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The keynote speaker for the annual Bibles for Beach Club Benefit Dinner will be announced next month. The Benefit Dinner will be held Friday, July 14 at the Speedway Club at Texas Motor Speedway.

The fundraising event allows KiDs Beach Club® to provide a Bible to every child who attends Beach Club. Because of our great donors we have been able to provide nearly 48,000 kids with Bibles since 2003, including almost 26,500 since starting Great Treasure Day in 2015.

Be sure you follow the organization’s social media accounts so you don’t miss the announcement about an exciting speaker you will not want to miss.

Visit the Bibles for Beach Club Benefit Dinner website.

KiDs Beach Club® continues to grow in 2017 with the additions this month of Gary Pool as the director of systems and technology at the KBC corporate office and Vickie Sneed, who has been hired as an independent area strategist near Memphis, Tenn.

Skilled in information technology, Pool considers himself to be a “GEEK,” which he says is short for God’s Electronic Equipment Keeper. Pool has been active in church since his late teens, both in his home state of Minnesota and in Texas, serving on everything from soundboards to church boards. He currently serves on the board of Career Solutions Workshop and as a career coach with Career Solutions, a ministry-based organization that helps people find a job God’s way. 

Pool possesses an undergraduate degree in music education and a master’s in logistics management. He has built two traditional businesses and previously served as a regional vice president for a Minnesota insurance company. He has also reached respected positions of leadership with several home-based marketing firms, being a regional vice president for one of them. 

Gary and his wife, Laura, have been married for 35 years and attend Hillside Community Church in Keller, Texas. Their son, Brandon, and his wife, Victoria, have two children, Lillian (10) and Jaxon (6) and live in Fort Worth, Texas. Their daughter, Julia and her husband, Adam, live near Indianapolis, Ind.

Sneed takes a new role with KiDs Beach Club® after serving as the Beach Club leader at Ellendale Elementary, which is sponsored by Ellendale Baptist Church. She and her husband Norman of 32 years attend the church, where she also serves in a leadership capacity for the church’s women’s ministry.

Sneed holds a bachelor’s of science degree in education and a master’s of science in leadership and policy studies with a concentration in school administration. She is a retired educator with Memphis City Schools having served as teacher, instructional facilitator, assistant principal and principal. After an early retirement in 2012, Sneed became active in KiDs Beach Club®, where the Lord has allowed her to merge her passions for public schools, children and the gospel all in one.

Sneed also enjoys scrapbooking, paper crafting, quilting, being a doting mother and grandmother to her four grown children and three grandchildren.

Please visit our employment website for a list of open positions and to fill out an application.

At a Beach Club at Harrison Lane Elementary School in Hurst, Texas, the volunteers see firsthand how important it is that KiDs Beach Club® celebrates Great Treasure Day and gives away a KBC Explorer’s Study Bible to every child.

Approximately 62 percent of all children who enroll in KiDs Beach Club® do not have a church home. These children are lost, and are searching for where to place their faith. With so much information so easily accessible to influence this young generation, it is vital that KiDs Beach Club® teaches these children the truth. Furthermore, it is important that we put that truth – the word of God – in their hands. 

Johnnie Wallace, the senior pastor at Hurst Baptist Church, which partners with KiDs Beach Club® to sponsor the club at Harrison Lane, noticed a particular little girl in his Beach Club. 

This little girl came to club her first week without a Bible. The very next week she brought a religious book to use in Beach Club like her peers. Except the religious book she brought wasn’t a Bible, it was the Quran. The next week she came back with another religious book. Realizing the week before she did not need the Quran, she instead brought the Book of Mormon.

The next week at club they celebrated Great Treasure Day, and this little girl was given her own KBC Explorer’s Study Bible. “And she also left there with something else,” Wallace said.

Each week in club after he tells the Bible story, Wallace encourages children who have questions about receiving salvation and making Jesus their Forever Friend to talk with him. As soon as that invitation was made on Great Treasure Day, that little girl was the first one to come up and visit with Wallace about making Jesus her Forever Friend.

“She left there with a new citizenship that day,” he went on to say. However, it’s not a great ending, because the Beach Club volunteers suspect she went home, told her parents what she had decided, and never came back to Beach Club, further illustrating the short amount of time KiDs Beach Club® has to reach these children for Christ. “But I know this, one of these days; I’ll see her again,” Wallace said.

These children are vulnerable and they are seeking. They want to know more. KiDs Beach Club® is giving them the tools to know more, and the Bible is that tool.

“I feel like we are giving the children something they can build their lives on,” Wallace said. “We may get them in Beach Club one week, but if we can get them in club to give them a Bible, we've given them something that can last them the rest of their lives. We try to teach that there is nothing more valuable than this.” 

KiDs Beach Club® is connecting kids to Christ and putting Bibles in their hands. Thank you for your continued support of the Bibles for Beach Club program and for your continued prayers as churches go outside their own walls and inside public elementary schools to share the gospel with hundreds of children all over the country.

KiDs Beach Club® has been accredited by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) the organization announced Monday, February 13. 

ECFA accreditation is based on the ECFA Seven Standards of Responsible Stewardship, including financial accountability, transparency, sound board governance and ethical fundraising.

KiDs Beach Club® joins a growing number of Christ-centered churches and ministries across America, supported by more than 27 million donors that have earned the right to display the ECFA seal. When an organization is accredited by ECFA, it demonstrates its willingness to follow the model of biblical accountability.

More Information about KBC & ECFA

“We are pleased to accredit a ministry committed to mobilize the church to go outside its walls in order to take the message of Jesus Christ into the heart of its community,” said Dan Busby, president of ECFA.

Founded in 2006, the vision of KiDs Beach Club® is to provide every third through sixth grade boy and girl a Jesus experience within the culture of their public school. KiDs Beach Club® is connecting kids to Christ and putting Bibles in their hands.

To learn more about KiDs Beach Club® and its stewardship opportunities, visit ServantMatch®, ECFA’s program that matches God’s servants with the stewardship options of ECFA members based on ministry sectors and categories. It is ECFA’s newest online feature that allows individuals to quickly and easily find giving opportunities.

ECFA, founded in 1979, provides accreditation to leading Christian nonprofit organizations that faithfully demonstrate compliance with the ECFA Standards pertaining to financial accountability, fundraising and board governance. For more information about ECFA, including information about accreditation and a listing of ECFA-accredited members, visit ECFA.org or call 1-800-323-9473.

Don Bearden is the pastor at Cornerstone Baptist Church in Pass Christian, Mississippi, and the church partners with KiDs Beach Club® to sponsor a Beach Club at Pass Christian Elementary School.

With a reemphasis by KiDs Beach Club® this year to share the gospel throughout every aspect of a Beach Club meeting, Bearden sees the impact its making in the lives of children firsthand. Since August, a total of 457 children in Beach Club have made the decision to welcome Jesus into their lives. That includes four kids at Pass Christian Elementary. 

One Thursday after club this past fall and just like he does each and every week, Bearden was greeting parents in the pick-up line after Beach Club and asked one mother to pull off to the side so he could discuss something with her. That day, her son made Jesus his Forever Friend during Beach Club. It’s never a decision Bearden takes lightly. He takes it upon himself to make sure a child’s decision will be supported at home. He wanted to schedule a time to meet with the family to see if mom and dad also follow Jesus. 

Bearden and the mother had a long conversation outside her car window and then on the following Sunday, both she and her son, who had been attending Beach Club on and off for the last year, visited Cornerstone Baptist Church. The boy’s father could not attend. You see, he was on active military duty in Afghanistan.

The boy had been taking home material from Beach Club, including Hang 10 pages and Memory Link cards. After first studying it himself, he would send it to his dad. When he received the KBC material, he reviewed it and had questions of his own, so he approached his unit’s chaplain with questions about what it all meant. These conversations with the chaplain resulted in the dad accepting Christ and led to his own salvation!

Praise Jesus!

The family desired for the father and son to be baptized together. The two were able to set a date in a small window of time the dad would be home. Cornerstone Baptist was not able host the event because its baptismal wasn’t working. Instead, a neighboring church offered its facility for the special occasion. Not only were members of Cornerstone Baptist present for the event but members of the neighboring church also showed up in support of the family.

It was incredibly moving, but it’s also an illustration about how short our window is to reach kids (and their families) for Christ. It would be easy to think we have them for four years from third through sixth grades, but we know for many kids that window is even smaller. For the boy in this story and his family, the window was incredibly short. It was only a matter of months.

The family relocated to Tennessee shortly after the baptism of this boy and his father.

Club leader Susan Jiura was getting ready for KiDs Beach Club® in the cafeteria of Sherrod Elementary in Arlington, Texas. She noticed a little boy with slicked back hair sitting in a chair across the room.

Jiura was intrigued by him and asked the lady who cleaned the cafeteria if she knew who he was. It turned out the little boy was this lady’s grandson. She was proud to tell Jiura that she and her husband were raising this boy, named Rylen.

Rylen’s grandmother went on to say he would sit in that seat every week and watch the other kids at Beach Club. He even sang the worship songs along with everyone. During the week, Rylen’s grandmother downloaded the worship songs to her phone so he could learn the words.

Jiura was so moved by the woman’s story that she made an exception and invited Rylen, who was only in kindergarten at the time, to join them in KiDs Beach Club®. The volunteers genuinely enjoyed mentoring Rylen from that young age until he was in fourth grade. Jiura also added, “I had the high honor of presenting him with his very first Bible, which he treasures.”

This school year, Rylen was unable to attend Sherrod Elementary. All of the Beach Club volunteers miss him and the impact he made in their club. Rylen’s grandmother recently sent them an update about him. 

Rylen now enjoys living out his faith by witnessing in Walmart. He boldly steps out to share the gospel to these strangers, sometimes getting some hard rejections. Brokenhearted, Rylen would ask his grandmother, “How can people not want Jesus in their lives?” 

May we all learn a little from Rylen and follow his example of sharing the gospel and loving on the people in our own communities.

How have you been able to share Jesus in your community lately? Parents, if your child in Beach Club has been stepping out in their faith we would love to hear about it! Tell us your story. Use #KiDsBeachClub in your social media posts or email us at news@kbcmail.org.