Recently, I commented on a site called Stock Exchange, but that site is more for folks who need some good backgrounds or images to make their own promotional material. I’d like to take a moment to tell you about another site which has a host of pre-made graphics and images that you can use for your ministry. It is called CreativeMYK. It hosts a huge bank of free Christian themed photos and professionally done graphics. You can check out their gallery here.
When you view their gallery, you see the most recent graphics first. They have a good search engine that allows you to search by file type or keyword. Although the file types vary (.ai, .psd, .eps), there are 22 pages full of jpeg images. Those of you not having access to a $600 piece of software like Adobe Illustrator will find this useful! However, you can open most .eps files in a program called The Gimp. There is also a trick to opening .ai files in The Gimp, that only works part of the time. Anyway, check out the gallery and see if there would be a graphic that would help bring some personality to your next Children’s Worship series.
I came up with this list that I’m putting in our church newsletter for the month of June. I thought some of you might want to cut and paste and use it for yours as well. Hope it could be a good tool for you.
Top Ten Signs You Should Volunteer for VBS:
10. Your wife is volunteering and she said you had to work with her.
9. You have a passion for wiping snotty noses.
8. You wonder why your adult Sunday school class never plays “Jump the Creek” or eats marshmallows with pretzels stuck in them for a snack.
7. You have a spare 20 hours during the week of (insert VBS Dates here).
6. (Insert your name) will not stop asking you about serving.
5. You have been a member for 15 years and never served anywhere.
4. You realize that “I’ve done my time with Children” is not a valid excuse anymore.
3. You recognize that primetime ESPN is pretty boring during the summer.
2. You think hand motions are a nice touch to any song.
1. Being hugged by stinky, sweaty children really gets you pumped up about God’s Kingdom.
I try to stay on schedule with posting Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, but I came across this forum post on Kidology, and just could not resist the urge to pass it on. I actually saw the link to it on the Kidology Facebook Fan Page. I don’t know why I did not think to throw this up on the blog because my wife has been doing this with my two girls for 3 years now! What I’m talking about is free kids movies throughout the summer!
Nancy Keith posted a nice list of free and VERY cheap movie deals with Cinemas around the country. I have not checked all of them, but I looked at the one in my area (Regal) and it is legit. Obviously, given the nature of this blog, I can only with good conscience endorse the no-cost ones! You could advertise this to your families as a summer activity or arrange for kids within your ministry to meet up at the theaters for a ministry fun day. Here’s the list:
So you are on Facebook, you have a blog for your own children’s ministry, you twitter and kids in your ministry text you. Why do you need one more tech resource to keep track of? Well, you definitely need CM Connect because it puts the chidren’s ministry community all on one site.
CM Connect was started by Michael Chanley, the Children’s Minister at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, KY. Michael has a passion for connecting people and developing community so he launched this website as well as several others. Parent Unity is a similar site that gives parents a place to learn from, encorage and grow with one another. SM Connect is a place where Student Pastors can build community and network and PM Connect is a place for pastors, missionaries and evangelists to share ideas and strenghten relationships.
There are currently over 4000 members of the CM Connect community. There are a myriad of ways to connect with others through “friending,” joining groups (click here for the Free CM Stuff group), and participating in discussions about Children’s Ministry topics. It is definitely a must for Children’s Ministry leaders!
If you are already a member of CM Connect, I invite you to respond to this post to let the readers know how you find the community beneficial!
I’d love for you to “friend” me, look forward to meeting you (I’m also on Facebook if you’d like to join up with me there)!
Cornerstone University Radio has a great resource out there for you to pass along to families. It is a place where a good deal of Christian radio progamming for kids comes together. This is a quote from their site:
We’ve gathered the best in children’s Christian programming and put it in one place so you can easily find safe, entertaining, and enriching content just for kids! Our alliance of broadcasters and partners work hard to make HisKids.net a place you and your child want to be.
Kids can listen to shows like “Down Gilead Lane” and “Paws and Tales” on demand. Or you can stream the His Kids Radio station. If you contact them, they will set up a custom logo of your church on a special site of theirs. You can provide a link in your own website to the His Kids Radio site with your logo on it. You can see an example of mine here. This is all free, however, they do offer a paid service where you can stream your sermons, podcasts and trainings if you would like. This particular aspect of their service is charged by how large your church is.
I’m not sure if you are familiar with the National Center for Biblical Parenting, but they do some incredible work. Every Children’s Ministry leader should have some of their resources in their toolbox. As with many of the resource providers I blog about, they have a good deal of books and curriculum which you can pay for. I have used their Parenting is Heart Work seminar with parents in my church, read their books for my own parenting skill development and also get their weekly newsletter.
The founders, Dr. Scott Turansky and Joanne Miller send out a snippet from one of their books in each weekly newsletter. It always flows well and often seems to be something that the Lord wanted me to recognize about my own parenting. I reccomend that the parents of my church subscribe to it and sometimes I will be reminded of a parenting problem within my church that the newsletter topic speaks to. At that point I can either forward the whole email to all of the parents in my ministry or to a set of parents who came to my mind. The focus of the emails are the parenting tips. This means that although there is some advertising for their products and services, you are not overwhelmed by a sales pitch when reading it.
Let me know how you may use these tips in your ministry.
Are your promotional materials still stuck in the early 90′s when italicized Arial font was creative and innovative? Many churches are and that simply communicates to the world that we are behind the times. That’s why I would recommend to you 1001 Free Fonts. They deliver on the promise that is contained in their name. You can go to the site, not be bogged down with ads or external links, and download a ton of great fonts for your publications!
Near the top of the page, you will see categories that are easy to manage. However, the base of fonts that they have is so large, it can seem difficult to navigate through all of the choices. That is a drawback. I have to say that early on in my ministry, when I didn’t know as many people and didn’t have as much to do, I spent almost a whole day, loading fonts from this site onto my computer. The cool thing is that you can just put those on a CD or the shared drive at your church and let everyone have access to them.
Part of what the owner of this site will do, however, is allow you to download 10,000 (yes…10 THOUSAND) fonts for $19.95. The link to this is on the site. Perhaps you don’t want to buy them and you don’t have the time to download all of those in one day. Well, get someone else to do it! Even if that is still not an attractive option for you, this site still offers a great way to download free fonts for that special project or promotional material you’ve been dreaming up!
“Because free is better than not free.” That’s the tagline for this website. I like that, because I like FREE! Freecountdowns.net is pretty straightforward. They offer free countdowns. I simply can’t gloss that over. They have some very good and creative content. I’d have to say my favorite is The One Minute Workout. I can’t wait to play that one at a special event for a warmup!
Becca, the creator of the site offers some simple advice:
I'm Dr. Andy Johnson. I'm a long time kidmin guy, author, consultant, camp speaker, dad, and husband. I am the children's pastor at Ingleside Baptist, however, any views here are not the expressed views of my church. Browse around and get some free stuff!
Purpose:
Free CM Stuff highlights top notch no cost resources as well as challenging leadership articles for those in children and family ministry.
