When my friend told me today about Red Ferris Wheel, I almost plucked my eyeball out in sheer excitement. Zach Fonville has provided us with a host of free still images and motion backgrounds. It is a HUGE collection! Download them now for your worship environments!
I’m not big on pulpit pleas, but I do find a good deal of fruit in volunteer recruitment through a sweeping campaign each year. I do not just accept people on the spot (I’m big on interviewing, conducting personal asks, and placing according to passions and gifts). We use this campaign to educate the congregation about upcoming ministries and make sure new people know there is a great opportunity to serve kids. We allow people to show interest in a particular position and then follow up with them with applications, interviews, and orientations. Here’s what I am doing this year. I have packaged it in a generic fashion so that your church can use almost everything I will be using.
Do you have a clip from a DVD you need for a message this weekend? Perhaps you want to convert some of your worship DVD’s to individual files so that you can more easily access them during a children’s worship.
Then you need Handbrake. I have used a paid program to rip tracks off of DVD’s and I really feel that Handbrake is the best. It is a free program and will allow you to rip full tracks or portions of chapters into MP4 format. While this format will not work in MS Powerpoint, it is a fully acceptable file in programs like Easy Worship, Pro Presenter, Song Show Plus, or Media Shout.
Big City Studio is the children’s church curriculum from Kidz Blitz (Roger Fields). We have been using it for 3 years now and it is incredibly awesome! In six years, it takes kids through the entire Bible and Roger and his team have come up with some high impact ways to get those Bible truths across to young minds. One resource I’ve created to help my Big City is a “Shout it Out” bumper video. Shout it Out is a “Wheel of Fortune” type game where kids guess letters and try to solve phrases that deal with the message for the morning. The kids really love this one. I used a song by Yancy.
See the video below or download it here.
Simply Youth Ministry, a dynamic student ministry company, has a lot of freebies on their site. Many of them can be used in CM. Have fun!
I’m thankful for partners in ministry. I have so much to learn from them.
Check out Simply Youth Ministry for a smattering of free resources like: forms, dramas, media, and videos. A great deal of this can be applicable to kid and family ministry.
I Am Second is a video testimony site with the goal of inspiring people to live for God and others. It currently features a host of videos from athletes, actors, and business persons. Some of them may have material not suitable for children (i.e. discussions of actions in the “old life”) but others would be very applicable (Colt McCoy and Joe Gibbs). You can only download a few from the I Am Second site, but you can download many others on Vimeo.
If you like one you can’t download, many church presentation programs allow you to display websites within the presentation. You could probably configure a work around that way. I have planned for adults to come into children’s worship to give their testimonies this summer. If I have a gap because someone didn’t show up or sign up for that day, I can always use one of these.
Christian Video Magazine is a free online magazine geared toward providing Christian viewpoints on the use of video and media in ministry settings. Here’s a quote from their site on what they do:
The purpose of Christian Video Magazine is simple. We want to provide our readers with articles that cover everything about using videos in the church, on their websites, and for ministry. How do you use them? How do you stream them? How do you create them? How do you project them? Where can you find them? Who is creating them? How will they impact mobile computing? What about background loops? And how can we make the best use of all of the fantastic Christian music videos?
You can either receive their magazine in a truncated email format or look at all of their articles in PDF or HTML format online. If you utilize videos in your ministry or want to keep up with relevant topics in the media industry, this is a good resource to check out.
Have a great video online that you want to use in your ministry? Maybe someone sent you a video that you want to convert to a different format.
The best online solution I have found for these purposes is Movavi. It is easy to use and not very finicky. I’ve used a variety of different sites that do the same things, but they always seem to have a few quirks.
If you are not familiar with Skype, it is a free computer to computer/phone line calling software. Computer phone systems have not quite taken the country by storm, but at this point they do have some special abilities, and yes, for the sake of my site, Skype is free (for the basic features and computer to computer calling).
This Sunday, I will be calling a family from our church who is serving in East Asia during both children’s worship services. I’ll project their video call on the screen and the computer will emit sound through the sound system so that all the kids in the worship can take part. We will hear them share their heart for missions and using a web cam in the worship room, we will allow some children to ask the missionary children questions.
We have done this once before and it was a success. You do have to beware that the video and sound could be choppy and it may take a few tries when the other person is in a country with poor internet infrastructure. But overall, it’s a good way to expose kids to missions work.
