Category: Ministry Resources

Coming Soon: “Holy Fools”

My PhD dissertation will be available to the public very soon!

I am so excited to share that my full 274-page PhD dissertation will be available (for free) to the public very soon. Stay tuned for the details. The title is “Holy Fools”: Exploring the Journey of Calling for Christian Variety Performers.

I didn’t know this ahead of time, but when I went to upload my dissertation to the academic database (ProQuest) through my library, I was able to choose whether I wanted my dissertation to be made public or kept behind a paywall.

The paywall option means my dissertation would have been available only to people with academic institution access (certain educators and students) unless they paid to see my dissertation (which I think would cost like $20 or $30 just to see it).

In my own research journey, I ran into such paywalls when looking for sources. I was blessed to have institutional access through my library, so I could request pretty much anything and get anything. But it was nice to find open source research out in the wild because it meant I was able to download the PDF instantly without making a library request for it. Of course there is plenty of crap out there for free on the internet, but there are also some very reliable and useful sources available for free out there as well. One skill in research is to be able to tell the difference.

There are many people around the world who do not have such access to academic literature and would benefit from such access. I myself was thrilled to have free access to Harvard scholar Jan Ziolkowski’s six-volume The Juggler of Notre Dame research for my dissertation. He made all six volumes free online through Open Book Publishers. You can choose to purchase the physical copies. But the PDFs are all freely available online.

I was inspired by the way Ziolkowski (and others) offered their research online without a paywall. I’ve heard that academic research/journals is a big-money industry that does not always look out first for the authors and researchers.

So I chose the open source option on ProQuest. It meant that I gave up any potential royalties I could earn from ProQuest had I chosen the paywall option. I want my work to be available to as many people as possible for as long as possible. I worked hard so that my work could be of service to the world.

In all honestly, probably only my Mom and two other random humans out there in the world would pay for my dissertation, so why not disseminate it far and wide!? Call me a fool for doing so, but see my dissertation for more on that 🙂

Here is a little sneak peak of my editing process (and the abstract if you’re interested). I’ve been making the final touches for the past few weeks. But it is now in the hands of my library. Once they approve the formatting, it should go live soon thereafter. I can’t wait to share it with you!

Books for Christian Ministry with Children

I’d like to share some resources that have helped me over the years while working with children and families in church ministry contexts.

You’ll notice one book in this list that seems out of place (the Jonestown one). I included that as a narrative about how NOT to lead families and children in ministry. It is a warning to all of us who work with children to steer clear of the vices that plummet leaders into grave destructiveness.

Jerome Berryman. Godly Play. San Francisco: Harper, 1991.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Life Together. New York: Harper, 1954.

Diana Garland. Family Ministry: A Comprehensive Guide, Second Ed. Downer’s Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2012.

Jeff Guinn. The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017.

Catherine Stonehouse. Joining Children on the Spiritual Journey. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998.

 

 

Kahoot: A free and easy platform with lots of fun uses for learning

kahootI attended a community event a few weeks ago at a local theater. Before the event started, a quiz game was running on the big screen. And anyone could join in and play if they had a personal electronic device and the game code entered into their web browser on the device. The game code was posted on the big screen before the game started. Lots of people in the theater played. The game kept score of the players based on correct answers and the speed in which they answered. At the end of the game, the winner was posted on the screen and the young man came forward to receive a prize.

The online platform used was called Kahoot. It is an app, but it also has an old-fashioned website so that players can play without having to download the app or even register with an email and password (which I love).

I had an event at which I was speaking a few days later, and I dove into Kahoot to find out how to use it myself at this event. I was so glad I did, because I found out how much fun it is for both the teacher and the learners.

So here is how it works. First of all, it is free (for now…currently they make money by offering it to large corporate clients who use it for various purposes). While you do not need to register an email and password in order to play, do you have to register if you want to administer Kahoot games. Once you sign up for an account, you can write your own trivia games or select one from the thousands that have been uploaded by different users. You can browse by keyword, and you can pre-scan the questions and answers of each uploaded game so you can see if it is one you want to use or not.

This event I spoke at was a family retreat for a church in Texas, so we did trivia games in three different categories: Bible, Texas facts, and Disney. The crowd loved it. Since the event was for families, we played the option of one device per team (per family) and everyone gathered around the device and tapped the multiple choice selection on their device. You can also set up the game to be every-person-for-themselves, but that only works if everyone has their own device.

Apparently, there are many more uses for Kahoot than just trivia games. That is nice because trivia can sometimes be merely that: trivial. You can use it for crowd-sourcing, opinion gathering, voting/polling, testing, and real-time feedback and input on public speaking presentations. Basically, if you need to gather information from a crowd, whether in a fun game or in something more serious, this app lets you do that in a simple and user-friendly way.

Check it out and discover all the great uses here: kahoot.it