Snow Ice Cream

Back when I was young (almost 40 years ago) my mom use to make snow icecream for us. Well my daughter comes up and asks me today if we could make it. I haven't had snow Ice Cream in a long time. So we made some. Here is a picture of the kids eating up their share (Lindsey looks like she had a brain freeze). I found this web site on how to make it.

TP Bazooka

Our Children's Pastor Mick Schultz found this kewl item on the web site and thought he could make one for our "needs." Well the picture should tell you that we were able to make one (YES!!!). We tried it out in the gym and we went through a roll in less than 10 sec. Pretty kewl and I can't wait to try it out with the kids some time.

Back to Basics Toaster & Egg Poacher

Here is an interesting item to use at home:

http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001552.php

A great blog post for jr hi pastors

Kurt Johnston (jr hi guy at saddleback church) had a great post in his blog recently and I just wanted to put a link to it hear. It is about having middle school parents as a part of the middle school minsitry team. I'm glad to read that we are doing this with the ministry here at NCBC and will never stop. I put it here if not for anything else then for me to go check again and again.

new york times article on middle schools

Shout out to Marco for sharing this article on his blog. I really like reading things such as this because it is so surprising to me how people who work with middle school kids wrestle with educating and helping middle schoolers.

I am no expert but I do have a heart passion for middle school kids. I love (and like) middle school kids and I enjoy interacting with those who love and work with them.

Marko shared this New York Times Article about the education system of middle school kids and how it is missing the mark in helping them. I made some comments on Marko’s blog and I wanted to share them with you all and see what your thoughts are about the article and my comments.

Here is what I said:
One of the observations I have seen with middle school/jr hi kids is their desire to want to succeed and to succeed by helping others. If we as a culture give them a chance to do this in every aspect (I know this is a big idea) of their lives I believe the key problems mention in this article (and many others) could be less or not even be major problems. In the article they say, “research shows that volunteering may work: children who used to being helped take pride in becoming the helpers.” Give a jr hi kid the chance to share with a younger child how to do a math problem or learn how to spell a word and watch that jr hi kid grow. Give him a chance to do a short term mission and watch him fly. We need to show and teach them how to do this by Godly relationships with adults but then we need to let them do it. This is also a fine line for us to walk because the opportunity to succeed comes with the opportunity to fail. For most jr hi kids failing will happen. We just need to be there to help them “fail” forward.

Statcounter up & running

After playing around to get my counter to start working again I've got it running. So now I know if you have visited me (hehehe). Thanks to all of you who visit here and if you want to know how many hits this blog gets check out the little numbers under my profile.

Book Report - Controlled Chaos

Controlled Chaos was a book I read right before I became the jr hi youth pastor at New Covenant Bible Church in 2002. I’ve been wanting to go back and read it again and mark it up with my comments, questions, and ideas. Well now I’ve done that and I’m glad I did. Kurt Johnston is the author of this book and the Jr hi Youth Pastor at Saddleback Church. He writes in a way that is easy to digest and easy to see applications to use in a jr hi youth ministry. A lot of the material I read has been happening in our ministry. But there are two ideas that I would like to use in IMPACT (the jr hi ministry here at NCBC).

One – is to be more creative. I certainly don’t have a lot of originally creative ideas (I’m more of a scavenger of ideas). But I do think that our ministry can be very creative if we choose to use one of our greatest creative resource we have – the jr highers. The youth themselves come up with some great ideas and I believe we can and should give them ownership of the ministry by letting them be creative in it.

Two – As I said before I usually scavenge a lot of stuff we use for the ministry here. One of the challenges from the book to me was to try something original. So one of the messages I will be teaching this spring or summer will be totally from God working through me and the studies I have had in His Word. If it goes well I can only give God the glory if it doesn’t than I can apply the “once” principle.

If you are a youth pastor, a middle/jr hi youth pastor, or someone who works with a youth pastor you should read this book. It will give you insight, challenge you, and encourage you as you work with jr hi youth.

If you would like to order this book please click on the picture.

Breadless sandwich

Here something to try. My boys don't eat sandwiches much. So I tryed something today and have everything that is on a sandwich but with no bread. They ate it so fast I thought I didn't gave them much to eat but I did. Just a thought that works in the Eades home.