Article
by Kevin Orris
Welcome to ChildDiscipleship.com! We praise God for your interest and desire to help children know, love and serve Jesus whether in your local church or home. Our team has intentionally crafted this growing collection of insights and resources to help you pass on a legacy of faith for generations to come. We’re committed to keeping things simple, rooted in Scripture and ultimately practical to serve you and your ministry.
Here are five things you should know as you begin to explore the site:
1. Eternal Impact
Our team is unwavering in our desire to provide robust research, Biblical resources and practical recommendations to help you help children follow Jesus for the rest of their lives. What better gift can we offer children than lasting faith and abundant life in the Kingdom of God?
We won’t pretend to be a one-stop shop for all things children’s ministry. Rather, we are resolutely focused on the discipleship of children. This is about more than crafts and snacks. How do we raise kids to be resilient disciples and lead the Church into the future? To withstand the rapid rise of post-Christian thought and influence? To know, love, and serve Jesus for the rest of their lives? These are the sorts of questions we will make our best efforts to wrestle with and answer in this space.
We invite you to hold us accountable to this standard and ensure our aims are focused on things above at all times.
2. Experience Abounds
We’ve assembled a team of contributors and guides to help us in this effort. This experience crew is composed of children’s ministry leaders, pastors, parents, thought leaders, and beyond. This group has centuries of collective experience leading ministries and discipling children across a variety of denominations and contexts.
3. Insight + Implementation = Impact
Our content often begins with insights to help you implement new ideas for impact. You’ll find the results of extensive research projects, ideas from thought leaders, observations from local practitioners, cultural trends and more. Whenever possible, we pair these insights with practical and actionable steps to make a positive change in the way you disciple children based on these insights.
This approach allows us to elevate the conversation to things that truly matter, all the while supporting you in your everyday ministry to children.
4. More Than “Content”
While we’ve created and curated a plethora of resources to help you today, we also host gatherings, lead trainings and offer curriculums to help you in your discipleship journey. Our flagship event is the Child Discipleship Forum, which we launched in 2021. You can access every talk from the 2022 and 2021 CDF here!
We’ve also launched Resilient Child Discipleship Training to provide practical discipleship principles and strategies based on our bestselling book Resilient. These events are taking place in six cities across the country, as well as an online offering, in the coming months. Click here to register!
Don’t see your city listed? Fill out this form to let us know where we should host future trainings! We plan to host hundreds of these gatherings in the years ahead, as well as expand and deepen similar training opportunities.
Additionally, we recently partnered with Barna to complete the largest known study regarding child discipleship in local churches. You can find the results of the research here.
Finally, we also offer a handful of easy-to-use curriculums centered on child discipleship. We recommend exploring Brite for weekends, Awana Clubs for midweek and Talk About for at-home discipleship.
5. Supported by Donors
ChildDiscipleship.com is a project of Awana, a non-profit and global leader in child and youth discipleship spanning more than 70 years. Each week, Awana reaches more than 5 million kids with the Gospel across partnerships with more than 68,000 local churches in 134 countries. Our ministry is fueled and funded by the support of gracious donors, spanning individuals, families, local churches, organizations, etc.
Would you please consider making a donation to Awana to support the work of ChildDisicpleship.com? Click here to donate today.
