Over the weekend I finally got to unpacking all my books from Chicago – a lifetime of children’s ministry and the inheritance of two pastor-dads and the heritage of a CE Director mother and as Kidology’s founder (who gets samples from publishers) – I am blessed with what could be the ultimate children’s ministry LIBRARY! I may have nearly every book and magazine ever published related to children’s ministry – and many go WAY BACK… it’s both incredible and frustrating. Not only because I could never read them all myself, but because I don’t know how to make them available to others. I couldn’t ever sell them, I don’t want to donate them, and yet they are all here sitting on shelves just LOADED with wisdom and ideas and sage advice and pages upon pages of knowledge! I wish I could scan them all and put them on Kidology.org, and yet for many of them, I’m not sure I’d have the right to do so – and researching the rights of each book would be too tedious to under take – and so here they all are – the ultimate children’s pastor library, here available only to me.
It got me thinking… I wonder if there were any children’s ministry leaders out there who would ever be interested in a residence program – just thinking out loud here – where they could just come to my house and have access to all my books, resources, tools, etc. and just enjoy several days of independent study here in beautiful Colorado. I’d be happy to avail myself for several meals for conversation and “brain picking” but otherwise, I’d just do my work, and leave them alone – What if I just said, Come! Study! Learn! Have full access to whatever of mine you want for several days. I’ll set you up with a desk and wireless Internet, and you can just browse anything I have and pack your brain full of as much as you can while you are here. Whatever you can extract from my brain while you are here can be bonus – but there is plenty on my shelves from others who have come before me or who have written from their knowledge and experience. I’d have some serious organizing and planning to do before I could do this – but I’m curious if the idea has merit.
It would be like a Self Study CM University – Kidology’s Colorado CM Independent University! What do you think?
