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Day 17 – Thankful for Awana and Sunday School

This is part of a series called 24 Days of Thankfulness. These posts are in RANDOM order, NOT priority order. Each is something I am thankful for leading up to Thanksgiving. DAY #17 : Awana and Sunday School I was just serving at an Awana last night in Colorado Springs. I was reminded as I watched these clubbers of the impact of Awana in my own spiritual journey as I realized how blessed these kids are – and they don’t even realize it yet. For them, it’s just something fun their parents have enrolled them in. Yet they are having a spiritual foundation laid that is going to serve them for the rest of their life. Some will come to Christ at club, others will memorize hundreds of Bible verses which will become the building blocks of spiritual thought that will form a biblical world view which will become the super structure upon which will be built a life of critical thinking. And I’m not over-stating it. Objective studies by outside researchers have found that most kids trained in Awana continue to faithfully follow Jesus as adults. (source) Awana is also where I got my beginning as a children’s ministry…

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Day 2 – Thankful For God’s Word

This is part of a series called 24 Days of Thankfulness. These posts are in RANDOM order, NOT priority order. Each is something I am thankful for leading up to Thanksgiving. DAY #2: God’s Word I have loved God’s Word since childhood. I remember being encouraged to mark up my Bible as a boy with underlines and highlights and I got so carried away with it, even illustrating it with stick figure drawings of the stories that my dad once commented, “Karl, it will be easier if you just highlighted the stuff you didn’t like.” I am thankful as well to teachers like Helen Reed and Margret Bramble and Charlie Hann and my Aunt Linda (and of course my parents) who made learning fun as well as challenging so that the Word of God was always relevant to my life. When I turned twelve and became a man (I was never a teenager, but that’s a post for another time) my dad presented me with a Thompson Chain Reference Bible and said now I was ready for a Man’s Bible. I was in awe! 25% of the Bible was study tools, and there were linked chains of references on every…

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No Budget? No Problem!

In these challenging economic times, children’s ministry budgets often get cut… sometimes eliminated. I read often online, even in the Kidology.org forums about ideas for fund raising and saving money. I’d like to take a different approach on this topic – while I AM sympathetic to leaders facing budget cuts and the challenges of ministering with less money, I’d like to pose a sincere question you are welcome to answer in the comments below –  my question is simply, “What do you need money FOR?” I think this is an important question. Because I’ve been in a children’s ministry where I had a $30,000 annual budget, a $6000 annual budget and a ZERO annual budget and honestly, my ministry was equally effective in ALL THREE. Honestly. No different. The  more  money I had to spend never increased the number of kids I could reach! My fear, is that in challenging times, leaders will devote more time to fund raising and get distracted from ministry. Don’t get me wrong. I’m on all for money and creatively investing in ministry! It angers me too when pastors and churches slash kidmin budgets first in tough times. It is WRONG in when they cut…

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Help My Blog Win!

O.K. – I usually stay quiet on these things – but since my good buddy Greg Baird isn’t being humble and quietly standing by and watching to see who wins, but using Twitter to drum up votes, and I’m in the same line-up as him – and he’s beating me – (and beat me in my last Karl vs. Greg contest) I figure – this year I’ll go for it and try to at least beat Greg! What am I talking about? Well, my good buddy Tony Kummer over at www.ministry-to-children.com does a Kidmin Blog March Madness each year to see who will be voted the BEST Kidmin Blog. While everyone hits the Blog and Twitterverse with “vote for me’s” – I’ve usually chosen to stay quiet and just watch and see who wins, (Hey, I’m human – I hope to win!) but I’ve chosen not to try and influence votes or buy votes swing it in any way. Guess I wanted it to be a PURE contest – and, I’m up against friends and GOOD blogs! So I just preferred to wait it out and see who wins. AND I think it’s wrong to vote for yourself anyway, out…

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A CPC Hero to Me

At CPC you get to meet lots different kinds of people. My favorite is getting to finally meet ordinary people who use Kidology.org every week and are helped by our ministry and who I’ve perhaps e-mailed for years but finally get to put a name with an e-mail or who come up and introduce themselves and I find out they’ve been blessed by the ministry or somehow we’ve been able to “equip or encourage them” over the years. (Which is, by the way, our Mission!) Some people like coming to CPC because you get to meet some pretty well known people too who have made an impact in children’s ministry. It’s true; you can, and in general, most are pretty approachable. I find most of those folks seems to handle their “status” with grace and humility, but just like high school, there are always a few who are surprisingly a bit snobby, which is disappointing, this is kids ministry, after all! I remember the first real “Big Name” kidmin person I met at one of my first CPC’s. My first time as a speaker I got to go the the speaker lounge (ooooo) and when I introduced myself to another…

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