I remember the first time I showed a Veggie Tales movie to the kids in my church. They loved it. My adult workers loved it even more. Back then you could show Veggie Tales to a room full of kids and most of them had never heard of it. Good luck doing that anymore.

I remember the first Bob and Larry stuffed toys I bought for my office. My office was a baptism changing room at the time, but gosh was this young children’s pastor excited to have Bob and Larry sitting on my shelf. Why? I was relevant.

I remember when 3 2 1 Penguins hit the market in 2000. Man was I excited to see a new line of videos. I was so bored with Adventures in Odyssey and McGee and Me.

I remember the first time I heard that Big Idea Productions was being sued by Lyrick over distribution issues. This was before K! Magazine and before I had “connections.” I couldn’t pick up the phone and call someone to see what was happening, I had to rely on Google, and Google confirmed the story.

I remember the spring/summer of 2003 when the court found in favor of Lyrick and awarded them $11 million in damages. I remember hearing the news that Big Idea (as it had been known) was dead.

I will always remember hearing Phil Vischer speak at Children’s Pastors’ Conference 2009. Since I’m on the board at INCM, I had the opportunity to meet Phil before the session when he spoke and talked to him for a few minutes back stage. What a great guy. I remember sitting in that room with 2,000+ other children’s pastors with my wife one one side and Evan Doyle on the other side. There, Phil shared his story. He shared the tough lessons he had learned about business – but most importantly – the lessons he had learned about his relationship with God. I bought the DVD of that session and have shared it with so many people.

Is Veggie Tales over? Obviously not. The company has new leadership and they are cranking out new products  like mad. I got something in the mail at the church this week about their new DVD called Pistachio.

Is Phil Vischer done? Nope. He has a new company called Jelly Telly. That’s another blog post of it’s own. I’m real excited about a new DVD series that Phil is creating called What’s in the Bible. It’s designed to walk kids and families through the entire Bible. The 13 DVD-series will release beginning March 1, 2010.

Some of my friends (Todd and Sean at Timbuktoons) have been working with Phil and the team on this project. Timbuktoons is the company that does the animation and video enhancements on our Kitchen videos. I got a sneak peak at What’s in the Bible a few weeks ago when I was meeting with Awana. It’s going to be great stuff that every Christian parent and children’s pastor will want to snatch up.

Enough rambling about Veggie Tales. All this food talk has made me hungry. I better hit the fridge.

They also host an annual kids entertainment event called the Kidscreen Summit that represents 1400+ attendees, more than 725 companies and 300+ buyers and investors.

This is definitely a place to keep on your radar.

A recent ranking of the most-visited children’s ministry websites found these sites at the top:

1. ministry-to-children.com
2. childrensministry.com
3. kidology.org
4. kidzmatter.com
5. cmconnect.org

Source: compete.com

Cool stuff, huh? Think these could be tools for training volunteers in this digital age? Thanks Justin!

Today’s kids are heavily influenced by screens—cell phone screens, computer screens, TV screens and movie screens. Over the past five years, there has been a big push to use screens when teaching today’s media-saturated kids.

Craig Jutila started creating videos in 1998 for his ministry at Saddleback Church. He told me, “We stumbled upon the media idea from a camp we did back in 1998. We would do a ‘camp news’ section each night. We had an idea to let the TV do the talking by having a child from the audience come up and play a game … entirely run by the TV. There was little set-up in advance for this, but we were amazed that the TV held the kids’ attention the way it did. From that, the idea was born to see if we could have a strong teaching element from the TV not only hold the kids’ attention but help them learn in a fun and creative way.” He went home and started creating video curriculum. By teaching in front of a camera, every child in the church could get the same Bible message in a format that they would relate to. He is recognized as a pioneer for video-driven curriculum in children’s ministry.

In 2003, the market was introduced to Kidmo. I remember seeing Kidmo for the first time at Children’s Pastors’ Conference. The company was marketed as “the reinvention of Sunday School.” At the time of this writing, Kidmo has 110 episodes (weeks) for elementary-age kids and 60 episodes (weeks) for preschoolers.

Thousands of churches have used Kidmo and other similar video curriculums in their children’s ministries. One concern that church leaders have voiced is whether it is healthy to use videos week after week. After all, hasn’t God gifted the local church with teachers? And aren’t teachers the ones who build solid relationships with the kids and their parents?

I am seeing a movement in the last year from media-driven curriculum to “teacher-led” media-driven curriculum. What sets teacher-led media-driven curriculum apart? The curriculum uses media elements (which kids connect with so well) but keeps the central focus on the live teacher, not the screen. Many children’s ministry leaders realize that nothing replaces a teacher opening God’s Word with relevance and teaching.

Companies like High Voltage Kids (www.highvoltage-kids.com) and the Willow Creek Association (www.willowcreek.com) are examples of companies marketing this type of curriculum.

Volunteers are more important than the people they serve. Stop and think about that. Do you agree? It’s not that the kids aren’t important, but it’s volunteers who interact with the children week after week to influence their lives. Consider that Jesus spent more time with his twelve than he did any other group of people.

Volunteers are important and need to be trained. Training would be easy if it wasn’t for budgets and busy schedules. You can’t afford to bring the world’s best trainers to your church; and if you could, good luck getting everyone to show up. This forces you to be creative in your approach to training.

1) Blogs. Some churches have created traditional blogs and video blogs to train their volunteers.

Justyn Smith, children’s pastor at The Church at South Las Vegas, says, “I use a ‘secret’ blog and podcast site that only my volunteers know about. I also allow my leaders/teachers to post their thoughts and encourage others to discuss them so we can all synergize to come up with solutions or better ways of doing things.”

2) Podcasts. A podcast is a broadcast of multimedia information (usually audio) over the internet. It can then be played on a mobile device or personal computer.  Churches are choosing to deliver podcasts on a regular basis so volunteers can listen on their own schedule.

Phillip Harris, children’s pastor at Lawrenceville Church of God, says, “We’ve often shared inspiring and training messages in audio and video formats. Some we’ve made on our own, but we’ve also passed along many that we got from others (like Jim Wideman and reThink). Simple and effective.”

For churches that do not want to create their own podcasts, there are other options. Two such examples are Children’s Ministry Talk and Children’s Ministry Podcast. Children’s Ministry Talk (www.childrensministrytalk.com) is a podcast devoted to providing straight talk for children’s ministry leaders, by children’s ministry leaders, on all things related to children’s ministry. It is hosted by Dick Gruber, Jason Rhode, and other children’s ministry leaders. Children’s Ministry Podcast (www.kidology.org/podcast) is hosted by Karl Bastian and his sidekick puppet, Gus. Together they discuss children’s ministry and provide helpful insights and tips for children’s pastors, leaders, and volunteers.

3) Twitter. Children’s pastors like Sam Luce at Mt. Zion Ministries Church plan to use Twitter to connect with their volunteers. “I am still working out the kinks. I think it is going to be great for my teen/college-age helpers and is much better than email. For my adult volunteers, it may be a tougher sell.”

Just because email is good for some things doesn’t mean it’s good for everything. Here are some times when you should NOT use email.

• When you have to deliver bad news. Do this face to face.
• When you need to discipline an employee or volunteer. Too many people think the ‘e’ in email stands for ‘easy way out’ and boy are they wrong.
• When you are mad. Take 24 hours and think about it before you email. Ministry is about relationships and communication can make or break relationships. Any single email could be the catalyst for cementing a relationship or for destroying it – bottom line.
• When you need feedback that can’t fit in a few paragraphs. Don’t make someone write a book in an email.
• When you need a formal vote (a motion, a second, discussion, and final votes). You end up with a long thread of emails and everyone gets confused and frustrated the longer it gets.
• When you have complicated instructions you are trying to teach. Pick up the telephone.
• When you want to gossip. How many times have you jokingly said (or not jokingly), “If you quote me, I’ll simply deny it.” News flash – this isn’t possible on email!
• When you have nothing to add. Ask yourself, “Am I  adding to the conversation or just making my voice heard?”

Am I forgetting anything? If so, leave a comment and let me know.

Twitter may be the next big thing in social networking. Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, everyone seems to be on Twitter. President Barack Obama? Yep. Britney Spears? You bet, and on I could go. Although Twitter won’t disclose their number of active accounts, a few months ago it was ranked by Compete.com as the third most used social network.

Click here to read the rest of the article from the e-magazine.

I started tweeting in early December of last year. Jim Wideman called me up and told me about it and said “Buddy, you better start.” I did. What attracted me to Twitter was not that people could follow me and listen to what I have to say, but because it provided an opportunity for me to learn from others. I’ve heard Jim say a dozen times that Colonels hang out with Colonels. Twitter seemed like a good way to do that.

Last week on vacation I decided to start on Facebook. Opposite from most people, I started with Twitter then moved to Facebook. “It’s about time” – I can hear it coming from your brain even as I type. Here is why I caved and decided to start this journey (not in any particular order).

1. I can connect with old friends. Obvious right?

2. I can connect with kids that grew up in my children’s ministry but are now big kids.

3. I can network with other children’s pastors. This was my #1 reason for starting. I knew there were a ton of children’s ministry people out there that I would never connect with if I didn’t jump in with both feet. I am looking forward to learning from them and hopefully they will learn from me.

4. I can connect with my employees in a new way. Our KidzMatter staffers are all (for the most part) on Facebook. This will help my employees see a more personal side of their leader.

5. It will help KidzMatter be a more customer-centric company. Facebook will give me the opportunity to engage with our customers and listen to what they like, don’t like and what they need. I won’t have to pay big bucks to get feedback from them.

6. It will drive more traffic to my blog. This is where I really have the chance to pour into others online. Michael Hyatt talked about this. Basically he said that your blog is your homebase (where you want people to go). Twitter, Facebook, etc. connect people to your homebase.

7. It’s easy. Facebook’s Twitter integration means that when I post an update on Twitter it will show up on my wall in Facebook. Very nice.

Why are you on Facebook?

Two years ago I came to a breaking point. My task lists were overwhelming me. I’m a full-time children’s pastor, the publisher of a growing bi-monthly magazine, the leader of a growing company, and serve on a handful of boards. Each of these have a way of creating some nice task lists. My breaking point came when I realized I couldn’t manage my tasks. I was working off a task list in Mail, several Excel spreadsheets, a few Stickies, and a pad of paper. It was a classic mess.

Then I discovered OmniFocus. It’s powerful task-management software. Here’s what I like about it.

1. Tasks (called actions in OmniFocus) can be as simple or complex as you want. You can simply add a task (Pick up some goldfish crackers before Sunday) or add a task complete with a due date, context, reminder, and the whole nine yards.

2. You can organize your tasks by category. Some of my categories include: This Week, Personal, Church, KidzMatter, K! Magazine, INCM, etc. Each of these categories even have subcategories with tasks under each.

3. You can send yourself to-dos from your email. Omnifocus will watch for incoming emails that are tasks and will automatically add them to your Omnifocus inbox. Come on, you’ve gotta admit that this is cool.

4. The context feature is one of my favorite things. Remember, I probably have 30 different task lists in OmniFocus. Since each task can have a context, like “Errands”, I can view all of my tasks by context. This means all of my errands will show up in a nice list when I am ready to start shopping.

5. You can capture tasks anywhere. This is good if you have the memory of a goldfish like I do. OmniFocus is based on David Allen’s popular Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity system. The first principle in that system is that you should be able to add (capture) new to-dos whenever and wherever they occur to you. If you are typing an email and think of a task, with a few keystrokes, you can add a task to Omnifocus. You can do this from any application on your Mac.

6. There’s an OmniFocus app for the iPhone. This means your task list is always synched with your iPhone. Nice!

OmniFocus 1.0.6 (the current version) is the coolest task management software I have found. If you’re like me and you spend as much time managing your to-do list as you do actually completing the tasks on it, you’ll be hooked. That’s my two cents worth.