I love VBS (that’s Vacation Bible School for the scarf with t-shirt wearing crowd of Children’s Ministers!). I love it because when it is done well and creatively, children learn foundational truths about Jesus, kids get saved, parents get plugged into church, and momentum is built to further the overall vision and work of one’s children’s ministry. My VBS is in 2 weeks and I’m extremely excited for what God has in store this year! Below are some creative ideas you can incorporate into your VBS to make it the best one ever!

Fun for Kids

• Mascot Hunt: Figure out a good mascot for your VBS and try to find a stuffed animal that looks like it. Hide the animal each day and challenge the kids to find it as they are walking around. If they find it, reward their class with a bag of candy and a special flag they can carry around the next day. This is so popular at my church, I have to do two, one for Pre-K and one for elementary.
• Surprise Character: Have someone dress up as a character who matches the theme. Have them bust into the classrooms during teaching time, interrupting the teacher and getting the whole lesson for the day wrong. Alert the teachers ahead of time so they can interact with the character and “set them straight” on the meaning of the lesson.
• Incentives: Offer an incentive for non-church kids to attend or for your own church kids to invite their friends. Last year, I gave away a Wii. It was our largest VBS in church history. This year, I’m giving a $5 gift card to Toys R Us to any non-church kid who attends at least 4 nights of VBS. I’m already WAY above the average mark for this point in our registration process and many of them are guests.
• Involve Kids in Follow Up: Have children in your ministry take the contact info for a guest that was in their class. Instruct them on how to follow up via a phone call or note in the mail. Have them to invite the kids back to church the next week and start a friendship with them.

Fun for Parents

• Send them home in style: If you have a car pick up line (which I recommend to reduce the amount of people who come into your building), then I recommend that you greet parents with a smile, open the door for kids, help them get their seat belt on, and say something positive about the kids. This can really have a huge impact on the ride home.
• Parenting Skills: Offer a parenting skills class during your VBS time. Have some snacks, foster community, and/or bring in a well known presenter to help them grow as a parent (Frankly, I’d love to do it!). You may start this off one year by just doing a one or two night thing. That way you could advertise it well during drop off and pick up prior to it occurring.

Fun for Volunteers

• Late Week Break: Have a variety of drinks and special snacks available on day 3 or 4 of your week for volunteers. Stand by the cooler and personally thank each one who gets a drink.
• Perpetuate the Memories: Set up a Facebook page or blog where VBS leaders can share memorable experiences after VBS is over. Use these quotes in recruitment the next year.
• Make Them Feel Good: Be sure to recognize them in a creative way if you do some sort of kick off or celebration night. Have them run out through a kid “tunnel.” Do a creative video highlighting the lead teachers. Pick a “Leader of the Day” to recognize outstanding work.

What creative idea do you have for VBS?

Several months ago, I came across a ministry called Visionary Parenting. You can go to their website to see all that they offer, but I wanted to highlight the free MP3′s on parenting that they offer. I have not listened to all of them, but the ones I have listened to are very biblical and filled with some great advice. Check them out.

You may could even contact the founder to see if he would be okay letting you distribute several of them on CD’s as follow up for new families. They are a great resources not only to get you excited about discipling your parents, but to pass along to parents as well.

I’ll leave you with a short 2 minute clip of the founder’s vision for Visionary Parenting:

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 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!

So you are on Facebook, you have a blog for your own children’s ministry, you twitter and kids in your ministry text you. Why do you need one more tech resource to keep track of? Well, you definitely need CM Connect because it puts the chidren’s ministry community all on one site.

CM Connect was started by Michael Chanley, the Children’s Minister at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, KY. Michael has a passion for connecting people and developing community so he launched this website as well as several others. Parent Unity is a similar site that gives parents a place to learn from, encorage and grow with one another. SM Connect is a place where Student Pastors can build community and network and PM Connect is a place for pastors, missionaries and evangelists to share ideas and strenghten relationships.

There are currently over 4000 members of the CM Connect community. There are a myriad of ways to connect with others through “friending,” joining groups (click here for the Free CM Stuff group), and participating in discussions about Children’s Ministry topics. It is definitely a must for Children’s Ministry leaders!

If you are already a member of CM Connect, I invite you to respond to this post to let the readers know how you find the community beneficial!

I’d love for you to “friend” me, look forward to meeting you (I’m also on Facebook if you’d like to join up with me there)!

Visit cmconnect.org

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!

Recently, I found out about a very nifty tool for the technological generation of parents that we serve. It’s called “Zefty” and is an online way for parents to help their children manage their allowance. They say they may add premium features down the road, but for now, everything is free. Here’s how the site describes its service:

1. Parents set up virtual accounts for their kids
2. Allowances can be automatically deposited
3. Parents manage withdrawals and deposits
4. Kids can print out ZeftyChecks to take to their parents
5. Kids can use ZeftyCalc to see how long they will have to save for purchases
6. Parents can use ZeftyCalc to find a reasonable amount for their allowance

Essentially, the parent is the bank branch with the actual money and Zefty operates as the online banking system. Obviously, the service will only work in a setting with older kids who can read and proficiently operate a computer. My daughters are preschoolers so we are resigned to giving them 4 quarters a week with one going to “Jesus.” Hopefully as they get older we’ll be able to use this site to teach them about Christ-centered financial management.