[Kid Inspiration]

If you have never heard of the Elijah List, it is a website that features a whole bunch of ‘prophetic words’ from heaps of different ministries etc.

I love hearing encouraging words about kids, and here is a great one from Scott Hicks: “Your Children Will Start to Prophesy and Your Kingdom Legacy Begins!”

Children have always been a threat to the enemy. He knows the indwelling potential they have–the potential has yet to be released. Therefore, he tries every trick in his book to lure them astray from the divine path that God has prepared for them.

We have to look forward to our young children’s future. Someone once said, “The windshield is bigger than the rearview mirror!” The time has come like never before, for us to begin to focus on our children’s future and less on our past.

Read on.

Ben Zander is one of my favourite people in the world — and up to this point I literally have only read one quote and two articles about him. But after reading this I am going to order this.

Ben is conductor for the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and professor at the New England Conservatory of Music, and a pretty inspirational guy.

Ben… was faced with the same problem every year for 25 years: Teaching students who were in such a chronic state of anxiety over the measurement of their performance, they were reluctant to take creative risks…decided the best approach would be to give everyone an A, at the beginning of the course. The A was not intended as a way to measure someone’s performance against standards, but as an instrument to open them up to new possibilities.

Students were required to write a letter that began with “Dear Mr. Zander, I got my A because…” and they had to describe in as much detail as possible, how they came to achieve this “extraordinary grade.”

In writing their letters, Zander said students must “place themselves in the future, looking back, and report on all the insights they acquired and the milestones they attained during the year, as if those accomplishments were already in the past. Everything must be written in the past tense. Phrases such as ‘I hope,’ ‘I intend,’ or ‘I will’ must not appear.”

Give all your kids in your childrens ministry an A for performance this year. Start with your engaged kids… the ones who learn the memory verses, and tend to remember what you said last week. Then give the kids who present somewhat of a challenge an ‘A’ as well.

What needs to change in their behaviour to get an ‘A’? And more importantly what needs to change in YOUR behaviour to ensure they get an ‘A’.

NOTE: I am not, of course, implying that we want to grade our kids, just the concept that we are all familiar with having most likely grown up in school.

From Savage Chickens

Your Best Life Now – by Joel Osteen
Warner Faith 2004

7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential
Joel Osteen pastors Lakewood Church which was started Mothers Day 1959 by his father John. On October 3, 1999, after the death of his father, Joel became the senior pastor of Lakewood.

This book is right up there with the Purpose Driven Life, and as one of those books that gets read, it seems, by pretty much the entire english speaking Christian world and beyond.

The seven steps probably won’t surprise you, they are well worn lessons that we can overlook in making things too complicated.

Here are the seven steps:

1. Enlarge your vision (what you focus on is what you get)

2. Develop a healthy self image (believe you can do it!)

3. Discover the power of your thoughts and words (your thoughts and words can pave the way to real changes around you)

4. Let go of the past (focus on what you want)

5. Find strength through adversity (trust God to get you there in His own good time)

6. Give! (giving opens up the doors of receiving)

7. Choose to be happy (enthusiasm for opportunity helps create fine results)
Like the Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren, this book presents things very simply and this is part of the reason for its success and effectiveness.

Application for Children’s Ministry:
Keep it Simple.

Don’t use too much ‘Christian-ese’.

Our kids (and adults) need to hear the truth, and they need it simply. I have heard too many people use words that would work on well on an adult who grew in church in the 60′s but are irrelevant to a child’s world today.

The literacy ability of people reading this blog would surprise you, and me for that matter. Rule of thumb: If your 10 year old can’t understand it, write it simpler (is that good grammer?)

Check out this statistic (from Audiblox.com):

In the U.S.A. the $14 million National Adult Literacy Survey of 1993 found that even though most adults in this survey had finished high school, 96% of them could not read, write, and figure well enough to go to college. Even more to the point, 25% were plainly unable to read.

Now this may be a reasonably strange lesson to learn from ‘Your Best Life Now’, but then I am a reasonably strange kinda guy (just ask my wife).

We move fast in ministry. Success is celebrated briefly, failure is quickly forgotten. We started our 7th service tonight. It was new and exciting, but within two weeks, it will be as if we have been doing it forever!

Dave Ferguson (Community Christian Church Chicago) writes (a few weeks ago) on “four rules for fast teams“, adapted from Fast Company (one of my favroutie business blogs).

1. LET THE GROUP MAKE IT’S OWN RULES.
2. SPEAK UP EARLY AND OFTEN.
3. LEARN AS YOU GO.
4. FAST HAS TO BE FUN.  

Read on at daveferguson.org

Ouch!

http://theresurgence.com/mdblog_2006-05-24_death_by_ministry 

Oh Man. You need to read this! And then spend a week in prayer and fasting, then read it again. Then if possible after reading it again, make sure you understand that a life of ministry is a spiritual battle.

eg. (USA) Fifteen hundred pastors leave the ministry each month due to moral failure, spiritual burnout, or contention in their churches.

In Australia alone, there are over 10,000 ex-pastors.

The T-Qualizer is a t-shirt with a built in sound sensitive graphic equalizer panel. As the music beats, the shirts equalizer lights up to the beat of the music.

This would be awesome to wear in a big kids meeting to measure the volume of cheering etc.

It has a fully functional EL (Electro Luminenscence) panel with a battery pack that snuggles discretely into a pocket inside the shirt. From Gadget Box (in England), with a great deal on worldwide shopping.

Via The Church Report

This survey was sent to 2,000 church leaders with the goal of ranking the nation’s fastest growing churches and churches with more than 2,000 weekend attendance. The 127 churches nominated for the 50 Most Influential Churches survey were located in 32 states and represented 27 affiliation groups and/or denominations.

It would be fascinating to read about the 50 most influential Children’s Ministries in the world, and if they correlate to the 50 most influential churches…

On that note, what are your top five influences in your ministry to kids?

Leave a comment, I will need to think on it a bit.

Via SearchEngineWatch.

Finally, Australia gets mapped by Google Maps. Not only did Australia get street level views, so did New Zealand.

If you have never played around with Google maps, have a look. You might even be able to see your car in your own driveway.

Rick Muchow is the worship pastor at Saddleback church – Check out this article on Pastors.com where Rick answers a question about kids praise and worship
Key Paragraph:

The worth of our children is so significant and powerful! They are the next generation of our church, but often we are so busy leading the adults who are asking to be led and funding the church, that we end up with our leftover energy going to the children. We as churches often train our younger ministers by putting them with the children. I wonder how our churches would grow if we asked our best leaders to focus on teaching the children first. It could radically change the church of the future!