Kids Pastor or Circus Master?

Here at Kidology we are bursting with pride over discovering Marty Martin’s article in the latest issue of CM Magazine! Marty is the Kidology to Go director, our roaming Kidmin Training Ministry! Download the entire article: Kids Pastor or Circus Master (1.3mb) Enjoy the article – and mention this blog post and get $50 off a Kidology to Go event booked during January or February in Southern California, Arizona or South New Mexico or Nevada – check out the schedule for more info! We hope you enjoy Marty’s article – but better yet, we hope you’ll book Marty and his family at YOUR CHURCH! Kidology to Go is visiting ALL 50 STATES and driving across Canada so BOOK YOUR EVENT NOW before all the slots are taken. PLUS, you can now book Rob Biagi for a Friday evening Family Concert the evening before the training event. Contact Marty for complete details! If you aren’t a subscriber to Children’s Ministry Magazine (in which I have a column, Age Level Insights, ages 6-9) you truly are robbing yourself! In this issue alone my good friends Jamie Doyle and Gordon West contributed! And, of course, while I’m at it, I have to recommend,…

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They Read My Mind

O.K. – I’ll be honest. There WAS one thing I hated about being a children’s pastor. I avoided it like the black plague. It was pure evil. Satan, I thought, must have come up with the idea. It was a plot to keep me from ministering to kids, sharing the Gospel, doing visitation, and equipping and encouraging my volunteers. Database Management. And it wasn’t my fault! The church’s database stunk too! If they couldn’t even keep theirs up to date, what hope did I have?! So I’d create my own, I thought. I bought every software sold on the market. Even programmed my own once. (that was a nightmare!) For seasons at a time, I didn’t bother, or I’d let it look I was keeping track of the kids – but God knew I didn’t have a clue who had really been there or not. Don’t worry – I made sure the person who dropped off the kid picked up the kid and that we had a “never alone” policy in place. Sunday morning security was a priority. But beyond keeping the kids safe on Sunday – my data was usually a mess! Please tell me, I’m not the only…

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This One’s On Me

Kidology’s “This One’s On Me” fundraiser is a way to support one of your favorite children’s ministry websites with small donations that otherwise may seem insignificant. To make it fun, you can choose to “buy” the equivalent of many every day products as your donation. The catch? You’ll get nothing in the mail, but will receive our heartfelt thanks and a tax-deductible receipt at the end of the year! If you’ve ever treated a friend to lunch or picked up the tab for a colleague’s Mocha Frappucino latte with whipped cream, then you know the joy a small gift can bring and the satisfaction from giving it. Here at Kidology we consider you a friend of our ministry and enjoy giving you the tools, resources, and ideas you need to be effective in your ministry to children. We’d like to give you a fun opportunity to give back to a site you love! As a non-profit ministry we are dependent on donations to underwrite the costs of this extensive high-traffic site. Keeping our membership fees low means we need those who benefit from the site to help cover the expenses that memberships and product sales can’t cover alone. Plus, it…

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IMAKIDMIN – Connecting Kidmins Locally

Now there is an easy and uniquely visual way for you to connect with others in children’s ministry who live near you. You’ve long been able to interact with your “kidmin” peers in the free Kidology.org Forums or on sites like CM Connect, but a discussion forum doesn’t easily help you know where people live – and more importantly, who lives near YOU! But now, Micheal Chanley, the same mega-networker and innovator who created CM Connect has done it again, this time creating IMAKIDMIN.com, a site specifically designed to help those in children’s ministry find who lives near them. And like CM Connect, it is completely free to the users. You can list yourself on the main map page, but also on the blog page, twitter page and facebook page too. Eventually there will be individual maps for each state as the population of the site grows, a few states have already been launched. HOWEVER – I’m most excited to announce an IMAKIDMIN KIDOLOGY PAGE where Kidology Members can list themselves so that Kidology Folks can network and find out where each other live as well. Here is a cool historical image of what the Kidology Imakidmin Map looked like…

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Hiding Tennis Balls

One of my “Kidologist Secrets” of relating to kids is to have fun games or “inside jokes” with the kids who I love. It makes them feel special – and let’s them know they are more than just another kid to me. They are unique. They are one of my favorites. I’ve always had a running joke that I was my Grammy’s favorite of her nine grandchildren. Of course, I assumed every grandchild believed that! But it was a theory I loved to humorously defend. In fact, at my grammy’s wake last week, in one of the photo albums featuring full sized photos of her grandkids, when I discovered I was on page one, I proudly declared, “See!? I was her favorite!” and was greeted with groans and rolled eyes. Imagine my surprise when during the memorial service my father read a note written by my Grammy where she wrote, “To set the matter straight as to my favorite grandchild, not withstanding Karl’s claims to whit – I loved all my grandchildren the same.” Everybody laughed. I had no idea my claimed to favoritehood had gained Grammy’s attention to the point she decided to set the record the straight in…

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