Ah!

Brilliant.

More new praise and worship music for kiddly winks.

I REALLY like the Kids on the Move team (I even bolded the REALLY if you noticed). The Senior pastor of Church on the Move Willie George practically invented children’s ministry (not even joking) and Jim Wideman it’s co-creator took it to new heights as the kids pastor for many years!

SIDE NOTE: I have had the privilege to spend some time with Jim Wideman and here’s pretty much how conversations go with him:

Me: ”So we did this <insert kind of cool thing> with our kids last year, but we couldn’t seem to <insert issue>”

Jim: (clears throat) “Yeah, tried somethin’ like that back in 1984 and found that you need to <insert solution> and God will bless it, dadgummit!”

Me: ”Oh… yeah… wow…”

(Problem solved).

And… back to topic: In the last little while the seeds blog has come online and been a HUGE blessing to me as I have watched kids services and events all filmed beautifully and lots or input from their myriad of awesome people like Adam Bush and Gabe George etc.

Check out their CM category on the blog.

So enter their album Greater is He!

Tracks include:

Jesus, What a Friend
I Love My Bible
Jesus Is Alive Right Now
Greater Is He
Supernatural
You Are My Rescue
I Obey Right Away
Jesus, I Love You
By Faith
Jesus Is the Way
Jesus on My Journey
Jesus, What a Friend (Remix)

My favourite? Jesus on My Journey.

I really like the title track Greater Is He with an awesome kids choir rocking in the background as well! But don’t take my word for it check out the iTunes link and sample some of these tunes!

Awesome job KOTM team, I’m sure that Hillsong Kids will be worshipping to some of these soon… which leads to a question… backing tracks and website with lyrics?

At Kidshaper Conference this year we were introduced to a team from ImagineNations Church in Penrith, Sydney.

INK is the band from ImagineNations Kids and they are awesome! They were playing songs from their CD Not Too Young and generally rocking out.

Our Churches need to be producing more praise and worship for our kids. The ratio of adult albums to kids is exorbitant, I would guess 100 to 1??

Well done Allyson Parker (Insert twitter link or similar social media site hopefully soon?) and the team!

And it seems that I may have an exclusive on this, because I cannot find a page or website or even a twitter mention, other than my wife?

So, by the power invested in me by the interwebs, I name this blog post as the official site of NOT TOO YOUNG by INK.

So not sure how to buy it, and not sure how you can listen to it, but I am hopeful that someone from the team will post a comment as the official site emerges!

UPDATE: So as the official Album Page, I thought I better add the track list and some credits from the album…

Track List:

1. Not Too Young
2. Get Up
3. My God Can Do Anything
4. Only One I Live For
5. Yours Alone
6. First Love
7. Super Awesome God
8. You Never Change
9. To The Rescue
10. Follow You Heart
11. Change Their World
12. You Are God

I have given myself a challenge for the next 26 days – post the complete A-Z of Ministry to Children.

E… Education, entertainment, Eric, eternal, effervescant…

E is for Encouragement – (I recently wrote a post at the official Hillsong Blog ‘Collected’ about this topic – have a read, but I want to talk about it here as it relates to kids).

I firmly believe that one word of encouragement to a child can literally set in motion the call of God on their life. I still remember the words both positive and negative that we spoken to me as a child about what I was capable of. You as a leader occupy an important place in the mind of a child, you’re not as present as a parent but you are around enough to have a big influence on the kids you minister to, in short, you can be a hero or a zero. Take the opportunity to speak words of life over their future every chance you get.

Research written about in the book NurtureShock has shown that some forms of praise can actually hold children back. Avoid praising children about their natural talent and giftings. eg. “You’re so brainy”, rather praise and encourage their efforts and hard work.

Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. (Location 376 Kindle Edition)

There is a lot more to be said on this topic, but try it this weekend in your services at Church – watch how many times you encourage kids about innate ability rather than the attempt they have made.

A while back we were looking into how to do our Early Childhood Praise and Worship better. One of our awesome team Matt who also works in our Bible College suggested getting a hold of some Cuban Box Drums or cajón’s.

They were perfect and have added a fantastic dimension to the praise and worship we do with our little ones. They are capable of sounding like a whole drum kit with a skilled player. Any drummer/percussionist should pick this up pretty quickly.

So our team on a weekend service would typically look like an acoustic guitarist or two, cajón, maybe someone with an ‘egg‘ and a bunch of singers. They circulate through our rooms (depending on our different campuses) leading our kids in worship with our ‘Cubbyhouse’ (1-2 years) diovan 800 mg and ‘Ark’ (3-5 years).

So you have an instrument that this age finds fascinating (you sit on it and hit it),  supports the music brilliantly and is super portable!

They start from less than $100 on amazon but I would suggest moving up to a slightly higher price bracket to get quality!

The kind of music we do with our little ones is a mixture of some songs we have written and a bunch of bridges and choruses from our songs… eg. they

couldn’t sing the whole song ‘Tell the World‘, but the chorus is great! We don’t really use backing tracks with this age group a lot, but then again we haven’t ever done an Early Childhood kids album

So there you go, get one and try it out, you won’t regret it!

After the awesome Napkin conference last week myself and Nathan Mclean made our way around the US to visit a few friends and Churches.

We made it to Free Chapel in Georgia after battling through a blizzard… okay it was a little snow, but more than I have seen in long time! (Ah New Zealand, you have a wintery place in my soul).

But making it to the Church we hung out with youth pastor Clayton Baird (graduate of Hillsong Bible College) who showed us around their flippin’ awesome campus.

One dilantin generic safe of the coolest things about Kidpak (their children’s ministry) is KP7, the kids worship band!

I love seeing music for kids that is reaching them where they are at!

Take today’s hottest sounds like the music from Fall Out Boy, The Killers, All American Rejects, The Hives, Switchfoot, Cold Play, Nickelback, U2, The Black Eyed Peas (and even a little guitar hero)…

Mix them all together and what do you get…

KP7 – NOISE

You need to check these guys out, their latest album Noise was just released, you can preview the tracks here, or on iTunes.

We have some comedians who read this blog. Just have a read of the comments from the previous post.

I decided against the ‘Top 10 things stolen from other people’s top 10 lists’ from Jonathon Clifforama

So I present to you:

The Top Ten Kids Music Resources.

So the rules for this little list… I am not including any of Hillsong Kids music resources. And will focus on any kind of resource that helps with creating/using/developing/producing/accompanying/pickling/whatevering music for use with kids and ministry.

This is stuff that we have used/loved and found valuable.

10. WDTV – Not the usual subject of such lists, this little device is absolutely brilliant for our multi-campus church. You put all your media… video MPEG files or a range of other formats onto any USB flash drive or an external hard drive and plug it where your DVD player used to be. The WDTV can then be used to playback all your backing tracks for Praise and Worship or curriculum in HD quality. There are a lot of generic brand units around that are similar, but I would trust the Western Digital brand any day.
I simply save an exact copy of our media flash drive on my computer, that way if it ever got lost… 20 bucks later I would simply drag the files over to a new 8/16Gb flash drive. We have this device in locations all over Sydney. It even has a seemingly well trafficked user community online. I paid around $200AU each for ours, but you can find them on special everywhere.

9. iTunes – It used to be that you needed to order CD’s and wait for them to arrive in the mail… I would be happy if I never had to buy another CD for the rest of my life. For a recent conference we needed a backing track for a Hannah Montana song. One search and click later and boom, the track is burnt to CD ready to use for the event! There are a bunch of music stores out there, iTunes is the largest and most available all over the world so it gets the number 9 slot.

That being said, there will always be a place for the humble CD, just like there is a place for vinyl records today!

8. New Wine – Ahh, the Motherland. My Dad is English and I have a British Passport so I thought I should add a nod to my ancestral roots. My connection with New Wine is Simon Parry who we wrote a song with last year called More Than Enough which is on this album right here. The New Wine team, a network of churches and believers across all denominations (from the website) do a great job releasing awesome music for all ages.

There seems to be a strength in the UK for networks connecting lots of churches together, another similar movement Spring Harvest does some great music for kids (and a few Hillsong Kids covers).

7. depakote price target=”_blank”>Doug Horley – Back in the day (which was a Wednesday), we rocked out hard for many months, perhaps years to ‘Put Your Hands in the Sky‘. It was a huge hit with our kids right around the time we started work on Jesus is my Superhero. He also pulls out some very surreal and hilarious puppet tracks on his CD’s between songs that really make me laugh.

6. Radio Disney – Millions of dollars are spent by the House of Mouse to figure out what kids like to listen to, so why not take that research, and make sure that money gets put to good use. Cultural trends are found all over this site, although in a fast paced Google world, Disney is unlikely to be ahead of the curve. They have always found their sweet spot right in the safe, profitable middle zone… not quite pushing the envelope but rarely behind.

There are fascinating discussions that can happen when you talk about lyrics with kids (especially preteens). Actually taking a song apart and dissecting it to see if those lyrics reflect the truth or are contrary to a Christ centred world view is very powerful.

5. Propellerhead Software – Creators of the popular Reason, ReBirth, ReCycle software packages. Now there are a LOT of options when it comes to creating music… on the Mac you have Garageband and Soundtrack Pro and for the Pro’s, Logic. There are a bunch of options for PC as well, but audio production is an industry dominated by Mac’s.

There are SO many options available to you but let me explain why I went with Reason + Pro Tools. The music I record is either creating demos or maybe music mixes for using in our programs. If I am recording a track at home, it is highly unlikely that it will just be left like that due to my limited recording abilities. So I chose Reason for the simple fact it has a HUGE library of Refills (sounds and loops etc) for just about every genre. So I can put something together pretty quick. It integrates tightly into Pro Tools via rewire (I just lost some of you) so I can take to our Church studio (who use Pro Tools) and continue working on it with the fancy gear.

4. Integrity Music – Integrity is a simply massive record label, they distribute all our Hillsong Albums in the U.S. and have a huge library of music! Check out the Kids link for the online store here. There is simply a heap of music here to inspire you and your kids!

3. CitiKidz – Go the Aussies! I love seeing churches rise up and put emphasis, value and effort into ministering to kids, so I have been so pumped to see Luke Harris and the Citipointe church team produce live Praise and Worship for kids! They have two albums out and you should get them for your church. In the U.S. they have partnered with Kidmo, so check out their site to order!

2. Yancy and Amber Sky Records – Yancy is a champion in music for all ages of kids and serves as director of Amber Sky Records which is part of the The rethink Group. She is a great friend and makes fantastic music AND my 4 year old has a big crush on her, although his girlfriend is now Zara and not Yancy he tells me. There are not too many artists from locals churches making music for kids, and hardly any making GREAT music, so give it up for Yancy. I am excited to see the resources coming out of Amber Sky as well!

1. Your Local Church – I have said it before and I will say it again, in terms of teaching, music, any creative endeavour, just roll with your pastor. Take your cues, direction and leading from your senior pastor/leadership team. So many of our themes and songs have come out of messages and teaching of Hillsong Church. Timing is everything… It took over 20 years for Hillsong Church to produce a kids album. I can tell you over the years plenty of people would have wanted to see music for kids produced, but I can tell you, in God’s timing he will make a way and the resources and backing will take it far above anything you could have hoped or dreamed.

P.S. Congratulations JavaJ, I will be sending you a copy of Hillsong Kids Ultimate Collection when it becomes available! (Matt, you were close).

P.S. Of course Jesus/the Bible/God etc. are all a part of this list, but like God’s thoughts are higher than yours and His ways barely comprehensible to your finite mind so is his position on this list.

So the pre order form for the new kids album is up online.

2005 Live Worship For Kids

Pre order your copy of the second Hillsong Church Live Kids Praise and Worship Album! This dynamic Kids album will be recorded at our annual Hillsong Conference during Kidsong World 2005!

# Australian Release Date: October 2005
(Subject to change)

Its going to be GREAT!! no bias here of course.