I hate to say it, but many children’s ministries are like a bad country song, “where have all the good men gone”? Volunteering and working with kids has long been a female dominated ministry, particularly in nursery and preschool ministries. A shortage of men working with little children has been a cultural trend that dates [...]

Adapted from my wife’s blog:

Nicole has been taking our kids to Mandarin classes since January. It has been wonderful to see Emma eager to re-learning her native language. In an effort to teach her English and prepare her for kindergarten this year it has been difficult to maintain her Mandarin language. A friend told [...]

Churchill Downs is an organization steeped in tradition. On the “backside” you have horse trainers, jockey’s & their valet’s that are traditionalists. The “frontside” of the organization is trying to be innovative to attract more customers and give them a better experience. Let’s be honest, this isn’t very different from the church (OK, except for [...]

The following post is an adaptation from a chapter I wrote in the book, “Turbocharged 2.0: 100 Simple Secrets to Successful Preschool Ministry”. To learn more about the book you can check it out here.

In over 10 years as a Children’s Pastor, I have observed some key characteristics in preschoolers that every leader [...]

Vision has been defined as “a clear mental picture of what could be, fueled by the conviction that it should be”. The Bible states in Proverbs 29:18, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Establishing a vision for your ministry is essential to knowing where you are going and getting everyone on the same [...]

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about our multisite strategy for children’s ministry at 12Stone Church. Currently we have 3 campuses, with more on the way. The most common questions I get is, “what is our model for multisite?”
Before we talk about our model, let me identify the three main ways I see churches [...]

My three children are fascinated with animals. They love to learn interesting facts about animals. Recently we checked out a book about baby animals that was full of amazing facts about all kinds of creatures. One of the discoveries that I found most interesting had to do with baby ducks and how they imprint.
When baby [...]

On January 4th, our team in Haiti discovered that brokenness has faces as we entered a walled in property that consisted of a cinderblock building and an acre of barren land. It was hard to imagine that this placed housed 120 orphans. 60% of their parents had died of HIV/AIDS, 40% were abandoned on the [...]

Surreal…that’s the best I can describe the feeling of seeing images and hearing stories of the devastation in Haiti. To think that our team was there 1 week ago is unreal. Our hotel (pictured below) in the city of Jacmel is demolished. Thankfully, we have heard from our friends in both Port-au-Prince and Jacmel and the [...]

At 12Stone Church we often get asked, “How do you organize your elementary small groups?” Throughout our services we transition between large group & small groups at various times to discuss the Bible Story and maintain interaction within the groups. We want our small group to be 3D:
DO – This is our hands-on element. Our [...]