Take a look at the Downloads section of Joe’s site. You can get a few good resources there including forms and job descriptions.I’m thankful for those in the Kidmin world who are so willing to share resources that have worked for them.

Joe is the Family Ministries Pastor at Praise Christian Center in Beaumont, TX.

This “Totally Free VBS” is brought to you by Community Bible Church in Brooksville, FL. I’m thankful that free resources like this are being produced on a regular basis in the kidmin world. I’ve listed a few of the positives and negatives of this curriculum below:

Positives:

• Hello! It’s free!
• Writers have taken great pains to highly organize the curriculum.
• Has a preschool component.
• Proof that small churches can do great things!
• Adequate resources for every volunteer involved.
• Curriculum has separate K/1, 2/3, and 4-6th grade elements.

Negative:

• Design and graphics need some work. Perhaps someone in the Kidmin world would take that on to help with the look and feel of the curriculum.
• You can only sample the music on the website and it only allows for about 3 second clips, you really can’t get a feel for the music. Have to email in order to get the full MP3′s.
• There is no video component, but creative churches can come up with these on their own.
• Each day is Old Testament teaching. All memory verses except for Day 5 are OT. There is a salvation emphasis on day 4, but even though the curriculum mentions accepting Jesus as “your Lord and Savior,” I did not see the gospel message of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection (I Cor. 15:3-4) explicitly stated.

Overall, I think this is a worthy effort and I think could be shaped into something with even greater potential if people with the right skill sets would take some time to polish it up. As with any curriculum, you will want to consider how this could serve your ministry and adjust accordingly.

Here’s the deal. Many of you have low budgets. Times are tough. You’d really like those three new dry erase boards for your elementary class rooms, but you feel like chalk will still have to do for now. Well, I suggest you let you parents, volunteers, and the congregation know what you need through WantsThis. This is essentially a “wish list” website that allows you to load online shopping finds into a sharable list. I think this could be a great tool for garnering resources from people in your ministry. Often people really feel good about buying “things” rather than just giving extra money. You can see some of great features here.

Apparently Free CM Stuff is not an original idea!

A youth pastor friend of mine, cued me in to Pastor2Youth. They have a ton of games, links, media, and object lessons that we can steal and use in CM.

Now humble yourself and admit it, it is possible to learn from youth pastors!

Contest ends soon: You have until this afternoon to get your name in the hat for the Sovereign Grace CD’s. Hurry!

I wanted to take a moment to tell you about a great new site called Effective Children’s Ministry. They are really starting to get some great content. Keep it up Catherine and Lin!

Also, I’ve extended the Brent Weber DVD contest for another week. Be sure to get your name in the hat soon!

Church budgets always seem to be tight no matter what the state of the economy. However, if you can prove to those in your church that you are budget-minded and tenacious at being frugal with church resources, they may just crown you as the King or Queen of Savings! Here are a few tips across the various areas of your ministry that can save you money:

Events

• Get several quotes from equipment providers (buses, inflatables, t-shirts, entertainment). Getting a few quotes takes a couple of extra minutes and you can often save hundreds of dollars. When I came to Grey Stone, I did this and cut the VBS t-shirt budget in half!
• Partner with other ministry areas to slice the costs in half. We did this for a volunteer banquet. The education ministry and children’s ministry did a somewhat joint thank you banquet for our volunteers. We got a better deal on the food (b/c of volume) and we split the entertainer fee.
• For camps or events that require parents to pay for their kids, many of us build a portion of this into our budget to subsidize the one’s who can’t afford it. I have found that a simple announcement in the bulletin explaining the need for scholarships draws a good bit of money. I explain exactly what it would cost to send one kid to that event so they have a concrete figure. I also have several “givers” in my contact list who have been very gracious in the past that I can call on for assistance. Try this one for extra camp spending money for needy children too!

Large Projects

• Sit down for 20 minutes and brainstorm about volunteers who can help you get the project done. We did a $10,000+ renovation project for our elementary worship room for around $5000 b/c of volunteers in our church who did things for free or at cost.
• Do the work yourself. Plan on spending 60-70 hours a week at church over those 2-3 weeks and show the church some hard work ethic!
• Schedule volunteer “work days” to help get the grunt work of large projects done. Schedule them at key times in the project plan and on days and times which working people are easily available.

Curriculum

• Use free curriculum, especially for short run programs, like Wednesday nights in the summer, or for Christmas/Easter lessons. Go here to find out about links to many of these free curriculum resources. Another great resource for this is Open from LifeChurch.
• Partner with a local sister church to alternate the sharing of curriculum. This would cut your budget in half. Even with dated curriculum, a few tweaks would make this very doable.
• Have teachers meet weekly to discuss their resource needs. They may find that someone else has what they were going to ask you to buy the next day!

Consumable Resources

• Three times a year, make a wish list known of items needed for your nursery or resource room. Put this list in your bulletin or newsletter. Want to make it even more successful, have some adult Sunday school classes adopt a particular area of “resource needs” and do a two week drive toward the end of the summer to get ready for the new school year.
• Steal them. Just kidding…I wanted to see if you read this far!
• Cut out the amount you feed children at church and have a rotation of families provide that snack or breakfast.
• Buy wholesale. Get a Costco, BJ’s, or Sam’s membership. You really do save a ton on things like cookies, cups, napkins, and plates there.
• Lock the snacks up so the youth don’t eat them!

Have a puppet ministry at your church? You can get free scripts at PuppetResources.com. They have Christian and non-Christian skits. They can be used with puppet ministries or as general skits to help you teach various Bible lessons or points of life application.

I love it when an organization will give their hard work away for free! It’s all about the kingdom work, right!

If you have not stumbled upon Max 7 yet, you are really missing out. They have forms, curriculum, audio and videos. You must take a look at the video: Aim Lower. If your pastor would let you show it in “Big Church” during recruitment time, you should take him up on it!

If you have not stepped into the world of online registration for your ministries, then JotForm is the site to get you started! Having parents sign up for your camps, VBS or summer events online can really save you a lot of administrative paperwork and headaches. I mean, why should you input all of that computer data? Let the participants do it.

With Jotform’s basic (translated free) edition, you will most likely not push its limitations. With the free version, you obviously get no technical support apart from the forums, but you get 100 submissions per month, 10 MB of uploading, downloading results in various formats and the ability to run secure financial transactions (i.e. PayPal, etc.). Of course if you feel that your needs would exceed the allowances for the free version, you can pay $9/month for the more versatile account. I have been using Survey Monkey for some of these same purposes and paying around $19/month.

Something about JotForm that amazes me is its user-friendliness. All of the form creation is drag and drop. It allows you to email the forms, code them into your website, display real time results of the results on your site (for polls) or link registrants to a web page containing your survey/form.

A tool like this is handy for a variety of functions. You can certainly use it for registrations, but other uses could include:

• Parent/Volunteer feedback survey for various ministry events or programs
• RSVP forms for volunteer banquets or ministry events
• Questionnaire concerning volunteer intentions to renew commitments

Can you think of other uses? Know of any other free tools similar to this one? Let us know by commenting below!

Today’s post comes from a post by Tony Kumner at Ministry To Children.

Tony came across some great free MP3 Bible stories told by a grandmother who wanted to record the Bible for her grandchildren. You can check out Tony’s post here. From his post you can read his take on the MP3′s as well as follow the link to download them.

I’ve listened to a few of them and they are pretty cool. They would be great for car rides. I plan on putting them on a CD and letting my preschool daughters listen to them for quiet times and on trips. There are no copyright issues here, you are free to copy and distribute to parents and kids as you would like.