Well, it’s official.  The holiday season is officially upon us.  Stores are decked out in green and red.  Lights are strung on houses all over the neighborhood.  The neighbor down the street has 42 of those blow up Santas and Polar Bears in his front yard.  Prices have been marked up to allow for deep holiday discounts.  Yes, ‘tis the Season indeed.

This December though, we are partnering with Michael Chanley  and CMConnect.org for a different kind of giving.  One of the things that has impressed me the most since joining the online children’s ministry community is the willingness to share and help one another in the shared vision of reaching kids for God’s Kingdom.  Michael is a shining example of this with CMConnect.org which is a social networking site designed to allow those in children’s ministry to collaborate.  This month Michael has decided to highlight and encourage an amazing gift which is freely available to all who work in children’s ministry.  That gift is the online community of people who are passionate about children’s ministry and passionate about equipping others who work in children’s ministry.  And, here is the really exciting part, that community can grow stronger and deeper with your involvement.

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From Twitter, Facebook, Digg, YouTube, Linkedin, Stumbleupon, Designfloat, Furl, Technorati, WordPress, Google Reader….and the list goes on and on; you can quickly realize that social media is huge and is only getting bigger. There are two extremes to social media, there are those that are scared of the unknown so they never try it and then there are others that as soon as they wake up they grab their iPhone (or any other smartphone) to get caught up on everything that happened while they slept.

My typical day is I get up around 7:00, check my email (I have 5 email accounts that are all synced to my Blackberry, check both (yes I have two) twitter accounts, check my Facebook account as well as my Facebook page, get dressed and try to shove some food in my mouth as I run out the door. I then get to work pull up my work email and Google reader to go through 1,000′s (yes, that is no exaggeration) of posts. If you are not familiar with Google reader it is a great tool that will pull all new blog posts to your Google account. I love it! Anyways, this is all done before 9:00 am so I bet you can guess how much more time during the day I spend on these sites.

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I frequently have people encourage me to connect with other children/youth pastors in the area. I am generally enthusiastic to meet others with a similar passion as me to reach children for Christ and hope to build relationships with them to network and work together for our common goals. So I contact them and try to get together and if they serve in full-time ministry (i.e. ministry is their “FT paying job”) then generally their response is, “Great! Let’s do lunch”. I then have to remind them that I can’t “do lunch” because of my job and they are often reluctant to meet evenings or weekends because that is their “family time” or time away from “the office”. Occasionally I am able to meet someone for lunch if I work my schedule properly, but it is not an easy thing for me to arrange.

So how do we network with others in kidmin when our schedules are so full? That is where this web site and others like it are such a great asset. There is nothing like meeting someone face to face and sharing what’s going on in your ministries, but when those opportunities are limited, then the internet, e-mail, instant messaging, etc. fill that much needed void. I have networked with several others via forums, e-mail, etc. which helps strengthen each of us personally and in our ministries.

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