Home 2009 (Page 2)

Year: 2009

The Eyeball Game

I’m letting out on of my ‘secrets’ in the upcoming release of Part Two of the Kids Church Cook Book and I thought it might make a good blog post. I was writing about a unique way I start children’s church – (perhaps another post later) and then describing something I do when I am doing my welcome… “Like the late night talk shows, after the welcome activity, I often do what I call my monologue, it is when I come out and just talk to the kids. I tell a humorous story from the week, I greet the kids. I look for visitors. I comment on things they are wearing or brought with them. I may ask a few kids questions about their personal life, “How’s your grandma doing?” (Shows that child I care, and other children that I’m connected to individual lives.) This time is loose, very short, and very personal, but very intentional. It is just me and the kids connecting. They will feel like I am just shooting the breeze, but often I have almost rehearsed the stories I might tell of something funny that happened during the week and have the kids almost falling on…

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A Free Resident CM University?

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…

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Take Your Life Back From the Church

My heart just breaks for those who are going through difficult times in ministry. Over in the Kidology forums I read of children’s ministry leaders who are going through incredibly difficult times in ministry – budget cuts, conflicts with leadership, church difficulties, etc. But one common thread that surfaces often is how over worked and exhausted leaders are and how many hours they are working and how their family life is suffering and how on the verge of quitting they are. I’d like to be a bit bold and issue a DECEMBER CHALLENGE to all children’s ministry leaders. Church ministry is hard. Church politics is so easy to run into even over incredibly petty stuff – simple mistakes turn into major missteps. A kind favor can end up stepping on sensitive toes. Generosity can be perceived as selfish ambition. You can bump into power control without even intending to. What you think will be embraced can be pushed away and what you think will be received with gratitude can instead be greeted with skepticism.  It can be incredibly hurtful and discouraging if we allow it. It takes constant, even daily reminders of WHOM WE SERVE to keep sane. People will…

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Watering Young Spiritual Fruit

Now that the third DiscipleTown unit, How to Grow Spiritual Fruit is available, I can’t help thinking about what a privilege it is for me to literally join with hundreds of children’s church teachers around the country, and some even farther away, in helping  children learn the secrets to growing genuine spiritual fruit. It is my prayer that each teacher who uses this material will find it challenging and encouraging in their own spiritual journey as well. I know that as I have studied for and prepared these lessons I have been reminded again that I need to work less at “being good” and more at drawing closer to God to let His goodness shine through me! I have to tell you, when I set out to start this series, I did not want to write just another series on the same old familiar “fruit of the spirit” stuff. I told the good folks at DiscipleLand, “teaching kids about the fruit of the spirit is like teaching someone how to be a banana. I’d rather teach someone how to grow bananas, or how to grow spiritual fruit, than do another series that just described the individual fruits of the Spirit.”…

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The Secret to Navigating the Evolution Debate

As I was surfing the web tonight, I stumbled upon an article about how deep the Congo river is: Evolution in the Deepest River in the World. As often happens if the word “evolution” is used, an evolution debate broke out in the comments. I get both amused and frustrated reading such conversations. Both by ignorant or arrogant evolutionists as well as overly simplistic or dogmatic anti-evolutionist. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind disagreeing with evolutionists. I have a honorary evolutionist friend who reads my blog (and will most likely jump on this post) and is now a friend on facebook (you know who you are) who I’ve enjoyed sparing with because he wasn’t arrogant or condescending even as he sharply disagrees with my theology and science – in fact, I’d rather argue with him than many Christians who I find petty or too quick to quote a Bible verse rather than use their brain. So for the sake of knowing someone will read it, I want to re-post here, my soap-box comment that I posted on the article linked above. Feel free to add your comments below: (I was limited to 2000 characters, hence the brevity) I love…

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