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.
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.
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?
If you are not screening your volunteers yet, you should be moving toward that process. You can find some sample screening documents here. Family Watchdog is a fantastic resource to find out how many sex offenders live in your area. You can search by state, city, zip code, and even address.
I used this as a tool to show people that our area had more offenders than they thought. For example, the zip code that my churh is in has 138 offenders. You can also get free updates when an offender moves into your area.
Your walk with Christ is the most important leadership aspect of your ministry. I’ve mentioned before that those of us in Children’s Ministry can tend to miss our weekend services. It’s not the best, but sometimes our church schedules do not allow us to worship with the adult body. Aside from my regular Bible study, I spend time in my car and during workouts, listening to various messages from my pastor, from conferences and from regular preaching and teaching ministries.
One site that I have been tuned into for quite some time now is One Place. You can access a host of preaching and teaching programs from this one site. Some notable pastors include:
Although the MP3′s are available for purchase from One Place, you can stream audio and video of these pastors/teachers for free and without registering. It’s a great tool to play as you are doing some of that mindless admin work we all have to tackle on Monday mornings!
