This was a year of continuing to listen for and cooperate with God’s priorities for KidZ at Heart. To the best of our ability, our staff and board gathers regularly for a variety of spiritual practices, where we attempt to create space to be with and listen to God as a ministry team. You might think of it as creating a Tabernacle experience where we can spend time with God personally.
As we continued to follow those practices together in 2018, we saw God bring new [...]
We’ve been talking quite a bit about spiritual formation of children and even a new project that KidZ at Heart is starting with Grafted Life Ministries. We invite you to dream with us.
Can you imagine...
Spiritual formation. That’s a phrase you may be hearing at church these days. But what does it mean? Well, that sort of depends on who is saying it.
And that’s why we’d like to share with you what KidZ at Heart means when we talk about spiritual formation.
For some, “spiritual formation” is a synonym for Christian education. For others, it means the same thing as discipleship. Most see it as a repackaging of what we’ve always called spiritual growth.
But Dallas Willard explains these words are simply [...]
Children and God connect with each other rather naturally and in many of the same ways that adults connect with God. As adults, we sometimes think we need to “help” both children and God to connect. But that’s not necessarily so! God and his children are pretty good at building a relationship when they are given a chance to do so.
In February, KidZ at Heart was privileged to be part of the 2018 Annual Conference of the [...]
We have exciting news to share! KidZ at Heart International has just signed a “memorandum of understanding” (commonly known as an MOU) with Hope International University in Fullerton, California. Together, we will be creating and administering an online Children’s Ministry Leadership Certificate as part of Hope’s School of Advanced Leadership Training (SALT) program.
Wikipedia defines MOU as “an agreement between two…or more….parties (that)… expresses a convergence of will between the parties, indicating an intended common line of action.” The Scriptures define this as the body [...]
Whenever Scripture talks about knowing God, the word “know” suggests much more than an intellectual cognition of facts. In the same way, the Christian life is far more than abiding by a set of rules or principles for daily living.
While most of us know these two statements to be true about our own relationship with Jesus, adults are too quick to take the heart out of the gospel for children and replace it with a set of facts to believe and standards by which to [...]
We have just returned from a very full and fruitful ten days in El Salvador. Although exhausted, our hearts are full. KidZ at Heart El Salvador is moving full-speed ahead! Over recent months, we have sensed God moving the work of KidZ at Heart further into regional centers of impact. El Salvador is certainly one of those centers.
Joining us on this trip were KidZ at Heart staff members Gean Stevens (Way was unable to join us) and Jim and Becky Dietz (Becky is a [...]
A few years back, we had the opportunity to ask the pastor of one of the largest churches of Eastern Europe what his ministry’s biggest need was. His answer, “Children’s ministry training. We have no idea what to do!” But he didn’t stop there. He went on to beg of us, ”Please tell your friends in America not to send one more VBS team to us. We don’t need to know what you can do for one week. We need to know what we can [...]
The news is disturbing…
“Children, as young as seven years old, are being turned into human bombs…” (60 Minutes, CBS News).
“Turkey wedding suicide bomber 'was child aged 12-14’” (BBC).
“The Iraqi security officers grip the boy tightly… This was the dramatic moment Iraqi police stopped Hussein, a 15-year-old suspected in a suicide bombing attempt for ISIS…” (CNN).
Why are terrorists now focusing on children?
George Barna, church researcher, tells us this: “If you want to shape a person’s life – whether you are most concerned about [...]
Just about every church would agree that children should be taught about God.
But is that enough?
For many years, churches have been trying to improve the quality of Sunday school and other programs for children. In an effort to make Christian education more enjoyable and to keep kids coming back, talented people have continually created better curriculum and implemented more effective teaching methodologies.
And we commend these efforts! There is much that children need to know about God and about his Bible. And we want to use [...]