While sitting in the booth as I work at McDonald’s, my place to escape and write, a two year old little girl with big puffy pony tails and I caught eyes.  I smiled and waved as I continued to work.  Throughout her meal she glanced my way and waved hoping I would return the kindness.  She kept coming back to me looking for attention.  It made me think about where we turn for attention and approval.

Do we keep coming back to Christ?  Do we aim to get His attention?  How else can we continue the work if we work on our own and not out of the strength of our connection with Christ?

I ask the God of our Master, Jesus Christ, the God of glory—to make you intelligent and discerning in knowing Him personally, your eyes focused and clear, so that you can see exactly what it is He is calling you to do, grasp the immensity of this glorious way of life He has for Christians, oh, the utter extravagance of His work in us who trust Him—endless energy, boundless strength. —Ephesians 1:17-18 (MSG)

Inspired by: What Matters Now in Children’s Ministry, Broken Cisterns

In the last article in our January series highlighting Special Needs Ministry, Amy Fenton Lee and Cory Center staff writer Rhonda Haslett discuss how to engage in a positive dialogue with parents of children with special needs and decide how to implement a “buddy system” within your children’s ministry.  These are critical needs in the process of building a special needs ministry!

Statistics tell us that families with children who have special needs do not attend church because their needs are either not attempted to be met or they get frustrated with the current provisions for their family.

Download the article Getting to the Need

Also, check out this short video about Grace Church’s special needs ministry and the story of an impacted family.

Life Change – Joey A from Jim Taylor on Vimeo.

Our friends over at Pajama Conference have been hard at work getting ready for some great Conferences that you can, get this, attend while in your PJ’s – because they are done online and are viewed right in your own home!  Get it, PJ’s….Pajama Conference???  Oh, never mind….

They have 3 such conferences coming up in the next 3 months:  Visionary Family Conference, What Matters Now in CM, and CM Telesummit 2011.  All 3 of these are bound to be amazing opportunities and will enrich your ministry to Children and Families.  Now to get to the good stuff…

Pajama Conference in conjunction with Cory Center is giving away two free registrations to the Visionary Family Conference on January 23rd – 26th.  Created by author Rob Rienow, The Visionary Family Conference ONLINE is a unique online experience where you can be equipped and inspired by three different Visionary Family conferences–right from your own home!  It is basically 3 seminars in one:  Visionary Parenting, Visionary Marriage & Never Too Late.  You will also get the opportunity to chat LIVE, online with Dr. Rob Rienow.

Rob has served as Youth and Family Pastor at Wheaton Bible Church for 18 years. God has now called Rob and Amy to serve full-time as missionaries through Visionary Family Ministries. Their mission is to build the church through a global reformation of family discipleship. He shares the biblical message of family discipleship at national and international conferences for parents, couples, and church leaders.

He is the author of the books “God’s Grand Vision for the Home” (Awana), “Visionary Parenting” (Randall House), and “When They Turn Away: Drawing Your Adult Child Back to Christ” (Kregel). He and Amy also wrote “Visionary Marriage” (Randall House) to help couples capture a compelling, biblical vision for their life together. The Rienow family lives in Wheaton, IL.

PJ Conference is also doing a giving away two of Rob’s books:  Visionary Marriage & Visionary Parenting – both of which are must reads for Christian couples and parents!

So, here are the details…

• To enter you must leave a comment to this blog entry.  Be sure we have your email address so the code can be sent to you.
• You get one entry for just leaving a general comment.
• If you Tweet this contest, you get another entry.  Write something like “Tweeted this contest,” then include the Tweet link.
• If you share on Facebook, you get another entry.  Again, write something like “Facebooked this contest,” then include a link of some sort.

In total you can get 3 entries.  That’s pretty good odds!  So, share the information in letting people know about this great opportunity.  Thanks for stopping by!!

The Cory Center for Children’s Ministry is a project of Bethel Seminary whose mission is to provide resources to the field of children’s and family ministry.  Our resources are focused in five areas: coaching, blog, articles, podcast, and app.

2011 will be an incredible year for the Cory Center because we will be:

• Coaching leaders in children’s and family ministry
• Developing new training modules for the 1 for 50 Initiative
• Continuing the What Matters Now blog (formerly the KidTech blog)
• Publishing monthly articles (including resources children’s and family ministry leaders can use to train, encourage, and build their volunteer teams)
• Distributing a redesigned enewsletter
• Offering several podcast series
• Releasing the Cory Center iPhone app

For our regular readers, you’ll notice that our website looks a little different.  We’ve moved our website hosting from SiteOrganic to publishing our entire website through WordPress on Dreamhost.  This transition will prepare our site for a migration to Bethel University’s domain in late 2011/early 2012.

Our staff looks forward to serving you in 2011!

Some churches will go to great lengths to make visitors feel comfortable like renovating the children’s ministry wing or adding new ministry programs; but is that necessary?  Being friendly and welcoming doesn’t mean taking out a loan.  It might just mean moving through a paradigm shift and looking with fresh direction at your ministry.  Knowing what visitors look for as well as what they experience when they pull into your parking lot is a great place to begin.  Though some would argue a welcoming church begins well before the parking lot, for the purposes of our research, that’s where we’ll begin.

Read the entire article

Bethel’s Global Influence
Article by Cory Center Contributor Rhonda Haslett

You may not realize this, but the Cory Center (which hosts this blog and provides free resources to leaders in children’s and family ministry) is a project of Bethel Seminary.  You can read more about how the Cory Center and Bethel are linked here.

Why do people take the time to pack up for a day’s journey to a conference?  They want to learn and grow.  They want to find out what’s going on outside of their small ministry bubble.  Often it is this exposure to the “outside world” that leads to inspiration and education and greater impact for their own ministries.  As balanced and cutting edge as the Bethel Seminary’s Masters of Children’s and Family Ministries program is, Bethel’s leaders are always seeking growth and expansion of influence.  Bethel has been researching how to bring deeper impact by exposing its leaders to other environments and ministry settings from all over the world.  Bethel is positioning itself for a greater global influence!

Bethel has been globally influential for years with students from other countries enrolled in their academic programs.   But in an all new emphasis to increase its ability to impact international ministry to children, Bethel Seminary’s M.A. in Children’s and Family Ministries has joined the Global Alliance for Holistic Child Development (HCD) programs.  The HCD Global Alliance is a voluntary group of seminaries, Bible schools, and other Christian academic institutions working together with researchers, trainers, practitioners, and other Christian leaders to create a global movement of academic programs in holistic child development.

Denise Muir Kjesbo, Ph.D., professor and lead faculty for Children’s and Family Ministry at Bethel Seminary stated, “Our presence in the Alliance gives us a new opportunity for global collaboration and partnership.”   In fact, her recent opportunity to speak at and attend the Global Children’s Ministry conference in Beirut, Dr. Kjesbo was overwhelmed with the need people and organization had from all over the world for excellent education in children’s ministry and leadership.  This is such an incredible opportunity for Bethel and the Cory Center to share vision and resources with such ministry organizations as the HCD Global Alliance, World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), the 4/14 Window Global initiatives, the International Fellowship of Evangelical, Mission Theologians (INFEMIT), Child Theology Movement (CTM), Compassion International, and Overseas Council International (OCI). To name a few.  To learn more about HCD Global Alliance, go to http://hcd-alliance.org/.  If you area interested in the primary events happening around the world in conjunction with this partnership, you can read the newsletter for HCD at http://hcd-alliance.org/resources/curricula/certificate-program/doc_details/

David A. Ridder, Vice President and Dean of Bethel Seminary, confidently stated, “This is an important place for Bethel to be.  It puts us on the cutting edge of what I believe will be one of the major global missions movements of the next generation- the focus on the 4/14 Window.”  It puts Bethel and the Cory Center is a pivotal position to bring a great deal of formal and informal education to those who lead and serve children’s ministries who will impact the 1.2 billion children and youth between the age of 4 and 14.  It is a plea to the Church to reach and raise up a new generation that experience personal transformation and can be mobilized as agents for change in the world.

Why is it so important to be a part of a global movement?  According to Global Children’s Ministry, We must work together because, “children’s ministry is exploding around the world, the world is changing and kids are in crisis.” You can read why these statement are true at http://www.globalchildrensministry.org/about/why_another_conference.

With this partnership between Bethel and HCD Global Alliance we have the privilege of equipping the leaders of children’s ministries all over the globe.  Please join us in celebrating these new bridges toward shared ministry!  We believe God is inviting new vistas for Bethel Seminary’s CFM program in the global arena.

As you consider this global perspective of children’s ministries, ask the Lord to help you determine your local role as well as global role in reaching the 1.2 billion of lost children around the world.  Perhaps your for experience and exposure to global ministry could start right here at Bethel.