Training — English

Today’s culture follows a specific recipe to give their children “the best future possible”. Outsourcing. Want your child to be great in baseball? Find the best coach. Want your child to be great in science? Find the best tutor. This recipe forces a question on parents when it comes to spiritual development. If I haven’t gone through any formal religious training (or patience training for that matter), how can I teach my children to have a strong faith that holds up to the world’s forces? If you want your child to be great in faith, find the best children’s ministry....

I sometimes joke that I’m one of a dozen people in the whole world who would pick young teens as my favorite age group to teach. They are always in flux and always challenging. They are never dull and rarely docile. They are going through physical, mental, emotional and spiritual changes, perhaps at a pace they will never achieve again. I don’t understand why this isn’t everyone’s favorite age group! NEW START YOUNG TEENS are entering a new stage of development. Like newborn babies, they are constructing who they can become and what their lives will be like in the...

Remember when you first got in to children’s ministry? Remember the calling God gave you? The burden you had for children? The awesome responsibility you accepted? The urgency you felt back when it was about reaching lost kids and discipling those who had accepted Christ? What changed?You went into children’s ministry because you wanted to be a shepherd of children—and all too soon you became more sheepherder than shepherd. Just getting the kids where they need to be and hoping to have a reasonable adult-to-child ratio became a weekly battle. You feel your heart for ministry fading and you secretly...

Start with your hands together in prayer. This reminds us that God heard the prayers of the Hebrew people when they were in slavery in Egypt and freed them (Exodus 3:7, 20:2). The commandments are a way for us to show our gratitude for God’s love in our lives. “I am the Lord your God…you must not have any other god but me. We worship one God.” (Hold up one index finger for the number one.) “You must not make for yourself an idol. Idols, or false gods, are not only things like statues, but also anything we place our...

I prefer window seats in airplanes and always request them. I love watching the clouds and bird’s eye view of the world below. Probably most important, when I’m turned toward the window, people in the row rarely talk to me. I get precious hours of silence. I boarded a plane to Arizona. A woman in a business suit was on the aisle and a little boy traveling alone was in the middle seat. I love window seats, but I love kids more. So I offered him my seat. “No thanks,” he said. “I throw up when I look out the...