Elemental Children's Ministry

(photo originally uploaded to Flickr by Ucodep)

Back in December, the Stuff Christians Like blog readers raised $60,000 to build two kindergartens in Vietnam through Samaritan’s Purse. It was so neat to see this happen in a matter of days. It was also inspiring to see the power of many people giving $5, $10, $25 and $100 gifts adding up quickly.

Well, I figure that if a blog like SCL can raise enough money to build two kindergartens, I’m sure that all of you in the Elemental Children’s Ministry community can give enough to buy one tent for people in Haiti.

I’ve been following a guy named Shaun King on Twitter for a while. If you don’t know who Shaun is, he’s a pretty charismatic guy (30 years old) who is the lead pastor of a pretty new church in the Atlanta area called Courageous Church. You can check out more of who he is via his blog Shaun in the City. I haven’t had a chance to actually meet or hear Shaun, but I get to attend a breakout he is doing at The Orange Conference at the end of April. I’m looking forward to it.

Ever since the earthquake hit, Shaun has been in the thick of things trying to get help to different areas of Haiti. He’s been using his influence with churches and his network to help make a dent in alleviating some of the suffering in Haiti. Most recently, he has launched an initiative called aHomeinHaiti.ORG. The ultimate goal of this initiative is to provide real homes for people in Haiti, but it is being done in phases. The first phase is to meet the immediate need of waterproof shelter for people. The rainy season in Haiti is quickly approaching, and most people simply have poles and sheets to use as shelter. They need more. One of the immediate ways to meet this need is to provide quality waterproof tents for people. Through aHomeinHaiti.ORG, Shaun has a goal of sending 200,000 tents to Haiti. This can be done in a couple of ways… People can browse an Amazon store that has been set up to purchase an actual tent, or people can donate via PayPal any cash amount that will directly go to purchasing tents.

Personally, as a family, we are going to partner with 5 other families to purchase a larger tent. At church, we are going to challenge the kids and their families to bring in money to purchase another larger tent.

Now, here’s where all of you in the Elemental Children’s Ministry community come in! I’d like to be able to help facilitate enough money coming in to purchase yet another large tent. My goal is for, at least, $600 to come through all of you readers. The way I am asking you to do that is by donating directly to aHomeinHaiti.ORG via PayPal donation. No money that you donate via the PayPal link will come directly through me or Elemental Children’s Ministry.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE MONEY TO AHOMEINHAITI.ORG THAT WILL GO TO PURCHASE TENTS FOR HAITI.

You don’t have to have a PayPal account to donate. If you do have one, great… if not, you can donate via credit card. Simply click on the link above and follow the instructions.

I think this is a very tangible and practical way we can help the people in Haiti. I encourage you to tell other people (friends, families, etc.) about aHomeinHaiti.ORG.

(NOTE: Neither I nor Elemental Children’s Ministry is receiving any kind of compensation for promoting aHomeinHaiti.ORG. All monies being donated to aHomeinHaiti.ORG by clicking on the above links are going directly to aHomeinHaiti.ORG via links from their website.)

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Have you ever wondered how things are made? I do all the time! Who puts the sticky stuff on the back of stickers? Who makes CDs? (Um, as a kid one of our neighbors worked at a place that made CDs… I thought that was cool!) How DO they get the filling inside of Twinkies? (and don’t you find it disconcerting that Twinkies are what’s left on earth after it’s polluted to death on WALL-E?)

Well, there is one thing being made that you don’t have to wonder about anymore, and that is The Orange Conference. There is a new site covering all of the behind-the-scenes details of what is going into putting The Orange Conference together! There will be interviews with planners and speakers. It’s even rumored that there might even be a weekly vodcast from Reggie… (send ReThink mass emails to demand it, I’m sure they’ll comply :) )

Some other things you’ll see at MakingOfOrange.com will be the stream of the opening session of The Orange Conference (for those of you who aren’t able to be there), backstage interviews, and possibly some streams of breakouts (this last thing isn’t a sure thing, but is being considered).

So check out MakingOfOrange.com and subscribe to theRSS feed so you can keep up to date of the happenings behind the scenes of The Orange Conference as well as seeing backstage stuff during the conference!

BTW, if you haven’t registered for the conference, you can do so by clicking here. You can also have a chance to win a free registration to The Orange Conference by participating in the Think Orange group blogging project discussions here on Elemental Children’s Ministry.

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I came across this post at Scot McKnight’s blog Jesus Creed. He highlighted Ivy Beckwith’s new book, Formational Children’s Ministry. I was pretty excited to see it show up on McKnight’s blog. Anyway, I encourage you to hop on over, take a look at the post and leave a comment.

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(photo originally uploaded to Flickr by Kenny Moller)

There’s a new parenting blog out there! My wife and I have started a blog entitled Elemental Parenting. By no means do we have it all figured out… far from it. We thought, though, that there might be other parents who don’t have it figured out either and need to go to a place that might help them feel better about their parenting :)

Anyway, hop on over there. We are adding more content as the days go by.

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(photo originally uploaded to Flickr by Stéfan)

Apparently there must be an influx of bloggers who are trying to stick it to the man by not disclosing the millions of dollars in endorsements they make blogging because the FTC is threatening an $11,000 fine to bloggers who do not disclose the nature of their relationships to links, reviews, etc. That being said, I do understand the implications of conflicts of interest and such, so here goes my disclosure:

While it would be nice to make a living writing this blog, truth be told, I don’t. I started this blog because I love ministry to children, children’s culture and the interaction of the two. Plus, I was tiring out my friends with my opinions on children’s ministry. I do have an audience, though, (that’s all of you reading this… thanks for reading!) and because of that there have been a few perks… and by perks, I mean I’ve had the privilege of receiving resources (i.e. books, curriculum, products, etc.) for review from various sources. I am also part of the Thomas Nelson Book Review Blogger program as well as ViralBloggers.com. When reviewing these resources, I offer my honest opinion of the material whether positive or negative. I do not offer favorable reviews in exchange for any type of compensation.

I am also part of the Amazon affiliate program and receive a percentage of material purchased through Amazon links on this blog in the form of Amazon gift certificates. While it isn’t much, I am able to turn around and buy a book after a year or so! In the same way, if someone clicks on one of the product links on the sidebar and purchases the product, I would receive small compensation which would go back into paying for hosting fees for this blog. So far, I haven’t received anything from those links. Also, if someone ever decided to donate via the PayPal link

those funds would go to help offset the cost of hosting this blog. Some day I might put up sponsored links that pay for ad space on this blog, but as of now, no one has paid me to have a link on this blog. (If you are interested in me putting up a sponsored link for you, though, feel free to contact me!)

Readers are under no obligation to click on any of the links on the blog or to purchase anything as a result of following any links on this blog.

One more thing… I do my best to give credit where credit is due. If I have posted something on this blog that belongs to you and I haven’t credited you, contact me so I can fix that. If you would like to reprint something from this blog either electronically or in print, or if you would like to use something from this blog in any other form of communication please be sure to reference either Henry Zonio or this blog (along with URL www.elementalcm.com) in accordance with the Creative Commons license.

Well, that ends my disclosure of this blog. If I failed to mention anything in this disclosure it’s because I’m tired and need to go to bed… not because I’m trying to hide something.

There! Are you happy, FTC?

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I received a direct message from a friend on Twitter with a link to the above page. All the message said was, “Hey, is this you?” When I clicked on the link, thinking my friend was asking a legitimate question or had a funny pic to show me, I was prompted to enter my Twitter login info on a site that looks a lot like the Twitter login site… that is except for the URL!

Recently, there have been a number of Twitter accounts that have been hacked and messages have been sent out via those accounts to people on their follow lists. There is a quick resolution to this: if you find that your account has been hacked, change your password. If you are worried about getting your account hacked, simply be aware of where you enter your login information. Be sure the source that is asking for your info is a trusted source, and be sure that if you do end up on a page that looks like the Twitter login page that the URL is http://twitter.com.

I thought I’d blog about it because of the number of DMs I’ve been getting from friends’ accounts that have been hacked.

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Yesterday, I wrote a blog post about some trouble I had with ScribbleLive. I soon received an @reply Tweet from Scribble Live saying the above. Now, there is a company that knows how to capitalize on social media! Kudos to ScribbleLive.

It’s experiences like this that remind me that all this technology needs to facilitate a personal experience. It’s so easy for technology to get in the way of that.

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If you subscribe to the RSS feed for Elemental Children’s Ministry, you recently received a lot of blog posts in your newsreader from Elemental. This was due to a glitch in ScribbleLive.com. I use it for liveblogging while I am at conferences. I’ve never really had a problem with it before, but for some reason today it decided to post multiple instances of an event. I apologize for the large number of empty or repetitive posts. Hopefully, in the future, this won’t happen again. If it does, I’m going to have to find a new service for liveblogging.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled Elemental Children’s Ministry posts.

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