targeted to attract children ages 5-11, I can’t wait until my little boy is old enough to watch Angel Wars with me. We will discuss the themes and lessons in the stories, and then it will create a wonderful opportunity to look to the Bible to study what God’s Word teaches us about real angels and how they relate to God, this world, and us. In the meantime, I’m enjoying them myself!
What is this new video about? Here is the official description:
In a city of darkness, they are the light.
From some of the world’s most visionary animators comes an action-packed, feature-length adventure of two young warriors in the battle between the forces of good and evil!
Kira and Eli are the newest members of the Guardian Force, a group of angel warriors sworn to protect the world from the powers of evil. Not yet full Guardians, the young duo still has a lot to learn, but when darkness descends over the city, the time for training is over. Faced with the responsibility of delivering hope to a lost city, they must learn to work together to drive back the soldiers of darkness and grow into the warriors they are destined to become.
Karl’s official endorsement:
Angel Wars beautifully combines stunning visual story telling with powerful character lessons. Rarely is something designed for kids so engaging that adults get mesmerized too. Angel Wars delights the eyes, ears and heart all at once. Christian parents, teachers and pastors now have something of excellence their children can enjoy that will teach as well as entertain. It’s Christian and it’s totally cool… imagine that!
Karl Bastian, the Kidologist
Founder and President of Kidology.org
As I hear about churches cutting budgets and individuals tightening their financial belts, I just want to remind you that 
