This week I was in need of some inspiration. I wanted a logo design from some folks on our church staff who do that, but I couldn’t translate what I was thinking about the design into words. I came across this outstanding site called Creattica. Creattica is a gallery of great design and inspirational imagery.

Want to see some impressive logo examples? How about a unique business card design? Need a fresh brochure look? Creattica is certain to have something to get you thinking. I know this site is going to make it in my frequent bookmark list!

Mail Chimp is a great tool for tracking your mass emails to parents and volunteers. I am amazed that they offer so much for the free service. The free service allows you to store up to 500 email addresses (plenty for most churches) as well as send up to 3,000 emails per month. So if you had 500 addresses, you could send 6 mass emails per month free of charge. They also offer a 15% discount to non-profits.

I’m really looking forward to using this in a similar way that Jonathan Cliff does (only I believe he uses Constant Contact-a paid service). Jonathan sends out weekly update and leadership videos to his volunteers. He utilizes Vimeo for this. Mail Chimp will allow you to communicate things like this to your people as well as keep track of who actually has opened the email and who clicked on the links within it.

Check out Family Time Training to get a few free family activities to spread around your ministry. Use them as a follow up to a special event or insert them in newsletters.

I wanted to let you know about a very helpful newsletter out there. Occasionally I will recommend free email newsletters to you, however, I only recommend them if they are of high quality and would be worth your time to read. One of those is the Connect with Kids newsletter.

Let me quote their website so you can see a little something about their mission and purpose:

Connect with Kids is a multi-media, education company focused on helping educators and parents teach life skills, prevention, character, health, and wellness.  Our belief is that parents and teachers are the greatest influence in the life of a child.  Our mission is to connect kids with the adults who can help them using the power of real stories on video, television and the Internet.

Essentially, the weekly newsletter links you to short video clips featuring recent research from universities and independent research firms on kid and teen issues in a variety of areas including parent/child relationships, physical care and nutrition, current trends and many more. I have never received any junk emails from them. In the last year that I have subscribed, every email has been a newsletter highlighting current research.

These newsletters can provide rich material you can use to more effectively shape you ministry. You may also find helpful tidbits that can be passed along to parents in your monthly newsletters or emails.

For those who cast aside secular research as an abomination to ministry, let me briefly comment. Though I am extremely committed to the changing Truth of God’s Word, I see secular research as a benefit to our ministry. In the words of Augustine, “All Truth is God’s Truth.” If a secular researcher, or research institution for that matter, discovers something that is validated by the Word of God, then I say “Praise God.” I would never endorse a research conclusion that was not validated by God’s Word. Disagree? Comment below, I welcome some Christ-centered discussion!

Rose Publishing is a company that produces some excellent Bible reference materials. Although their resources are available for a price, they do offer a free “sampling” of some of their materials through a weekly email. By signing up for their email, you can receive free Bible eCharts about every other week. The free charts they make available are pulled from various resources they offer. Some examples include:

• 10 Names of God
• Then and Now Bible Maps
• Christianity and World Religion Comparisons
• Armor of God Diagram

If you know anything about education, you know that graphic organizers (charts, timelines, descriptive illustrations) are exellent ways for people to grasp certain concepts. These emails provide you with a few tools to store in the “Bible Teaching” folder on your computer to pull out for future reference.

Rose sends out about one email per week, so they do not flood your inbox. Each email is obvioulsy a promtion for their material, and every other week, it includes a link to a free eChart. I do not recommend a lot of newsletters to you, only ones that provide a good benefit, so I definitely commend this one to you.

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’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.

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!