[Kid Inspiration]

What a fancy title… ‘Engaging with Trends’… let me subtitle even fancier…

Engaging with Trends
“Why using relevant pop culture elements can help
you create a ministry that kids refuse to miss.”

I started two new elements in our weekend services last weekend. It got dozens of kids excited, engaged and begging to attend church.

We have a bunch of ‘stations’ setup before we start the service so the kids can hang out and interact with the leaders before we start.

Craft stations, Air Hockey, Playstations, Xbox etc.

Well I added two new stations last weekend.

1. Nintendo DS Station
2. Tazo Station

The biggest selling portable gaming system in the world is the Nintendo DS… Especially with kids.

And one of the coolest things to do is collect tazos… especially Footy Tazo’s. It is so popular advocare vitamin online various schools have banned them from being traded at school!! (You know something is engaging kids when they ban it!!)

Listen, you may not live in Australia and have NRL or AFL Tazo’s, but I would place money on the fact that your kids are trading some kind of sports collector cards!

So I create an area where kids can play each other on their DS’s (over Wi-Fi) and trade tazo’s… it is amazing the kids that come out of their shell when you start trading with them.

Of course as a leader you don’t just create an area for kids and not get involved yourself… so I am now the owner of a Nintendo DS with Diddy Kong Racing and have a huge pile of NRL Tazo’s (research I tell my wife!).

As a minister to kids you do not bring in your KIDS toys… you bring in YOUR toys!

I don’t tell the kids that I have bought a DS for my little boy Brooklyn, I tell them it’s mine! (And it is… Brooklyn is allowed no where near it! – he’s 1)

Your mission is to find out this weekend:

1. How many of your kids have a DS
2. What cards are they collecting

OK…

This is not a post about technology (none of your kids may have a Nintendo), it is about getting into your kids world!

So you can bet at the beginning of next years footy season I will have a whole corner devoted to Rugby League and will be finding out the most popular games so I can buy it and practice enough to whip all my kids at it!!!

FOR AUSSIES: Go onto ebay and search for ‘Tazo‘, you can buy a whole set without having to go through the hassle of collecting them in chip packets. While you’re there, buy a second hand DS!

I am:

• Building credibility with kids
• Building a bridge to speak into their lives
• Creating a cool environment to participate in
• Staying young
• Creating topics I can talk to kids about
• Redeeming technology
• Bringing ‘new and fresh’ elements into our services
• Having fun!
• Finding excuses to buy stuff
• Training my hand-eye coordination
• Supporting Australian sport
• Creating opportunities for introvert kids to be admired (who has the most cards/highest score is the ‘man!’)

It’s a win-win situation!

NOTE: Don’t get too attached to your collecting cards… make a point to give away your best and rarest to your kids. I don’t care about collecting the set… only helping my kids to get every card.

Kids really add buy carisoprodol do learn from their culture!

Check out the video below…

adalat no prescription color=”#330000″>Religion does seem to be good for young children. The religious attendance of parents and a cohesive religious environment in the home yields significant benefits for children’s behavioral, emotional, and cognitive development, and such outcomes are most pronounced when both partners attend services frequently.”

Early Childhood Longitudinal Study by researchers at Mississippi State University

Article from Rick Warren’s Ministry Toolbox — Church is good for children.

That’s the message of a new study that says young children of churchgoing parents fare better behaviorally, emotionally, and cognitively than do children of parents who never attend church. In fact, the more often the parents attend, the better off the kids are.

Nice.

When I started blogging in November of 2004 there was not much in the way of blogging going on that had anything with ministry to children. I actually blogged only twice that month, but that has since grown to 340 posts, but since then millions of blogs have been added and the list of blogs relating to serving children on this earth has grown.

Technorati lists 1,150 blogs that discuss Youth Ministry, and 232 blogs that discuss children’s ministry. Both those number are lower if we count only those blogs that are strongly focussed on ministry to youth/children.

I now actively follow 50 blogs that relate to CM… some of them loosely related, some fully engaged conversation about how to reach children for Jesus Christ.

But I have been pretty pumped to see the rise in recent times of quality blogging exploding like a coke bottle full of mentos… like an out of control object lesson involving baking soda…

So here are my top ten blogs, some of these are new, some are ancient (more than a year old):

• Jim Wideman’s Blog – The legend, the man, the blog… Brother Jim joins the blogosphere. It seems like Jim has exploded online in the last month or so, first by starting a Podcast, then joining Kidology and posting voraciously and now to top it all off a BLOG! Jim is the Children’s Pastor at Church on the Move and a veteran… the ‘Camp Dad’ of children’s ministry. Generous both with his time and words I love seeing a dude stick around for so long. Staying and building the local church.
• Just Pudge – Just like the aforementioned coke, Pudge Huckaby exploded with some of the best written posts on ministry I have read in ages! Pudge is the Elementary School Pastor at Newspring Churches Children’s Ministry ‘The Majestic‘ (love that name!). After an initial flurry of brilliance, the blog is taking a break, but I fully expect Pudge to return to his former glory and join the pantheon of greatness that he is destined to become a part of!
• Children’s Ministry and Culture – The blog of Larry Shallenberger and Keith Johnson, this sucker has been around almost as long as my own blog. Both are authors of a number of books and contribute to CM Mag. They have great insight into the culture of children and are particularly bright individuals prone to finding obscure research and applying it to work with children and then causing me to think long and deeply about it.
• Karl Bastian (the Kidologist) – Karl… where does one start. The creator of Kidology.org, possibly… okay not possibly… hands down the best forum online to get answers from your peers around the world. The blog is a mixture of personal entries (beautiful adoption story), and a bizarre fascination with Mountain Dew and almost beats me out in the oldness stakes, but not quite (March 2005).
• The Remix of Children’s Ministry – The Children’s Pastor of Horizon Community Church in Ohio, US. Matt is not the most prolific blogger but has some very nice things to say about me, so I thought I should give him a shout-out But seriously when he speaks, I listen.
• Phil Vischer -The creator of the Veggies. Not really a CM focussed blog, but Phil has VERY cool things to say about the media industry and is very intelligent.
• Multi-Site Kids – Tammy Melchien serves as the Executive Director of Kids’ City, the Children’s Ministry of Community Christian Church. CCC is a multi-site church with 8 locations in the Chicagoland area. She has great insight on how to duplicate ministries and blogs very candidly and openly about it.
• P2 – Family Pastor of Ridge Stone Church in Canton, Ga. Another old man in the blog world (Started June 2005), and doing cool things in a relatively new church plant.
• Children’s Ministry by Design – Stephen Posey is one of the Children’s Pastors at Church On The Move in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It’s great to see not only Jim blogging, but his staff getting into it as well! A baby blog started in March 07 but STACKS of great content already!
• Glen Woods – Currently the volunteer Children’s Pastor of Portland Open Bible Church. actos sales Another brainy dude who is writing about the intersection of theology and culture in the practice of children’s ministry… I like that… theology and culture.

So there you have it. I have a bunch of other favourites, but they have all been punished because they don’t write enough

The message is clear… if you are reading this and don’t have a blog. Get one… and start writing.

UPDATE: Corrected link to Matt McKee’s blog.

I just read the best newspaper article ever.

Would you like to read it?

But what if I do and then you don’t read it all the way through… and watch the video clips on the page?

I guess I will have to take that chance.

Pearls Before Breakfast by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post.

Can one of the nation’s greatest musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? The newspaper sets out to discover if violinist Josh Bell — and his Stradivarius — could stop busy commuters in their tracks. Read On.

Have a thorough read of the article… take your time, it may take a few minutes to really read it all.

Done?

Okay, just love the premise and experiment.

You can probably guess the one section actos prescriptions that I loved the most.

Yep.

Its was this paragraph.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

The point I would like to propose to you is this.

NOT that parents can often be too busy to notice their children.

BUT that every child in their first year of school considers themselves an artist/painter/sculpter. Then with every subsequent year when you ask the same question less and less children put up their hands to admit to their creativity.

Until you have a classroom with no artists by early high school.

(Teachers, try the above in your classroom).

This from the aforementioned article.

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

Maybe life just chokes the poetry out of us.

When kids notice beauty… life…

I want to let them enjoy it.

And teach them how to live with poetry.

The downside to day care?

These kind of articles become a LOT more interesting when you have a one year old child — in day care three days a week.

It seems that children who are looked after by their mothers up to the age of 3 do significantly better in developmental tests than those cared for by nurseries, nannies, childminders or relatives.

Of course, statistical studies on behavior and grades and development alone cannot measure the full impact on children of spending their days away from both parents. The presence of a parent provides children with a sense of safety and well being, personal love, the instilling of family values, and a stronger family bond. Parents are parents best when they are actually actos 6o mg present. A nanny or other child care provider may be able to love a child and teach him to follow all the rules. But more than the feminists will admit, children often…simply need Mom and Dad.

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. – Proverbs 22:6

Related Links:

A Downside to Day Care? – MSNBC
•Study: Day Care Slightly Weakens Child-Mother Bond – CNN
•Mother’s Care is Best For First Three Years – The Times
•Number of Hours and Length of Time in Child Care – nces.ed.gov
•Blueprint For Action – Healthychildcare.org
•Official: Babies Do Best With Mother – The Guardian

Nice article about ‘contemporizing’ the bible for kids.

A pain-free way to get a little blip on the attention-o-meter is to look for strategic places you can contemporize the language. actos 30 mg In other words, add some modern lingo, even pop culture references, to tug them in.

Link

Author Donald Miller wrote this after attending screenwriting course:

It did not escape me, as I listenend to 36 hours of story deconstruction, how powerful story is. The overwhelming majority of the Bible, in fact, is story. We often think of the Bible as creeds and precepts, but it is anything but. Instead, the stories of the Bible work to create an internal map, a guide and compass, teaching us what is worth pursuing and what is worthless, what is meaningful and what is not. Right and wrong, then, are not often taught by lists (truth without meaningful context) but rather through the tools of story. The seminar made me wonder why religious institutions who aim to teach ancient texts don’t have story departments alongside their systematic pursuits. It seems that one might benefit from the other.

Link

Keeping kids attention.

But…

Is there a line?

Can we put too many words in the ‘mouth’ of the bible?

I read an article that talked about the development of childrens bibles from the 1800′s until now.

It seems that there are some extra-biblia (that a word?) additions to some of the stories in the kids versions. Or they cut off the story at a happy ending not a tragic one – and it is getting more widespread every year.

When are we giving kids false information?

A lot of my mental images of bible stories are pictures/artwork/movies that I have seen as a child… nice line of animals ldeaing into the ark (It was 2 of every unclean animal, 7 of every clean one Gen 7:2-3)

So there is a line I guess – and there is nothing I love doing more that shattering a bible ‘myth’ that was created by a church culture or a line taken out of context (eg. Only God can understand you when you speak in tongues).

The bottom line (I love a good bottom line).

Children need to understand the bible as ONE narrative, extending from creation to the end of time, teaching them the reality of the world around them.

(I am sure there is a better bottom line, maybe you could write it?)

Godtube.com

Why?

WHY?

From MSNBC

GodTube is the best example of a new group of Web sites that aim to do the same things regular Web sites do, but with a Christian (or Christian conservative) point of view. Like the idea of MySpace, but hate the thought of your children as prey? Try Famster, a secure online community for families. Like Wikipedia, but chafe at what you see as its liberal bias? Read On.

Somewhere along the way someone has a brilliant idea. Let’s take an element of culture and prop up the word Christian in front of it. Then it is now safe for people of faith to participate in culture.

A Christian MySpace, a Christian music genre, a Christian movie, a Christian email address, a Christian bookstore.

So we separate from culture and live in a Christian gated community.

If there is one skill I REALLY want to impart to generations of children growing up right now around the world is how to engage culture… and FILTER it. What is bad, what is good? How can I tell the difference between art and obscenity?

Let’s teach kids how to make decisions on what media they consume, instead of training them to retreat from culture and build a Christian theme park.

Let’s be honest… the creation of Christian cultural ghettos are usually tied into profit.

It may be impossible for me to protect the children in our ministry from viewing pornography at a young age (average age is 11)… although I will fight to keep our kids pure.

But teaching, training and inspiring our children to make the right choice is my plan to populate the world with Godly adults who move from being just consumers of every cultural wind to creators of profound/Godly/entertaining/moving/beautiful works of art.

Slavery may still be with us (in the West) if William Wilberforce had decided to create a Christian Shipping Company instead of engaging the political arena actos 15 mg and standing up for justice… and for Christ.

UPDATE: Here is another article on a similar theme. Link

The one sports team I would love to be in.

(If I was a child again)

The Texas Titans

Backed by a billionaire who pays for three full-time coaches, two skills instructors and a trainer-nutritionist; putting them up at posh hotels; and giving them whatever else they need to win.

actonel price target=”_blank”>News Link

The Scholastic Corporation, US publisher of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, has reported a net loss of US$ 7.7 million for the quarter that ended February 26, 2007…

Now overall the company is doing fine, but you would think that selling over 300 million books just in one series would help your companies bottom line?

No?

Link actonel generic teva

A bad day for Muppetville and Sesame Street…

Elmo has hooked up with Barbie.

Barbie Loves T.M.X. Elmo Doll

From Amazon product description: It’s fun synergy! Always on top of what’s hot, Barbie knows everyone loves Elmo. Barbie also knows what Elmo is up to, but isn’t telling! Dressed in cool T.M.X. Elmo graphic print tee, Barbie is the queen of the style scene and together, Barbie and Elmo are the talk of the town! Includes Barbie doll and a mini plush Elmo.

I never thought I would say it, but I guess the midlife crisis hits everyone (even though Elmo is only 3 1/2 years old he technically over twenty which is a long actonel 75 mg time in monster years), and Elmo has the aging rocker syndrome, whereby you date someone a quarter your age and get a tattoo (I cannot confirm the tattoo part).

Elmo, I can only pray that you sign a pre-nup before taking this relationship any further!

A sad day indeed

Interesting analysis from the Sydney Morning Herald about this current generation of children. It seems that high-density living often meant children missed outside play vital to motor skill development. So we have timid kids who don’t like to paly on the scary park playground.

Here are the stats:

- Proportion of Sydneysiders living in flats: 17%

- Families in flats with more than one child under five: 3.2%

- Families in flats with children under 15: 17.2%.

I guess the message is clear, get your kids outside to play!

acomplia generic target=”_blank”>Link

I heard about this amazing innovation a few months ago and have been looking forward to seeing the final project… well it has been finished.

The laptops are powered with a wind-up crank, have very low power consumption and will let children interact with each other while learning. It is touted as a potent learning tool created expressly for the world’s poorest children living in its most remote environments.

Read a BBC news report here.

Nicholas aciphex pharmaciess online Negroponte is former Director of the MIT Media Lab, and founder of the non-profit, One Laptop Per Child, dedicated to making the famed $100 laptop a reality.

In this talk, he outlines some of the challenges of getting a $100 laptop produced, and explains why he stepped down as Media Lab director to focus on it full-time, “for the rest of my life.”

I love that great minds are committing themselves to helping the plight of poor children around the world!

I read this recently… is he overreacting? Or telling it like it is?

Thoughts?

Enough is Enough
Ben L. Amos

I’ve had all I can stand and I cants stand no more! I am angry, hurt, dismayed and utterly disappointed at the so called adults in this nation. We have sacrificed our greatest resource into the raging infernos of our meticulously constructed Deities of money, convenience, entertainment, irresponsibility, and self realization. We adults; parents, counselors, entertainers, teachers, politicians so easily shun our responsibility to protect the emotions, minds, souls of our children; passing the blame like a hot potato one to another.

I am amazed and incensed at the what was once viewed as vulgar, inappropriate, and too “mature” for children and young adults is now cute. I listened the other day in utter disbelief as a girl of 6 called into a local radio station in Southern California to introduce the #2 song for the week labeled “Smack That”. I was appalled as I heard the parents or whatever adults watching her in the background laughing and applauding and the DJ proud and happy announced that was the youngest guest DJ. Us adults told our kids “have sex just protect yourself” now sexually transmitted disease and babies having babies is an epidemic. Uhh hello, do you not understand that kids only hear what they want to hear. (Have sex)

We adults have said “hey they are only games“, gratuitously violent, bloody, and graphic in nature but games nevertheless. Now kids are massacring one another in schools nationwide, 5 year olds are bludgeoning their 2 year old siblings to death, and teenagers are posting messages on the web to have their parents murdered. We adults have said “hey calm down Mr. and Mrs. Stuffy they’re only songs, come on kids will be kids, this is America and we don’t believe in censorship.” Now kids across America and the globe, Black, Asian, White, and Latino all want to be “hard”, dress and act like Hoe’s, smoke Black and Tan cigars, to imitate the neoteric ubiquitous bad boy that permeate the media from video’s to radio.

Money hungry egocentric entertainers shift the blame to the parents, uninvolved clueless parents who allow their children to play games in the “Grand Theft Auto” genre like they’re Ms. Pac-Man blame the teachers, cynical unimaginative teachers blame the politicians and the government, politicians void of integrity, guts, and loyalty to their nation blame, well other politicians of the opposite. Our churches spend multi millions on sanctuaries and seminars while allocating less than 5 to 10% of their budgets to youth programs.

I boldly declare that you, America, have been duped, hoodwinked, sold acres of worthless barren swamp land, the aciphex generic cananda wool has been pulled over your eyes; someone sucker-punched you, they pulled a fast one on you! They told you not to discipline your children; “let em’ make their own choices.” They said don’t censor what they hear they are going to hear it anyway. They told you and you conceded that truth is relative and religion and morality is restrictive, suppressive, and no longer and has any bearing on a civilized society. They told you music and movies are simply entertainment and they have no bearing on the decision making process.

Now the violence, drug abuse, teen anger and rebellion, the trend of high dropouts, teen pregnancy, and teen mental illness currently permeates every social, economic, racial, ethnic and geographical people group in America. My soul grieves for our children, my eyes remain in a perpetual state of moisture and my the anger percolates at my fellow parents, politicians, teachers, and entertainment community who have allowed and many even perpetuated the emotional rape and molestation of the innocence of America’s children.

My boys have been robbed of the chance to gaze at amazement at the body of a young woman for the first time because at the tender age of 5 it is thrown in his face at the everyone grocery line. My teen age daughters have been denied the euphoric and innocent feeling of when a young man gently grabs her hand and ask her to dance because Disney Channel and Nick Jr. says they should be doing that at 10 not 16. When she turns on the radio she is lyrically violated and all of society from 17 Magazine to Cosmo says echo’s those rhythmic chants saying to young women that it is normal for a guy best line to be “what to do ms? Uhh when can I hit that?” Someone must do something about it and I guarantee I will be one of those people if I have to knock on doors to get people to wake up so be it.

Ben Amos
Ben Dare Entertainment Commentary

One of my favourite blogs: the cool hunter has a number of posts related to kids and cool stuff for kids.I see a lot of companies and businesses creating environments for kids these days. Which is a fantastic thing… adults are starting to think from a child’s perspective (very biblical).

Here are a list of these companies stolen from a kidology.org forum post

See the original post here .

• www.wackyworld.tv
• www.realfakebuildings.com
• www.littlemountainproductions.com
• www.creativeforkids.com
• www.cvmkids.com
• www.worldsofwow.com
• http://www.dreambigstudios.com/
• http://www.happytheartist.com/
• http://shanegrammer.com/
• http://labrosseltd.com/childrens.php3
• http://lassocreative.com/scenic/scenic%20_portfolio/index.php
• http://www.faithworkstudio.com/
• http://www.jonathanmartincreative.com
• http://www.sunnyday.org/wallmurals/childsroom/child_dept.htm
• http://www.angelfire.com/art/person/logos_signs.htm
• http://www.alsupworkofheart.org/index.html
• www.starryhostdesign.com
• http://www.wonderworkstudios.com/THEMES.htm
• http://www.kingdomproductions.net/Themed%20Environments1.html

All these companies create awesome looking themed environments, and I am accutane price excited that churches around the world are investing in children and facilities for children. The look that these companies create is often ‘cartooney’ and ‘fun’, engaging kids each week during services. But I got even more inspired by some of the creations from around the world. Not just fun and cool looking but hugely functional!

I love the cartoons, but I love the spaces that get kids involved WITH them.

Check out the pictures and see if you don’t get as inspired as I did!

The Cool Hunter. Have a scroll down this page for some awe inspiring design ideas!

Library where kids are inspired to read.

The Kids Republic bookstore in Beijing incorporates the core design elements of a kid’s playground, these slippery slide-inspired-shelves house books in an incredibly fun way. Breaking from the traditional table and chair reading areas, padded L shaped reading stools are used and enjoyed by tiny readers. Dull lighting is replaced by snakelike fittings.

A tree-inspired day care center is a far cry from fake grass enhanced playgrounds. The tree trunk is the very foundation of the center, and as such creates the security blanket for the entire structure.

Subscribe to the Cool Hunter blog… there is some truly inspiring design happening around the world… especially for kids!

Wow.

…

Crazy. acai purchase