I am launching into a book adventure to equip people to disciple kids. You can go to here to help donate. If you are able to donate and share the link, I would appreciate that greatly.

Friends in children’s ministry and I came to a realization after years of serving that everything hinges on our team’s ability to disciple children. Not the program, not the curriculum, not the philosophy. Those are important tools, but to make those tools come alive rests on our teams’ ability to make disciples. This best impacts kids for the Gospel and prevents burnout. But there’s more.

Why?

The Barna Group has discovered the #1 reason why Christians don’t make disciples is because they do not feel equipped. In children’s ministry, there are amazing training resources for policies, safety, and abuse prevention. Sadly, progressive discipleship training resources to equip children’s ministry volunteers to disciple, teach, and shepherd kids into a deep understanding and love for Christ is greatly lacking. Most churches pick and place new children’s ministry volunteers without preparing them for the massively important and eternally impactful work they do investing into kids. We believe this occurs because an effective kids volunteer training resource is non-existent and unavailable to them.

We’ve decided to do something about it

September of 2024, we went under contract with Build Groups to write and publish such a resource as this. It takes funds for editing, graphic arts design, copyright editing, and promotion. I need to raise $9,000. Would you consider praying about giving a gift of $1,000, $500, $100, or $50

Timeline

• Writing and first draft December-February
• 60% of funds due- December
• 100% funds due- March
• Editing and formatting March- May
• Final edits and version June
• Print July

This isn’t available?

Sadly, no. One of the biggest questions asked of children’s pastors and directors, “How do I train my team to disciple kids, not just run a program?” There are resources on how to teach, how to manage a classroom, how to run the program, how to keep kids safe. But how does one use those resources to shape kids to be more like Jesus? That is the missing and needed piece. Training is like muscles and bones with no tendons to hold it together.

What will this accomplish?

Ripples, the working title for the project, will give a wholistic view of discipleship from reaching kids, to teaching that disciples, to program development that empowers teams, and finally to staff development. This answers three big questions:

• What is my teams strengths and weaknesses so I can choose a program or curriculum that will help us where we need it?
• How do I move from challenging children situations to development opportunities where everyone grows?
• How do I effectively train my team when I need to run the weekly program, keep kids safe, recruit, and I only have so much energy each week?

This was tested?

God put together a new leadership team for my church network’s “Kids Kamp.” To train our camp staff and use that training to help our network’s children’s ministries, we implemented the resources found in Ripples. The contrast in our camp before and after was promising. In developing our training plan we discovered it was a need for churches beyond Nebraska.