Over at Ministry-To-Children.com there is a great comp going on.

2010 Kids Ministry Blog Madness

Vote for Your Favorite Kidmin Blogger

Here’s How It Works – Listed on the site are the top 64 children’s ministry blogs arranged in a four division bracket-style tournament. (I guess in the U.S. sports are divided into four main divisions, which is cool… so my blog is in the West Division).

Sunday 21 March 2010 is when round #1 will close and the top picks in each division will advance.

So I have to call in some favours… especially for those volunteers and pastors at Hillsong Church you need to jump on over there and click the vote button in the appropriate spot.

Click here for the comp.

Slowly but surely every single person on the team at Hillsong Kids is becoming a blogger…  its my theory on growing a volunteer team… if every single team member will become a blogger, then maybe, just maybe every single blogger in the world will become a volunteer!

Not sure exactly on the logic yet, but it’s a work in progress.

Carlos Dyonisio (aka Cadu), is just one of the most passionate people I know about seeing the lives of kids changed for the better! He is from South America and came to Australia a number of years ago and has found himself serving here at Hillsong Church!

He is an uber nerd… I mean I am nerdy, but this guy has Linux installed on his laptop with no graphical interface… just think back to the days before windows on MS-DOS and you can imagine how he runs his computer.

His new blog is For One Child and already has some great content up.

P.S. Don’t read the post entitled Running the Race unless you really want to read about his bladder movements.

P.S. I am kinda serious about the blogging theory, the more your team can see their lives invested into being a voice for childhood the greater impact your Church community will have!

Today, being Thursday I posted a guest post at The Thursday Blog, which is the blog of a certain Funny Man Dan. He is currently in that season of life that exists between the due date and the baby actually appearing so asked me to post something for him.

Check it out:

A Tale of a womb and a man.

So yes, another life goal completed… to guest post at the blog of Funny Man Dan.

I just added a Subscribe by email box on the right hand column of this blog (looks like the box below).

So now you can receive edification and justification through email every time I post!

Yay.

Here are a few posts that hit it out of the park in the last few weeks!

Pudge on Leading for Tomorrow

A bunch of posts from Henry Zonio about the Conspire Conference Rewiring Ministry for the Digital Learner,  Spiritual Formation in Children

Fascinating stuff from The Connecting Church and Home Conference from Jared Kennedy via Doug

Shane Hipps on Technology from the Q blog! MUST WATCH! Hipps discusses how technology shapes your faith and offers a critique of the cliche “the methods change but the message doesn’t.”

How to Blog 101 from churchrelevance.com

So after losing a whole bunch of blog posts due to some database weirdness and the backup that my webhost was about 2-3 days before but unfortunately  after the issue and my backup was from 8 Jan so about a month ago I went back into google reader (which obviously cache’s each blog) and pasted each post back into my site…

Phew, although I did feel a little lame about my rather scarce blogging pattern over summer highlighted by the realtively quick time it took to reconstruct my blog.

And I lost a whole HEAP of comments on each of those posts! If I lost one of yours I am truly sorry… it was your work!

So…

1. Backup your work regularly.

2. Backup your work regularly.

3. Regularly is like once a week for me.

The good to come out of this is I will endeavour to post some quality posts with increased frequency.

(write more good stuff)

Dave out.

I haven’t written one of these posts in a while, but I think to start out 2009 it would be great to write about some new blogs and not so new blogs on the internets.

The last time I wrote something like this was in May 2007: The State of the CM Blogosphere

So today I write the State of the CM Blogosphere Jan 2009, or “Blogs of most excellent repute”

I will try and write about new blogs here rather than the ones listed in the last report. But if I really feel like there is consistent goodness coming from those blogs I will be forced by sheer respect to mention them. It is worth at this point to mention two resources: church.alltop.com, A list of some very influential Church blogs and from Church Relevance: The Top Church Blogs

I cannot even remember how I got the number of 232 blogs that discuss children’s ministry in my old post, I even went onto Technorati to figure it out, but the site was slow so I gave up. I do follow 121 blogs that relate to ministry to children, although only a very small amount of those update regulary.

I do need to talk about the rise of twitter this last year, but that will be kept for another post!

So, here are a few of the top blogs that I love reading at the beginning of 2009!

• Just Pudge – Still in the game, probably one of the most engaging blogs still to read, who has taken a cue from his senior pastor Perry Noble who writes an enormously readable blog. It was great to meet the children’s pastor of Newspring Cherie Duffy when she was over here in October who doesn’t blog but does twitter.
• Justyn Smith – From ‘The Church‘ in South Las Vegas. Started strong and hopefully will keep going because I think he has a lot to say! I met him last year when he was over here in Sydney with his pastor Benny Perez to speak and is a fantastic young pastor to children!
• Jim Wideman – Just a great guy starting out in ministry, a great fresh new pastor with a LOT of wisdom and a huge future ahead of him (at least thats what it seems like ). I will be meeting him this year when he makes it over to Australia with his daughter Yancy to speak at kidshaper conference.
• Rob Bradbury – Rob and his team from Planetshakers Church in Melbourne blog about a lot of cool stuff… now because it’s not just Rob, I think it’s frequency of posts could increase. And they do need to remove the annoying Captcha for commenting (hint, hint) But Rob is really my hero in ministry in Australia. And you should get the K Magazine issue that features him on the cover with a fantastic article about their relatively new church plant.
• JC’s Thompson – A blogger since Sept 2007, the Elementary Production Director for the Children’s Ministry at Brookwood Church in Simpsonville, SC (I copy and pasted this from his site). I love the way he thinks so read this post to get an idea of what ticks in his brain. Looking forward to reading more!
• Kenny Conley – Kenny is the Next Generation Pastor at Gateway Community Church in Austin, Texas. Love the practical stuff that has been coming from Kenny recently… the photos for portable church and makeover stuff. I do learn visually so it has been great for me to see all those photos!
• Jonathan Fietzer – The Assistant Children’s Pastor at World Outreach and Bible Training Center in Milwaukee, WI. Jonathan has a very fancy site, and lots of great posts!
• Karl Bastian – Karl has a new blog look and is fulltime on kidology.org, by far still the best place to get answers and support when you need them from incredibly generous people. He writes a great blog with a fantastic mix of personal and minstry.

etc.

etc.

Lots more that I could write about, but pasting all those links in takes a lot of time and my wrists are beginning to hurt.

TIPS: If you are starting to think about maybe writing a blog, then please do it. One of the greatest things I have found is that making my thoughts public is a great accountablility system. Keeps me learning and giving and making time just to think (VERY important for any form of creativity). And make sure to mix the ministry with your personal life, if we have learnt one thing from Pixar movies is that story matters. I want to know YOUR story, not just your thoughts.

So it’s time to introduce you to three new blogs.

I am a little apprehensive about two of them, but am confident about the third for reasons I shall now disclose.

The Good Life by Nathan McLean. Now Nathan is another children’s pastor here at Hillsong who has many good intentions about blogging but has issues following through. Although he has no problems following through in other areas.

He has just had his first baby and loving being a father. Hopefully this little pump will encourage him to put down thoughts on his blog. (of course I may just need to email him is login details for the 7th time)

Vogelpedia by Mike Vogel. Mike is a U.S. Maryland native who made his way over here to our Bible College three years ago and has since become an invaluable leader in our ministry. He runs the Voltage ministry (pre-teen) in our City Campus and is just the epitome of a great follower, which makes him a brilliant leader! I am hopeful about his blog, mainly because he is almost as competitive as Nathan and will make sure he wipes the floor in the regularity and quality of blog posts after this announcement (won’t you Mike)

Kathryn Joy by Kathryn Macdowall. I have a little more confidence in recommending this blog as Kathryn has probably tripled my boys blogging in just a few weeks. She is our Hills Campus administrator and curriculum writing guru, and very single… (see I am trying Kathryn — just putting it out there).

So here are three new blogs for your reading pleasure and hopefully just enough impetus to enable some brilliant thoughts to emerge from within their capable minds!

YouTube is a site that creates nothing.

All the creators did (before Google bought the site) was put up a way for people to create content and share it with the world.

I mean its not like a news site where people create meaningful content at the employ of the almighty Goog… it’s just a way to put lame videos that SHOULD have been sent to the funniest home video show of your choosing!

And therein lies the crux.

Millions of people have made YouTube what it is today by creating all the content FOR Google (then they make millions from advertising, which is a whole other rant).

This culture, and the culture of our kids growing up is shifting from ‘consumers’ to ‘contributors’.

I watched Macgyver diffuse bombs using a matchbox and three hairpins growing up, I never really considered it possible to make my own episode… even if I wanted to, film was expensive and forget about editing it!

Today’s culture honours the contributors, the creators, those brave enough to put something out there and they disregard the leechers, the whiners, the critics who have never created anything.

You want to have an opinion that is valued, a voice that commands respect…

CONTRIBUTE!

Networking is not so much just about meeting other like minded people, it’s about the bringing value.

The little community of Children’s Ministry bloggers that has grown and developed in the last four years is full of people that CREATE content.

Are you serious about connecting?

Do you really want to build relationships that sharpen you?

Do you want the generation rising to listen to anything you have to say?

Then WRITE something, FILM something, RECORD something… and put it out there for every person in the known universe to read!

(btw: There are at least 900,000 blog posts every day online.)

Please, for your sake: Move from consumer to contributor!

Here are a few great posts I read recently:

Notes from Reggie Joiner

• A lot of kids leave church experience rich but relationally poor
• What is the purpose of kids applying what they learn? So they can see God and others can see God in them.
• No one is more strategically positioned to experience all levels of spiritual growth in a child than a small group leader.
• The reason volunteer leaders are not committed to children is because we’re not asking them to be committed to children. We give them outs every way possible.
• How do we partner with parents? By casting vision to parents and getting parents so bought in that they cast the vision at home.

Speaking the truth in Love

Mark Driscoll with some helpful words about using our words to speak the truth in love.

4 Assumptions during the busy season

Here’s 4 assumptions I asked our teams to make during the next 4 months of ministry…

Enjoy.

Here are a few posts that I have ‘starred’ in Google reader.

They either caught my eye, or my massive nerdy tendencies.

From various blogs all over this earth:

Creating a Healthy Volunteer Environment -Part 2
Yesterday we talked about what an unhealthy volunteer looks like. It’s not as easy as just firing all those who bring a spirit of unhealthiness to our ministries or arena’s; but I can begin to change the environment that all my volunteer exist within.
I present my Top 6 things to Never do or say to a Volunteer

The Elephant Song
If you have young children, or if you’re young at heart, this is the song for you: The Elephant Song by Eric Herman (video created by Eric’s wife Roseann with the help of their 3-year-old daughter Becca. The little girl in the song is Meghan, who was 6 at the time).

Special Needs Ministry for Autistic Children
By its very nature, children’s ministry is challenging, but special needs ministry takes the challenge to a whole new level. Any children’s pastor familiar with teaching special needs children understands the importance of developing a unique approach and relationship with each child. It takes a great deal of effort, but it is well worth it when you can effectively connect and minister to a special needs child.

Ten Questions: Introspection

1. In what area of life have I lost my passion? (What can I do to get it back?)
2. If the enemy were going to “take me out,” what are my three most vulnerable points?
3. What new burden has God given me in the last year?
4. What have I unlearned that has made me closer to God?
5. What new discipline is God calling me to do?
6. What has God asked me to do that I haven’t yet done?
7. Is there something that I think about more than I think about pleasing God? (Money, possessions, ministry, family, recreation, something else.)
8. Do I have an increasing joy in serving Christ?
9. Am I handling the pain of ministry with integrity?
10. Am I still being persecuted for my faith in Christ?

Putting Strength To Work
As always with these meetings, we learned about the child’s performance that has both good and bad. We ended up discussing about the poor results, carelessness, concerns and how to fix them. What Marcus Buckingham shares in this video resonate with us

I follow a 100 or so blogs right now (far too many, and I am estimating because it’s midnight and changing tabs on my internet browsers seems like a big deal right now). But every time I open Google Reader I am confronted with 800 or so unread posts!

And over 140 unread Childrens Ministry related posts… which would ordinarily make me a little anxious to catch up with all the posted goodness — but a second emotion flooded my mind which was ‘Yay’… (not really an emotion).

The blogosphere is slowly but surely filling up with more and more blogs relating to the bringing of children to Jesus, the discipling, reaching out to and general focus of the ministry of children… that is why I say ‘Yay’.

So bring it on… the more unread posts the better.

Incidentally, Pudge is running a poll about blogging, so head on over there.

P.S. Blogging is slow here at the moment owing to the momentus effort being rendered to complete our brand new curriculum (hillsongkidsbig.com)

This week brings around our annual Colour Conference!

Thousands of women at the Acer Arena for a few days of maximum estrogen.

I love the concept of live blogging (real time commentary), but that kinda only works if you are attending the conference, so I thought I would live blog the experience for the kids we are putting on!

So follow me on twitter if you have it.

http://twitter.com/kidinspiration

If you don’t have an account, click here to get one free!

Twitter is a unique approach to communication and networking based on the simple concept of status. What are you doing? What are your friends doing—right now? With Twitter, you may answer this question over SMS, IM, or the Web and the responses are shared between contacts.

Okay… I am writing this on my brand new iphone that doesn’t quite function as a phone yet.
Owing to my inability to wait until they come to Aus ‘officially’, I have otherwise acquired one from an undisclosed source and have… Worked around the issues you might say.
Next week should bring phone capabilities with a little piece of plastic from Hong Kong.
So no real content in this post… Just one man trying to be cool… in a desperatly nerdy kinda way.

Following up from my Rant on Blogging, here is advice from Al Mohler, the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary:

Mohler emphasized the importance of taking “the new media seriously, not making it a bulletin board for isolated, disconnected, reckless ideas, snarky comments and anonymous diatribes, but rather, a place where seriously-minded Christians do the seriously-minded Christian thing and make serious Christian arguments in a serious Christian way with love and with charity, with boldness and with courage.

“Should Christians go into the wild, wild, west? Yes,” said Mohler. “But we need to go in understanding that there is no sheriff. But that doesn’t mean that we do not have a higher accountability, certainly we do.

Read the rest of Godblogging USA