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Kids Ministry, Parenting, Prayer
February 26, 2020

Did Jesus Get Hand Cramps?

By Kids Ministry 101

I started praying for a family I’ve never met a few weeks ago. Thanks to the internet, I learned that a Christian artist I’ve followed for a while suffered a tragedy. Her daughter, one year younger than my oldest, had a seemingly minor fall which resulted in a traumatic brain injury.

Doesn’t news like that just jostle you when you have kids of your own? It feels impossible — the reality that these precious children we raise could leave us in mind or body in a split second fall. Doing normal things. On a regular day.

I started praying for this little girl, and led my daughters to pray for her, too. 

Then, a few weeks later, my youngest needed extra snuggles, so I was laying in her bed with her, and I heard my oldest daughter from the other room praying out loud. She started praying for the little girl to be healed, as we had been praying for weeks, and then her prayer changed.

“Jesus … actually, can you just come back? Yes! If you would just come back, the little girl would be healed and her mommy and daddy wouldn’t have to be sad anymore … I have to do school in the morning. What was your favorite subject in school? Well, you didn’t … WAIT, you probably did! You had to have your hand cramp and have your day be so long! Why did you do that? You could have just stayed in heaven …” 

I cried. And I’m crying again now. What a prayer.

How often do I forget Jesus’ humanity? How frequently do I pray a list of demands rather than praying with the humility that would ask questions like, “Why did you leave heaven to come here and live this life of pain and suffering and the hand cramps of carpentry? You could have just stayed in heaven …”

You know how the Spirit answers that why question, right? 

“Because I so love you …” (John 3:16).

And isn’t that what we’re all wanting to know? 

I spend a lot of time teaching my daughters about who God is and how much He loves them, but my 8-year-old daughter’s prayer last week taught me. He is so powerful that He can change anything for any prayer at any time. And He’s so approachable that we can talk to Him about His favorite subject. 

So, pray that God will help you teach your children about this glorious mystery of a God who loves broken people. Pray that God will work wonders. But also pray that He’ll help you see and learn from these little children, about the kind of faith that knows He hears. 

Scarlet Hiltibidal is the author of Afraid of All the Things and He Numbered the Pores on My Face. She lives in Middle Tennessee.

Podcasts
February 20, 2020

Family Ministry 2.0

By Kids Ministry 101

https://media.blubrry.com/lifewaykids/p/s3.amazonaws.com/ministrysites/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2020/02/17130611/Sam-Luce-Final.mp3

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Sam Luce joins the podcast to discuss that we all agree Family Ministry is a good idea. The question therefore is not how and where family ministry happened. The question we need to now wrestle with is what do we do to make family ministry happen and why do we do it? 

Sam’s Blog

Sam Luce has been a pastor at Redeemer Church in Utica NY for the past 21 Years. In those years he have served in multiple roles currently he serves as the Pastor to Families for all five of our locations. Sam served as chairman of INCM, co-authored “The Eric Trap,” has been involved in several book projects, and been blogging at samluce.com since 2007.

Podcasts
February 13, 2020

A Beautiful NEW Day in the Neighborhood

By Kids Ministry 101

https://media.blubrry.com/lifewaykids/p/s3.amazonaws.com/ministrysites/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2020/02/11155310/Dorena-Williamson.mp3

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Dorena Williamson joins the podcast to discuss that today’s church is awakening to the needs of our growing multicultural world. Leaders long to be more equipped to minister to diverse families. Explore biblical ways to be inclusive while fulfilling the great command to love our neighbor.

Links to BOOKS by Dorena Williamson

Dorena Williamson is the author of ColorFull, ThoughtFull and GraceFull, published by B&H Kids. She speaks in Public schools, Christian schools, churches and conferences, fostering relevant conversations that celebrate the beauty in God’s Diverse Kingdom. A veteran of cross-cultural ministry, Dorena serves as First Lady of Strong Tower Bible Church in Nashville, a richly diverse faith community.

Encouragement, Kids Ministry, Teacher Appreciation, Volunteers
February 12, 2020

Volunteer Appreciation Resources for Spring

By Kids Ministry 101

Use these downloads to show thanks for your volunteers in a fun way this spring.

Click to download : Thanks for making Kids Ministry sweet! tags
Click to download : We are soda-lighted tags
Click to download : There’s muffin else tags
Encouragement
February 12, 2020

Longing to Belong

By Kids Ministry 101

By Andrew Peterson

During our first ten years in Nashville our family lived in four different houses. We liked the adventure of a new place. But after Jayber Crow I was done with transience. I was stirred by a longing to care for the land under my feet, to work in partnership with the earth instead of in opposition to it, to learn the names of the birds and the flora and fauna as well as the names of my neighbors, and to shepherd some corner of this planet for the sake of the kingdom. As far as it was in my limited power to do so, I wanted to mend the world—even if it was just a few acres of it.

As nice as it was to live in a little Nashville subdivision, pushing a stroller through the neighborhood in the evening and being close enough to Percy Priest Lake to take our little Sunfish sailboat out at a moment’s notice, Jamie and I both knew it wasn’t the house we wanted to die in. Our neighborhood, like so many subdivisions, practically embodied the word transitory. Neighbors came and went. New streets were always being carved out of the tree line. Every other day, it seemed, a “For Sale” sign showed up in someone’s yard. It wasn’t the kind of place we could imagine our grandchildren getting excited to visit.

By then, several of our friends had moved to East Nashville, where at the time you could still buy a pretty bungalow and renovate it on the cheap. There were cool restaurants and historic neighborhoods (a little known fact: the outlaw Jesse James lived there for a while while he was on the lam). Now East Nashville is the hipster center of town and the bungalows are priced like mansions, so we missed that boat. Then one day we visited some old college friends who had just found a farmhouse in South Nashville. Only minutes from the city, a winding road took us past cattle ponds and ramshackle barns, over bridges that spanned Mill Creek, and finally up a gravel drive to their hundred-year-old farmhouse. As soon as we arrived, I broke the tenth commandment. Sort of. I didn’t exactly covet my neighbor’s house, but I coveted the land. I coveted the peace and quiet, the story of the farm, the stands of hackberry and white oak and cedar. I immediately wanted to move there. By this time I had found in Nashville a people to belong to—could this be the place?

I sat on their front porch, eyeing a little house across the pasture. “Do you think any of your neighbors will ever sell?” He told me it was doubtful since the other houses on the hill were occupied by members of the family that had grown up there. But, come to think of it, the old cabin at the top of the hill was for sale. Jamie and I drove up and checked it out, but it was on twelve acres and well out of our price range. As we disappointedly crunched back down the gravel drive I had a vision. It burned itself onto my imagination so brightly that I can still see it now, clear as day. I saw Skye as a little pigtailed girl in overalls tearing through the meadow in the spring, the air full of sunlit pollen. Even as I pictured it I grieved because it didn’t seem possible that we’d ever live there. So we kept looking. I continued to wrestle with my discontent: was it worldliness or was it the Holy Spirit pulling me toward something? I just couldn’t tell.

Then about a year later my old roomie called and said his neighbors had in fact decided to sell, at a price we just might be able to afford. Jamie and I met with the owners, then we drove out there every day for weeks, dreaming, wondering, praying. I drove friends out to show them the property, asking their opinions, seeking wisdom. One day Jason Gray and I sat on the front porch of what would one day be our home and he prayed that God would give us the wisdom to know if we should try and buy it.

The catch was, the house was 25 percent smaller than our current one. And it wasn’t exactly pretty. The kitchen was literally the size of a walk-in closet and the décor wasn’t, shall we say, “aligned with Jamie’s taste.” But the building itself wasn’t what interested me. All I could see when I looked out the front window was that daydream of Skye’s pigtails bouncing through the meadow. (The boys probably weren’t in the daydream because they were busy building forts in the daydream woods.)

In the end, we went for it. Without knowing America was on the verge of the Great Recession, we sold our subdivision home for a tiny profit and bought a house in one of the last rural pockets of Davidson County. The day we moved in, Jamie cried. They weren’t happy tears, mind you. Our kids were growing by the minute, I was touring more or less constantly, and we had just done a very un-American thing: we had downsized. We had also down-styled. The old vinyl flooring was, well, old. One corner of the outdated carpet had been chewed up by the former owners’ cat. The kitchen, as I said, was miniscule. None of this would have been hard for her except that we had gotten used to the relative niceness of the subdivision house. “But look at the land,” I would say, encouragingly, with a grand sweep of my hand. Bless her heart, she took a deep breath and dug in. I love that woman.

“Can we please replace the carpet sooner than later?” she asked on the day we closed.

“Of course,” I said without really looking at how bad the carpet was. “We’ll get to it.” My mind was on cutting trails and building tree houses. I went out for a weekend of shows and came home to a shock. There was a pile of old carpet in the front yard. Jamie had single handedly torn it up and hauled it out with an iron will.

“Now. About that carpet,” she said with a smile. “Here are some choices for hardwood flooring.” Like I said, I love that woman. Without delay, she began making our house beautiful. And I started reclaiming the land. When we moved in I was finishing my first reading of Richard Adams’s masterpiece Watership Down, about a community of rabbits on a great journey to find a new warren. Not only was our new place built on the side of a very English-looking down, there were always rabbits in the front pasture.

We named our place the Warren—not only because our journey mirrored Hazel and Fiver’s, and not only because of the rabbits that abounded, but because the new house was so small that there were times—especially when the kids had friends over and it was too rainy to play outside and we were stepping on LEGOs® and bumping into each other in the tiny kitchen—when we felt like we were living in a little underground rabbit hole.

Don’t get me wrong. I know many people don’t have homes at all, so I shouldn’t be complaining about the size or weird layout of the house. I’m just saying that downsizing ain’t easy, especially with three small children. Especially—especially when one of the two parents has a job that requires weeks of travel. (Sorry, Jamie.) But when the kids came in with skinned knees from climbing trees, or when the sun threw golden light at the hill in the late afternoon and we all went out to watch the clouds catch fire, or when we woke in the misty morning and walked the trails in Warren Wood and saw the kids’ tree forts quietly awaiting their return, or when we sat on the porch on warm nights and listened to the barred owls calling to each other from the dark branches, we knew we had chosen wisely. God had provided a place we could love, a place our grandchildren could love as much as our children did. About five years in, we were able to build an addition that made the inside as lovely as the outside—and once again it was because Jamie, too, had a picture in her mind, and did the hard, creative work of incarnating it.

I tell you all this because place matters.

Of course, not everyone can move to the country, nor should they. But wherever you are, you might as well go ahead and pull up the carpet. Make it beautiful, even if you can’t afford it. Let your imagination run wild. Give your house a name. Watch how it changes the way you treat it. Let thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in our house as it is in heaven. I started keeping bees. Those bees pollinate the flowers we put in the ground. 

Jamie hung pictures on the walls. She keeps candles lit in whatever room we’re hanging out in, year-round. If we ever move (and I hope we don’t) we will have left our mark on this home and on this property. When I walk the trails now I can hear the memory of laughter echoing in the trees. We have become members of this place, members of this community, of this kingdom—praying His will to be done in these woods as it is in heaven.

Excerpted with permission from Adorning the Dark by Andrew Peterson. Copyright 2019, B&H Publishing Group. This excerpt also appeared in the January 2020 issue of ParentLife.

Andrew Peterson is an award-winning singer-songwriter and author. In 2008, driven by a desire to cultivate a strong Christian arts community, Andrew founded a ministry called The Rabbit Room.

Podcasts
February 6, 2020

Providing Safe Settings in a Challenging Culture

By Kids Ministry 101

https://media.blubrry.com/lifewaykids/p/s3.amazonaws.com/ministrysites/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2020/02/04163106/Providing-Safe-Settings-in-a-Challenging-Culture-Jody-Dean-.mp3

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Jody Dean joins the podcast to discuss Online Obnoxiousness, Gender, Suicide, Bullying, Apps/Gaming, Mandatory reporting, abuse, security, and changing culture are some hot topics that pour through our news feeds and news cycles. We can learn online through YouTube how to cause pain to ourselves. We will take the next few minutes and walk through some hot topics with tips on how you can navigate these concerns.

NOTES PAGE

Dr. Jody Dean, serves as an Associate Professor for Christian Education at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Dr. Dean has years of ministry experience including ministry leadership, youth, discipleship, and administration. His whole adult life he has been engaged in ministry through leading and equipping others in the work and ministry of the local church.

Teacher Appreciation
February 4, 2020

Valentine’s Day Tags

By Kids Ministry 101

Show appreciation to volunteers or loved ones this Valentine’s Day by using these free tags. Simply download the file, print them out, and attach them to a sweet treat.

Click here to download : Valentine’s Day Tags
Crafts, Discipleship, Fun, Kids Ministry
February 3, 2020

Getting to the Heart of It

By Kids Ministry 101

It may alarm you or it could cause you to burst out laughing, but listening to kids in your ministry will always educate you. What do the kids you teach care about most? What are they excited to share with you each week? For the kids you lead it may be their sports teams, a new app on their phones, their friends, or the latest video on YouTube™. Kids reveal what they love most through what they talk about regularly.

And so do you.

We all set our affections and our attention—our worship—on something or someone. We may have a thousand things we like or care about, but the passion of our hearts is to love God and worship Him. When our interests supercede our worship of God and our love for others, we have a problem. However, when we cultivate genuine worship in our hearts and teach our students that the overwhelming passion within us is to love and obey God, they will see it.

Worship is our response to what we love most. It is recognizing and responding to God as worthy, deserving of all honor and praise. (Psalm 29:2) True worship overflows from a heart that is satisfied in God and wants to glorify Him, and it affects every part of our lives.

Wouldn’t it be exciting if what captured your kids’ hearts, minds, and attention spans was true worship of God? It can!

When the kids you lead trust in Jesus for salvation, He makes them new and begins to mold or shape their lives more into the image of Jesus. As they grow in their faith, the truth of God’s Word shapes their minds and hearts and changes their actions to look more like Jesus.

This month as you celebrate Valentine’s Day, help your kids remember that their hearts can praise God no matter where they are—on their way to school, riding a bike, or even posting on social media. Anytime we set our minds and hearts on God and choose to value Him above all else, we worship Him.

For deeper Bible study resources from Lifeway Kids on worship, check out the latest volume of the preteen series Forged: Faith Refined at lifeway.com/forged.

Consider using this free craft with the kids you teach this Valentine’s Day. As you do, discuss these questions about worship:

●      What words come to mind when you hear the word worship?

●      What do you know about God that makes you want to worship Him?

●      How should knowing who God is lead you to value Him most?

●      What do you think it looks like to love God with all of our hearts?

●      How does knowing and loving God fuel our worship of Him?

Paper Plate Heart Craft (click here to download instructions)

You will need:

Small paper plates

Scissors

Pencil

Single hole punch

Tape

Colorful yarn

Guide kids to fold a paper plate in half and cut out a heart shape from the middle of the paper plate, making a template. Next, instruct them to open the heart template and place it on top of a second plate. Explain that they will trace the heart template onto the center of the second plate with a pencil. Then, they will cut out a heart shape in the center.

Use a single hole punch to punch holes around the entire perimeter of the heart shape.

Select various colors of yarn and guide kids to tape the ends so they don’t fray. Lead kids to thread the yarn through different holes of the heart and tape the yarn in place on the back of the paper plate. Continue threading the yarn around different holes choosing a variety of colors until each hole has been used. Encourage kids to place their craft in their rooms. When they see it, they can stop and remember that God wants their whole hearts to worship Him.

Kayla Stevens is the Content Editor for Lifeway Kids Discipleship. She is a graduate of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and William Carey University. Kayla lives in Nashville, Tennessee and has served in Kids ministry for over 10 years.

Resources, Teacher Appreciation, Volunteers
January 31, 2020

Lifeway Kids Planner Downloads

By Kids Ministry 101

Concrete & Cranes Building

Valentine’s Volunteer Appreciation

Popcorn Appreciation Party

Bookmarks

Extra Lucky Volunteer Appreciation

Easter Volunteer Appreciation

Easter Recipe Tags

Mother’s Day Gift

VBS Appreciation

VBS Mini Candy Bar Wrappers

Father’s Day Craft

Fourth of July Tags

Scripture Cards 1

Ice Cream Social

Pizza Party Invites

Fall Appreciation

Scripture Cards – 2

Fall Kids Tags

Thankful Tree

Sweet As Pie Invitation

Christmas Appreciation

Christmas Tags

Podcasts
January 30, 2020

Lead Well in Family Ministry

By Kids Ministry 101

https://media.blubrry.com/lifewaykids/p/s3.amazonaws.com/ministrysites/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2020/01/30110723/Dale-Hudson-FINAL.mp3

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Dale Hudson joins the podcast to discuss tips in leading family ministry well.

Dale Hudson has been in children and family ministry for over 30 years. He has helped build some of the fastest growing and largest ministries in the country. His passion is to help churches build strong next gen ministries, teams and leaders.

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