[Kid Inspiration]

Okay, so as you may be aware we are working at this moment on our first Hillsong Kids Curriculum. So that has me up late writing content and messages and scripts and stuff.

The one site I visit regularly is Desiring God which is the teaching ministry of John Piper whenever I need a shot of Theology. He pretty much has everything he has ever written, thought about writing, or even thought about thought about writing online which makes it a fantastic resource to check out some theology points. Another I will check is Koinonia House (Chuck and Nancy Missler).

So I was over there searching Desiring God for some insight on Adam and Eve. Trying to figure out how to express what happened in the garden to kids.

And I came across quite simply a mind expanding little article that has given me a perspective on what we are doing for our kids as we seek to raise them to follow Jesus.

Preaching As Concept Creation, Not Just Contextualization

As we think seriously about contextualizing the message of the Bible, let’s remember that we must also labor to bring about, in the minds of our listeners, conceptual categories that may be missing from their mental framework. If we only use the thought structures they already have, some crucial biblical truths will remain unintelligible, no matter how much contextualizing we do. This work of concept creation is harder than contextualization, but just as important.

We must pray and preach so that a new mental framework is created for seeing the world. Ultimately, this is not our doing. God must do it. The categories that make the biblical message look foolish are deeply rooted in sinful human nature. “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1Corinthians 2:14)….

That uses some serious big word with many syllables, but here’s what I got from it.

I strive to present everything to kids in context… like explaining how life differs from the time of Jesus, who would be a modern day tax collector, stuff like that. But what Piper suggests is that (if you read the entire article), is that we need to create structure in the minds of our kids to support that context.

The cool thing is we get to work with kids, the easiest humans on earth to create new paradigms simply because they don’t have to unlearn anything, they are completely open to new ideas.

Piper goes on to say that it is the work of the Holy Spirit, which is also a good thing because I wouldn’t have a clue how to start.

If you haven’t fallen asleep reading this post yet you might just be wired like me! So go read the article and if you’re brave, post a comment below with an example of concepts our kids need to know!

Haven’t read this yet… but it’s on the reading list.

From Brian Mclaren’s blog, links to research from Dave Csinos about children in the Bible.

BTW reading Brians book at the moment Everything must change.

There are VERY few veterans when it comes to ministry to children, especially in Australia… so it was a real honour to meet Dick Gruber last weekend. He was in town for a conference and popped in to one of our Sunday morning services.

Got to meet Dick and his son Tim, both incredibly tall indiviuals.

Although, don’t you hate it when you have guests and after saying farewell you realise you just spent the entire time talking about what YOU are doing and not taking the time to ask THEM questions… anyway I felt like that after they left… and I usually am and inquistive person!

Oh well!

“If there’s one thing I just don’t have time for, it’s delegation”…

No one would admit to agreeing with that statement, but we can often act like it. There are too many people sitting in churches doing nothing, that will find their purpose by serving children. Ask and keep on asking, knock and keep on knocking…

Found these great tips on delegation via churchrelevance.com

From Kevin Moore, the youth pastor at Oneighty from Church on the Move (Tulsa, OK)…

1. Speak it.
   Make an effort to clearly speak to each worker about the details of what they are suppose to do and how those details are important to the vision of the ministry they are serving in.
2. Spell it.
   Make sure that you spell out in writing (a) the vision and goal of the ministry, (b) the expectations and guidelines of the task, and (c) the details of the job.
3. Slowly Release.
   Let your worker watch you perform the task. Next allow them to work alongside of you. Spend some time observing them, giving complements and criticism when needed. Once they have learned from you, they are ready to succeed on their own.

Don’t miss any one of these steps!!

This is a follow-up post to McDonalds and Leadership

I have been developing the pipeline we could use for our ministry… here is the first draft if you will…

Hillsong Kids Leadership Pipeline:

A simple way to explain to emerging leaders how they could continue to expand their influence.

1. Hillsong Kids Leader – (Apprentice leader) Be a part of the team that makes our weekend services happen/run our mid week ministries.

2. K.D.G. (Kids Discipleship Groups) Leader – (Leader of children) Pastor a small group of children during our weekends and midweek in .

3. Team Leader – (Coach of leaders) Oversee a group of leaders.

4. Ministry oversight – (Lead a ministry) Run an aspect of Hillsong Kids.

5. Key Team – (Oversee leaders running ministries)

I think that implementing this could really impact every volunteer as they can see where they are and where they could go!

So Rob Bradbury at Planetshakers with his team has released 4. This is AWESOME, I got a hold of a copy from last weeks launch at Kidshaper conference. I have had a quick look through it and it is great to see this kind of quality coming out of a local church!

4 is the latest curriculum for kids 6-12. Using video clips with high quality praise and worship, Zing Things that add humour to the week’s less and preaching targeted at children, everything is set for you to add some personal group teaching before the kids disband into small groups. We surveyed children’s pastors around the world asking them what was important to have in a curriculum. ’4′ delivers on every point and more!

So hop on over to the 4 Resources site and check it out.

Dave Ferguson over at his blog posted this last week about the leadership lesson he learned at McDonalds.

He noted a poster describing the seven-step career path that McDonalds offers.

This is a great lesson for all companies and churches!  You need a career path or a leadership pipeline and leaders need to know about it! One of the most exciting things about successful reproducing churches is that they have put a high priority and intentionality on leadership development.  In fact, research tells us that those churches that have a Campus Pastor track or pipeline experience an average annual growth of 25%.  I’m lovin’ it!  And that same study tells us that the biggest mistake that multi-site churches make was “failure of attention to leadership development”.

I have spent the last week thinking about this… if Macca’s can make it this simple, then our children’s ministry can as well. So I am putting together the leadership pipeline for our leaders.

Simple.

Effective.

And Challenging.

What would your ministry pathway look like?

Rick Warren article: How to get more out of your reading time

I may be a little biased about reading here. I never had a TV until I was 12… a curse at the time (very embarrassing to try and do an assignment about your favourite TV show), but a blessing looking back. So I got big time into reading!

A couple of quotes:

Practice active reading. Mark up your books. I always read with a pencil in my hand. Even when I’m reading magazines, I’ve got a pencil in my hand. A book only becomes your book when you mark it up.

Yep… Clean bible, dirty Christian. Dirty bible, clean Christian. Carries over to books… as much as I hate to mark a new book… gotta do it!

The best way to save time in reading is to be discriminating. James Bryce says “Life is too short to spend it reading inferior books.” More than 1,000 books are produced around the world each day.

That’s a lot of reading. Try the books that are recommended to you, not just the ones on sale!

Right now over at the swerve blog (from lifechurch.tv) Craig Groesche is writing a 5 part series on mentoring. I was talking to a friend of mine who I thought would be right with me in the need for every leader to have great mentors in their lives.

He hadn’t really thought about it.

Apart from the wisdom you can receive the very act of HAVING a mentor says something about your willingness to grow and accept advice, no matter how tough it is.

So here are a few highlights from Craig’s series because says it really well:

Mentoring Part 1

No matter how gifted you are in your field, there is NO SUBSTITUTE for life experience. Without an experienced mentor, you’re drastically limiting your potential impact and performance.

So now you know you need one, go and visit the Swerve blog and read the rest of the series… (part five is not up until tomorrow… unless you read this tomorrow, then it will be up).

So our church has a number of Youtube accounts now… one for United and one for rest of church life.

Check them out and subscribe so you can get updated on new videos being released.Here is the Hillsong Conference highlight video I linked to in the last post.

So what is the purpose of your ministry to children?

We have our annual conference coming up in just two weeks at Acer Arena in Sydney. As well as Kidsong World we run the Children’s pastors and leaders stream. Nathan Mclean and I will be speaking in one of sessions with the leaders about curriculum and developing leadership.

In planning the sessions I am exploring the purpose of our ministry to kids… and more importantly HOW to outwork that purpose. One of my not-yet-conclusions is:

“I don’t think it’s just teaching kids the bible”.

The pharisees were the most versed in scripture, but their knowledge never translated into faith.

‘Scope and sequence’ is one of those phrases that simply strikes a chord of… apathy into my heart. It’s just hard to get excited about it. The ultimate goal should not be to get through the whole bible in two or three years… the goals should be to create life long learners passionate and excited to read the word of God. Cover all of the bible you can, but don’t make it the goal.

Kids need to enjoy and participate in the journey, not just wake up at the destination.

An hour and a half a week during your weekend services is never enough to cover the whole bible thoroughly. But it can be accomplished with the hundreds of hours a year that a parent has.

Provide an opportunity to experience God and connect with others this weekend.

This one snuck up on me! Rob Bradbury from Planet Shakers in Melbourne Australia. He and his team have started a podcast and a blog!

Check it out at: childrensministry1234.com

I have mentioned Rob in the past on the blog, for a nominal fee, ’cause he is a brilliant leader in Children’s Ministry in Australia!!

He oversees Kids R Us which is the kids department of Australian Christian Churches.

I’m not sure why he hasn’t told me about this… the only reason I can think of is that he was try to test me and my geekness… ‘how long would it take Wakerley to find my blog…’

Yeah that’s it.

Regardless, check out the podcast on iTunes (search for planet kids) and add the blog to your reading list.

Oh, his children’s ministry website is at planetkids.com.au Nice site with a great layout… the main page has three options… Parents | Kids | Leaders. Which is a awesome simple way to layout your website.

So I had not really heard of John Piper until recently when I started to check out the Desiring God website. They also have a ministry targeted to children.

They make excellent use of the net and apparently the website contains all Piper’s sermons and articles since he started in ministry. I love seeing a dude giving away all his stuff!!!

Messages (audio and written) and books are all over this site.

They have a great blog which is where I found out about the Children Desiring God conference, that was just held in April. And has begun my fascination with John’s writing and speaking.

He talks about kids A LOT.

Just search for children on the site and it brings up over a thousand results of message and articles that reference kids…

So…

To the conference.

Check out the sessions from the conference blogged in great detail! You can listen to John in Session One delivering the message.

Conference Session One

Conference Session Two

Conference Session Three

Conference Session Four

Conference Session Five

I love seeing ministries just giving away stuff… going beyond a ‘podcast’ or free samples… they literally give away the farm…

For an idea to spread it needs to get out to the people. Your idea could be the exactly the right thing the world needs, but if no one ever hears it… it’s just a good idea.

John Piper is taking his ideas to the world.

One of his articles had a great impact on me recently taking a passage from Psalm 78 and building a message about God’s plan to pass on the word to children.

Check out Johnny boy! You could learn a lot (I did)!

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.

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 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. 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?)