Gordon D. West: KidZ Newsletters

The board and staff of KidZ at Heart International is delighted to welcome Paige Kolb and SureFire Prayer to our global Christian community. As the rich suite of resources and dynamic leaders of SureFire Prayer are grafted into KidZ at Heart, we will be better prepared than ever before to train, partner with, and mobilize networks of leaders to help kids fall deeply in love with Jesus!

Like any partnership, this one came together based on shared passion, vision, and style, with both [...]

Recently, we visited the growing KidZ at Heart team in El Salvador to conduct KidZ at Heart’s Great Trainers Summit, our training of trainers. While traveling in-country, we saw churches everywhere which helped us see why El Salvador considers itself to be a Christian country. Jesus has been proclaimed there for many years, yet we were saddened to hear the results of a recent survey.

This study revealed that 54.9% of all inmates currently in the prisons of El Salvador [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]