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Creative Resources for Pentecost by A Sanctified Art
I’m excited to share with you a little more about A Sanctified Art this morning. They have put together this incredible bundle of Creative Resources for Pentecost and it’s definitely worth checking out. Some of you have been asking if I was going to put out a coloring sheet for Pentecost, similar to the Alleluia Coloring Sheet we did for Easter. Unfortunately, because of the product launch that is happening now – we aren’t going to have anything for Pentecost – but I would highly encourage you to check out these resources and see if there is something that you might…
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Sample Lesson from An Illustrated Earth: Celebrating God’s Creation
We are excited to be able to share with you a sample lesson from our curriculum, An Illustrated Earth: Celebrating God’s Creation. In the lesson, you’ll find some introductory comments, the lesson, our Illustrated Story Cards for the lesson, as well as the two 8.5×11 versions of the coloring posters that will be included with each lesson. You can download the sample lesson here. This is a curriculum that we hope will require little to no effort on the part of the person planning it (other than making some photocopies and getting crayons/markers out), and can be led by anyone without any…
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How Churches Plan to Use the Illustrated Earth Coloring Posters & Curriculum
Earlier this week, we began accepting pre-orders for our Illustrated Earth Coloring Posters. Since then, we’ve had almost 50 churches pre-order their posters for this summer. Since we had so many early-adopters, we figured that many of them must have had some specific ideas of how they would use the posters and we wanted to share their ideas with all of you. Below are just a few of the responses we received from churches and we’re excited to see how people are already dreaming up ways to use these posters that we didn’t even think about. And we especially love the intergenerational focus…
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Use Illustrated Earth Posters with Cokesbury’s Surf Shack VBS
Cokesbury’s Surf Shack VBS is most likely one of the most popular VBS curriculums available for the summer of 2016. In addition to Cokesbury’s Surf Shack VBS, Group’s VBS options are also viewed as the a standard VBS curriculum that churches across the theological spectrum use. I’ve worked at churches that have used these types of VBS curriculums before, and I am aware of what the appeal can be about programs like Cokesbury’s Surf Shack VBS. You get everything you need to run the program for the week. They often come with videos, shirts, all the appropriate marketing materials you’ll need, original…
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Teaching Sunday School When No One Else Will
I’m always intrigued as to how people find out about Illustrated Ministry. More often than not, people arrive here from Facebook, Pinterest or other direct links people share. However, often people will get here from their Google searches, and there has been a particular Google search that has shown up a few times in the past week or two. From what I can tell, about 10-20 people have arrived at Illustrated Ministry by typing this into Google: Teaching sunday school no one else will. No one else will. I’m not entirely sure how to understand that. But when I read it –…
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Illustrated Earth Coloring Posters Available to Order
Below you can learn more about our Illustrated Earth Coloring Posters, but you can also find out more information, see more photos and purchase the posters by clicking here. We are excited for you to see our new Illustrated Earth Coloring Posters. For this series of posters, each of the posters illustrates a story from the Bible, coming from both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. Below is a list of the stories that these posters cover: Module 1: Water Stories Week 1: Genesis 1:6-10: Separation of the Water (download a sample lesson from the accompanying curriculum, An Illustrated Earth: Celebrating God’s…
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An Update on Poster Paper for An Illustrated Earth Coloring Posters
We are getting ready to launch the pre-orders for our Illustrated Earth Coloring Posters, but first we wanted to give you a short update on the paper that we’re using to print these posters. We’ve been very pleased with our previous printer, and the quality of the posters we’ve sent out. They have worked well, and we know some folks have actually framed their finished posters. With our previous printer, however, we were limited in our paper options. So we are very thrilled to be able to share that with our new printer, a local Chicago family-owned business, we now…
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Interview with John Hendrix, author of Miracle Man: The Story of Jesus
John Hendrix is an illustrator from St. Louis; he’s done some great work over the years and you can check out his portfolio here. Most recently, he has written and illustrated an amazing picture book, Miracle Man: The Story of Jesus. I shared about it in our email newsletter a few weeks ago, and I’m grateful to John for taking some time to have a Q&A with Illustrated Ministry. Illustrated Ministry is trying to provide children with creative ways to engage Bible stories through illustrations and the chance to create art. When was one of the first times you experienced…
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An Illustrated Earth for Summer Sunday School & VBS
As we discussed last week, many churches haven’t figured out the solution to the problem of summer Sunday School. Well, actually, there are many problems tied up in this one program: Who will teach? Many churches want to give their teachers a well-deserved break from teaching, since many will do it throughout the school year. Many churches have their Christian Education hour during worship (which we are not fans of – but we know it’s a reality for so many churches), and so teachers enjoy having the chance to actually be in worship during the summer. And some churches believe they…
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Join Illustrated Ministry at Faith Forward in Chicago
We are one of the sponsors of Faith Forward, a conference that is reimagining children’s and youth ministry through theology, relationships and practice. The conference is next week, here in Chicago, and we will be there. We are excited to share with everyone the work that we’re doing to help create illustrated faith resources for churches and families. While the conference is just one week away – we do have a pretty special opportunity for one of you out there. We have a free registration that we are going to give away to someone for someone to go to the…
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Summer Sunday School: What’s a church to do?
Having served churches in Idaho, California, Oregon and Illinois, I can predict the conversations that many of you are having about summer Sunday School during staff meetings now that we’re in the post-Easter era of the church calendar year. That conversation might go something like this: Senior Pastor (SP): So, what do we have planned for summer Sunday School? Children’s Pastor (CP): Yah…we’re still trying to decide if we are going to offer something. SP: Okay – but we want to continue to offer something for our children during worship, because if we don’t, young families will just stop coming to…
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Illustrated Ministry in the News
For those of you who didn’t run from your computers last Friday on April Fool’s Day, you may have caught the breaking news from Illustrated Ministry about our summer curriculum, An Illustrated Leviticus. I worked on putting all of the pieces together for that from about 9pm – 3am on April 1st and yes, I did have a lot of fun. In case you missed it – this is the process I hoped people would work their way through: First, they would see the link to our blog post on either Facebook or Twitter. I paid a little bit of money to boost one…