My friends, today, you get the two for one deal. I was planning on posting about KidzMatter’s free monthly download, but then the KidzMatter founder, Ryan Frank, cued me in on something else. Ryan recently began publishing a magazine called K!. It is a fantastic magazine, that’s why I am a subscriber. KidzMatter would like for you to have a free copy of their magazine. All you need to do is contact them by calling their office (Toll Free – 877.568.2437), let them know you’d like a free one to preview, then they’ll send you one. It’s that easy.

Of course, KidzMatter, offers a great deal of excellent resources. You can purchase  worship videos by Uncle Charlie, short films by Timbuktoons and KidzMatter original material like powerpoint games and “Spud” episodes. Ryan is a starving Children’s Pastor with a hungry child, you should definitely support him!

So let’s recap:

1. Check out the KidzMatter website each month for a free download. This month’s is a cool video about Adam and Eve called “Baby Pops.”
2. Call the KidzMatter office and get your totally free copy of the K! Magazine. It is the final step to you becoming the best Children’s Pastor in your church!

Thanks to Money Saving Mom, a great blog my wife reads, I found out about a Summer Reading Program offered by Barnes and Noble. Here’s how the B&N website says it works:

1. Kids read any eight (8) books of their own choosing.

4. We’ll give them a coupon for a FREE book! They choose from a list of exceptional paperback titles.

This would be a great resource to pass along to our parents of elementary and middle school students.

Need to freshen up your finances? Mint is a free financial panning interface on the web. It is a place to compile all of your accounts (checking, savings, retirement, investments, credit, mortgages, etc.) in order to review them and keep track of all of your expenses. It automatically categorizes expenses, however, you can adjust those categories and add to suit your specific situations. It also allows you to budget and compares the budget you set up with your expenses as well as compare your expenses at specific vendors with national averages.

The way Mint keeps its services free is by advertising various offers that may save you money. They analyze your personal financial picture and produce various credit card, mortage and bank account options that generally have better perks or interest rates. The cool thing is that they do not force these offers on you, you have to go to a special page on your account to view them. You could never even look at them if you so choose.

The big question that comes up is that of security. They have gained a great reputation for what they do and for their security. Here is a quote from their site. They say that Mint.com employees

can’t view your banking username and passwords. We do not store this information at Mint. Your banking login credentials are securely stored by our online financial service providers. Your Mint login credentials are not shared with these providers.

I personally use the site, not to budget or categorize my expenses, but to have one place where I can see a birds eye view of my financial picture. Most of us Childen’s Ministry leaders don’t make much money, so it important to know where our money is going. Overdraft fees and mis-charges can really put a hurting on us! It certainly can be a great resource to keep you organized in each of your financial areas.

Do you know what the most important thing is? (Yes, I’m playing the “what is Andy thinking game!”). Let’s try again. Do you know what the most important thing is? (Insert basic Sunday school answer here…). You probably guessed it, the most important thing is Jesus! The Most Important Thing website is a great evangelism tool that is both free and easy!

You register with them, put your brief testimony on the site and then begin sending people with whom you witness to the site. From the site, they can read your testimony, see an interactive gospel presentation and respond in various ways. You can even have the site report to you when someone reads your page or makes a decision based on your testimony. It is very simple, people just go to the site and put your name in the search bar. They can click your name based on location (in case someone else has the same name on the site) and then read your testimony about how you trusted in Christ.

This site is sponsored by the Baptist State Convention of Oklahoma, but is not denominational in nature. It is for anyone who would like a new tool to effectively share the gospel. You can purchase business cards from their site for a very cheap price or have your own made at VistaPrint like I did. I put the website address, my name and some brief contact info on the card. I use these a lot at drive throughs and in grocery store lines. I usually say something quick like this: “I love to share how much of a difference Jesus has made in my life. If you get a chance would you to take a few minutes to go to this website, type in my name and see my story?” It takes all of 10 seconds and I’ve never had someone turn away a card.

Share this website with your kids and teach them about building a testimony. They can make business cards for themselves and invite their friends to view their story!

D6family.com is a website developed around a Randall House Curriculum that is established with the whole family in mind. I’m not a fan of that (more later) but one of their resources called splink has proven to take the Deuteronomy 6:4-9 message and compact it into easy to swallow ideas. Splink provides weekly ideas that parents can do with their children to instill a biblical foundation and worldview. It does somewhat align with their curriclum, however, anyone can do most of the ideas they suggest. Here’s one from this week:

Tell your child that to know a person you first learn things about that person.

Help your child come up with a few questions and let him or her “interview” a grandparent or other relative. (What was your favorite toy/game? What did you like about school? What is your favorite food? What were your chores as a child? What pets did you have? How did you learn about God? Tell a courtship story.) Videotape the interview if possible.

We can know about Jesus by reading the Bible.

Ask:
What do we know about Jesus from the Bible? (He is kind; He helped people; He loved children; He was obedient to His Father’s will; He was willing to take the punishment for sin by dying on the cross; He had no sin; He is wise and fair, etc.)

They put 3 ideas out once per week. A parent could check it in an RSS reader very easily on Mondays to get them thinking about how they will impact their child spiritually for the week. They also provide the option for anyone to sign up for an email to receive the ideas weekly in your inbox. I can’t testify to this method, I just check their site. I’m not sure how much advertising is in their email. Comment if you know!

You may want to put a link to it on your website, place it in a newsletter, make business cards with the logo to pass out to parents or put fliers about it in guest bags. Heck, you might even want to use the ideas yourself in your teaching or parenting!

Now, as for the family-wide curriculum. I think it is a noble idea. I think the intentions are good. However, given what we know now about educational psychology and development, it’s not the best way to educate. I do believe that the church takes on a lot of roles and one of those is education. Sadly, evangelicalism is slowly jetisoning this philosophy. If education about the Bible and Christian living should be taking place in the Sunday school or small group setting, then it must be done developmentally. There are some basic things about God and the Bible that children need to know before they can look into the deeper things of Scripture. Paul explains this in I Corinthians 3:2 and 13:11. On the other hand, adults who have that foundation, need meat, not milk.

Here’s one quick example: You couldn’t do a church wide Sunday school study on Hebrews 8 and 9. Foundational to understanding those chapters is a basic knowledge of the Abrahamic covenant, the sacrificial system and the temple culture. Kids need that stuff first, adults (for the most part) already have it.

So that’s my soapbox for the day. Feel free to comment and rant and rave. Just do it with a Christ-like attitude!

One thing that I try to give away to my families and in guest bags at every event is a Kids MP3 Bible. Faith Comes By Hearing is a powerful ministry that seeks to spread God’s Word all over the world. Aside from their regular products, they offer a special program for pastors and churches that allows members to receive free MP3’s of the New Testament as well as Kids Bibles with major stories and Bible songs.

What they ask in return is for your church to promote their ministry in some way and take up a special collection for their missions work. The two Bibles mentioned above are both dramatized and are an excellent tool. We have probably gotten close to 1000 discs from them. Seriously, no one in their right mind would pass this up!

Are you still stuck using Microsoft Word clip art for your next big Children’s Ministry event? Or are you really doing it the old school way by taping pictures from those 1980’s clip art catalogs? Well toss your clip art out the door and start using quality graphics from Stock.xchng. Everything on their site is high quality and absolutely free. You do have to set up a free account with them in order to download the graphics. They have mostly picture images, but are growing in their number of digital graphics as well. Here is what the website allows you to use images for:

All Images on the Website are copyrighted and they are the properties of SXC or its Image providers. All rights are reserved unless otherwise granted to You. Your rights to use the Image are subject to this agreement and the restrictions specified at each Image.

We hereby grant to You a non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use the Image on the terms and conditions explained in this Agreement and on the Image preview page FREE OF CHARGE.

You may use the Image

• In digital format on websites, multimedia presentations, broadcast film and video, cell phones.
• In printed promotional materials, magazines, newspapers, books, brochures, flyers, CD/DVD covers, etc.
• Along with your corporate identity on business cards, letterhead, etc.
• To decorate your home, your office or any public place.

Here are a few logos/posters I have done using background images from this site. Click on the image if you would like to see the whole thing.

I did these in either Publisher or Inkscape

If you are like me, you don’t get to spend much time in worship. I run two children’s worships while the adult services are going on. Children’s Pastors have it extremely tough in this area. The way that I stay fresh and sharp, spiritually, is by practicing individual worship and listening to solid Bible Teaching.

You can get just about any sermon somewhere over the internet, but I wanted to share with you the resources located at John MacArthur’s website, Grace To You. Dr. MacArthur is a world renowned Christian leader and has spent the last 40 years of his life studying the Scriptures 35-40 hours per week. Although I am not in complete agreement with Dr. MacArthur, I would be ignorant and foolish to suggest I couldn’t learn anything from him.

His website (in the Resources section) is filled with articles, theological position papers, audio Bible studies, and sermons dating all the way back to 1969. It is good to see others making more and more free items available to the Christian community. It is welcomed and celebrated!

Have you been jealous of that larger church down the road who always seems to put out the best looking promotional materials? I mean, what match are you for that pizzaz? Well, first of all, you should be judging your ministry by the amount of work the Holy Spirit is doing through you, not by the quality of your printings. Secondly, if you do want to look a little more up to date and are spending thousands on color ink jet cartridges from printing 500VBS brochures, you may want to look into Xerox’ program.

Now notice that the title of this entry calls for a free “color printer” not a free lifetime supply of color printing. There is a catch. When you sign up with them, you’ll get the free printer, solid ink (see below) to get you started, free shipment, and a 3 year service agreement. From then on, you only have to print out at least 2,000 pages per month to stay with the program and purchase supplies from them. All in all, it would probably be a little bit of an increase from your normal printing spending, but you get high quality printing and a free printer out of the deal.

The technology here is not laser or ink jet. It is called solid ink and is like a wax cube that you put in the printer. A friend of mine used this program with his church and seemed pretty pleased with it. The one drawback he suggested was the inability to write ON the ink, as it was sort of waxy. It did not rub off, however, it did not allow ink from pens to be used on it. Most people don’t write on colored areas of brochures anyway, so this is probably not a big concern. Also, the printer can easily be networked so all your staff friends can use it!

Have you had some experience with this program? If so leave comments so that others can get a feel for its quality or lack thereof.

Recently, I found out about a very nifty tool for the technological generation of parents that we serve. It’s called “Zefty” and is an online way for parents to help their children manage their allowance. They say they may add premium features down the road, but for now, everything is free. Here’s how the site describes its service:

1. Parents set up virtual accounts for their kids
2. Allowances can be automatically deposited
3. Parents manage withdrawals and deposits
4. Kids can print out ZeftyChecks to take to their parents
5. Kids can use ZeftyCalc to see how long they will have to save for purchases
6. Parents can use ZeftyCalc to find a reasonable amount for their allowance

Essentially, the parent is the bank branch with the actual money and Zefty operates as the online banking system. Obviously, the service will only work in a setting with older kids who can read and proficiently operate a computer. My daughters are preschoolers so we are resigned to giving them 4 quarters a week with one going to “Jesus.” Hopefully as they get older we’ll be able to use this site to teach them about Christ-centered financial management.