Many of us in ministry are lacking in the counseling skills needed to talk children and parents through difficult problems. I often get parents who come to me with behavior problems or marriage issues that I feel insufficient to answer. I have found the National Association for Neuthetic Counseling website quite helpful.
You can find some great articles about issues that we in Children’s Ministry deal with on the Resource Page.
Amanda Porter of Mt. Sterling, Ohio! Amanda is not currently in full time ministry, but praying about where God will lead her next. She does regularly volunteer in her church in Ohio.
Congratulations Amanda! I hope those leadership CD’s will benefit your ministry! They’ll be on their way to you soon.
Open Church Resources is a budding blog with logos, motion backgrounds, videos, sermons, graphics, and invite cards. You can probably find a few handy things on their site.
I found a very nice child dedication video here. (scroll to the bottom).
Don’t forget to get your name in the raffle for free Leadership CD’s featuring Jim Wideman!
I guess I’ve been on an audio kick. I promise that the next several posts will not deal with audio! If you would like some Christ-centered audio regarding church leadership, leadership within the home, and a whole host of other leadership topics, you can find them at Leader Source.
Go here to find more info regarding teachings covering a wide variety of topcis. Leader Source is an interesting organization. Check them out.
If you want a good site for a Children’s Ministry resource directory, interesting and challenging articles (by Roger Fields), and some children’s ministry humor, go to Cold Water Cafe.
Also…don’t forget about the Jim Wideman Leadership CD’s that I’m giving away. You can find that post here.
Wednesday Give Away (WGA)
I’ve got 4 “The Club” CD’s to give away (2 sets of 2 CD’s). These CD’s are leadership talks from Children’s Ministry expert Jim Wideman.
The two sets of CD’s are:
1. Communication Essentials (1. Communicating with Workers and 2. Creating a Vision Statement)
2. Administration Essentials (1. What I Expect from My Team and 2. Mastering Paperwork, Policies and Procedures)
*I do not think you can purchase these any longer. He has arranged his CD’s in a different way. I originally purchased them from KidzMatter.
Simply comment below with the note “I love Free CM Stuff!” Next Wednesday, August 26th, I’ll randomly select a winner! The more times you comment, the more times your name will be entered into the drawing!
Recently I posted about the resources available at John Piper’s website for Desiring God. In that post, I made mention of the Advance ‘09 Conference which was held in my backyard of Durham, NC. There were some heavy hitters at the conference including Ed Stetzer, John Piper, and Danny Aiken.
As I have been listening through some of the messages from this conference on the Church, I could not withhold sharing with you two messages from Mark Driscoll. One will really challenge your thinking of the church as well as your ministry’s role within Christ’s bride. The other is called Ministry Idolotry. This message will lead you to rethink how spiritual you really perceive yourself to be. I commend both messages to you. Go to the links below to listen or download or watch the embedded videos of these messages. The are two of the best messages on a theology of the church that I have ever heard.
Mark Driscoll–What is the Church? (mp3 download)
Mark Driscoll–Ministry Idolotry (mp3 download)
What is the Church by Mark Driscoll from Vintage21 Church on Vimeo.
You may have read my post early on about K9 internet filtering. K9 is a good resource to use in home computers, but I have recently found out that to put it on your church computers (i.e. business) you need to purchase a license.
You may want to check out OpenDNS. It provides similar internet saftety solutions and is completely free for any setting. I must admit that I have not used this yet. I plan on taking K9 off of one of my church computers and installing OpenDNS on it instead.
Have you had any experience with OpenDNS? Tell us about it.
I recently came across a program which provides a safe and entertaining web environment for kids. It’s called Kido’z. Kido’z is a great resource to pass along to your parents or to install on computers that kids may use in your ministry. You can read more about it here. It is in the beta version now, so you can get it for free. Eventually they will come out with a premium version with more features, but from their site, it looks like the free version is very usable.
Please let me know if you have ever used this program before. How did it work?
Do you know of any similar web environments for kids?
Let me make two qualifications on the post:
Credit Karma is a pro-consumer company that offers you free credit score monitoring by allowing financial and insurance companies to advertise on their site. They offer their service for free in much the same way that Mint does. You can log in and get your credit score (something that is not available from AnnualCreditReport.com) at any time you wish.
This service is good for you to monitor if your credit is being used the way you want (i.e. identity theft) and for providing you assistance in getting out of debt by looking at offers that may present better interest rates. Nonetheless, it is a helpful financial tool. Give it a spin!
