So here’s what happened. – Christmas at our Church.

Here’s what didn’t happen – posting at this blog.

But I haven’t been entirely silent – I have written a couple of posts for Hillsong Collected which highlight the behind the scenes of our Kidsong Conference.

Kidsong Inside and Out Part 1

Kidsong Inside and Out Part 2

If you have a big event coming up for Kids soon, check it out it might just spark something off in your brain area!

There are some cool things happening online right now:

• cmconnect.org has had a facelift and it looks fresh!
• I kicked off a little community on Google+ for kidmin people, not sure what it will turn into but I just really like Google+
• Have a look at our Churches strategy for Summer Camps, it’s awesome and very cohesive. Instead of multiple pages its just one with all the info!

Blessings!

I have met over the last few years a large number of incredibly faithful kids pastors and leaders. A large percentage of the people who lead children’s ministries in Australia are volunteers and give a large chunk of their time to their local Church to see the ministry to children move forward.

I think these leaders have a HUGE amount to say to everyone involved in ministering to children. I am fascinated with the different forms that our little world of ministry takes on. Just last year a network that had seemingly languished here in NSW was resurrected and is finding it’s feet again. I have been able to be a part of a few of the gatherings and it has been such a blessing just to connect with leaders from other denominations across the spectrum of ministry in Australia. The Salvation Army people, Anglicans, Baptists and representatives from World Vision.

Now I don’t travel around very much except perhaps to the Kidshaper conference each year. But mainly I get to invite hundreds of pastors to the kids stream at our annual Hillsong Conference. So for me the net is a vital connection to leaders around this sunburnt land.

Maybe it’s the Tall Poppy thing in our culture – but my experience is that very few leaders in Australia a good at telling their own story.

There is so much God stuff going on with our kids in Australia I want to read some more about this, I want to hear more about this.

The most significant thing we have done in the last few years is start a preteen ministry. I wrote about it here: Re: Ideas for Children’s Ministry and have spoken about it everywhere I get the chance. What a WASTE if I had never shared the experience of starting this program and the blessing that it has been (I think I should talk more about it actually), and simply kept it to ourselves.

Right now someone is sitting on a story that will inspire me (or anyone) to greater effectiveness and new vision but they choose the path of least resistance and keep it to themselves. That’s not humble, that’s irresponsible.

<And Breathe…>

Here are some people telling the story of what God is doing in Aus:

Rob Bradbury is the Godfather Children’s ministry in Australia of has a new blog.

Children’s Ministry 1234 – The Planetshakers kids team

Brendon and Cathie Clancy – Kids worship leaders and pastors

Chris Neal – Keep writing Chris

Nathan Mclean – On Hillsong Kids staff at our Hills Campus!

Andrew Shepherd – 25 years in ministry and passionate as the day is long!

Funny Man Dan – My very own muffin of mirth keeping you smiling since 1984

Kathryn Macdowall – Hillsong Kids staff and the worlds greatest curriculum writer

Uniting Church – News from the Uniting Church in Australia

This was a pretty quick list and far too small. I am sure it needs to grow. If you know of others please leave a comment below and I will edit this post!

P.S. This is kinda like a part two of my last post Blogging Matters.

HT to TSK on this one.

Seth Godin & Tom Peters on blogging

I have tried to put into words the impact and point of blogging to many people over the years. These two influential business leaders put it brilliantly!

If you are leading anything like a ministry or team I want you to understand that you have a voice and a platform. You are called to steward that responsibility and privilege! If you don’t record and share what God is doing with and through you in this age of information I believe you are missing something quite profound.

Paul recorded his life and it turned into the New Testament.

That opportunity is not really open to us today, but who knows what could happen if you took steps to present your voice to the world? At least have enough respect for your calling to treat it as precious and important.

A book is simply a container for an idea (what makes a book a book?).

After you are gone, where will your ideas be contained? If you don’t do something about it… nowhere.

At the very least give your future generations the inspiration of discovering your story, your journey with God!

A lot of noise has been made (in our little but colourful corner of the the internets) about the 2011 Ministry To Children Blog Madness competition.

I was up in one of the divisions in the first round (there are four) but owing to our Colour Women’s conference and all that was happening it just passed me by without much comment on my part.

Unlike the 2010 comp. where the prize was just winning, this year Tony Kummer put up an iPad as a first prize!

I couldn’t let the whole thing happen without saying how awesome that was, so kudos to Tony!

The four final blogs are all worthy of winning and I love reading all of them.

Sam Luce

Small Town Kidmin (Jared Massey)

Justyn Smith

Leader 2 Leader (Jim Wideman)

There is more diversity each year in our world of kidmin blogging and I am so happy to see that!

At our official Hillsong Blog ‘Collected’ I just had a post of mine go up. It’s a quite a strong piece about not outsourcing only what we can do as parents. And also a call to take Church seriously. I would love you to visit, have a read and at the least click the like button at the bottom. But at the most write a comment/response. It would be GREAT to get conversation going about this topic on Collected…. it would say so much to have the topic that is often a discussion on kids pastors blogs get some major recognition on our wider Church blog! Thanks in advance.

Here is the post:

I have outsourced my child’s swimming development.

You see, I’m just not an expert on the subject. I haven’t studied swim theory and I am completely unfamiliar with what it takes to learn how to become a swimmer even to the most basic of levels… which I would assume is ‘not drowning’. Click to read on!

So Tony Kummer at Ministry to Children has put together a evista without prescription target=”_blank”>top 100 list of kidmin blogs.

It took him a huge amount of effort to put this together, so hats off to you Tony!! I would be blogging about it even if I didn’t come in at third place… just because of the hours he put into it!

I have been blogging since late 2004 and all I can say is that there is something about longevity and persistence. Just showing up is 90% of success I think. It will be a big milestone to see this blog at the ten year mark!

Bring on 2014!

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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 detrol la cheap 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 depo provera generic 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 cymbalta cheap 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 compare prices nexium 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 clomid brand online 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 claritin without prescription 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)

claritin prices target=”_blank”>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 claritin on sale 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 cipro cheap 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.