If you are looking for some good ideas and motivational reading, go check out Children’s Church Ministry. Content on the site occasionally leads you to a product you can purchase, but it’s not an overwhelming sales pitch.

What do you do when you have families splitting up in the church? We pray, we offer encouragement, we hang out a little extra with the kids. In order to minister to hurting families, we have to garner as many resources as possible. If you check out the Divorce Care for Kids Parent Zone website, you can find a great deal of articles about how to handle various situations in a divorced family.

You may not have DC4K in your church, but you can still download the Parent Pages handout that goes along with the various segments of DC4K in addition to the helpful articles. These are helpful resources at your disposal that keep you from having to write your own, therefore spending more time ministering to families!

What can I say, I go to this site ALOT!

1. Articles
2. Daily Bible readings
3. Free downloadable NET Bible (a very good translation)
4. Adult curriculum and Bible study courses
5. Self study theology courses

Take a look at it and bookmark it!

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.

If you are like me, you spend a ton of time with children, preparing lessons, working with your volunteers and running around looking for last minute subs. Unfortunately, the position of Children’s Pastor often does not lend itself to regular time in corporate worship. I listen to my pastor’s messages weekly, but also get spiritual growth through other pastor’s messages. John Piper’s website is full of incredible resources I wanted to be sure you knew about. I love the spirit of sharing, which is why I love John Piper’s work so much.

On Pipers site, you can download messages of his from 3 decades ago, articles he has written as well as conference messages of which he has been a part (like the recent Advance ’09 Conference in my town of Durham, NC). You can also download Scripture study guides and virtually every book which Piper has written in PDF. Yes, the books are all free. I have to say that the Desiring God site is one of the most comprehensive of any ministry I have seen. It is definitely worth bookmarking and using as an occasional resource for your own spiritual growth or for study materials as you prepare to teach children.

**Please, no comments about Piper’s Calvanism or my affinity for him. I am not a follower, I just think he has some great resources!

You may recall a post of mine back in April on a free internet filter called K-9. Filters are great, but we need to be educated about what is being filtered. Children are so precious that any and every step should be taken to protect them from the dangers of internet predators, pornography and scams.

Besides internet filtering, parents and leaders of Children’s Ministries need to be well educated about what is out there facing kids and how to protect them. That’s were a great website called NetSmartz comes in. NetSmartz is a resource of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. NetSmartz has a parent resource section including free training/education videos, back to school safety checklists and link to a knowledge base called NetSmartz411. It also hosts a kids site for educating children using games, kid-friendly articles, videos and fun characters. This kid-centered site is called Netsmartzkids.

The kid site is a bit busy, but proves to have some valuable tools. This site is a definite resource to pass along to families and kids within our ministry. Please comment below if you have any other sites that are beneficial to educating kids and families about internet safety issues.

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.