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It wasn’t the smoothest running of Beach Club meetings for Carol Bourland, the club leader at Miller Elementary in Arlington, Texas. The fall semester was winding down and Christmas break was quickly approaching. That led to not all their usual teachers being available to serve at club that day.

In the absence of their normal third and fourth grade teacher, Ryan Rasberry, a pastor at Pantego Bible Church, which sponsors the club, stepped in to fill the gap. Rasberry and his family assisted Bourland in starting the Miller Elementary Beach Club seven years ago. So Rasberry knew the routine of Beach Club well and delivered a great lesson that ended with an invitation for the children to respond.

That day three of the third and fourth graders responded to the invitation and made Jesus their Forever Friend!

With the chaos of ending Beach Club they missed getting the information of one of those children who made a profession of faith. Because Rasberry had been a visitor they did not know who it was. The only thing the volunteers had to go off of was that it was one of the fourth grade girls.

The next week, during the last club of the semester, Bourland asked a few of the fourth grade girls who it was that made Jesus their Forever Friend the week before. The first few girls did not remember who it was. Bourland recalls turning to another little girl and asking if it was her who asked Jesus into her heart.

“This is where God showed His presence so vividly,” Bourland remembers. “Because when asked if it was her, the little girl said, “No, but I wanted to.’”

Bourland asked her what it was she wanted to do the previous week and she responded that she wanted to ask Jesus into her heart. Bourland immediately paired the girl with another Beach Club volunteer to talk with her. In that conversation the little girl invited Jesus into her heart and her life making Him her Forever Friend!

“I am always amazed at how God shows us in an amazing way that He is present in our Kids Beach Club.” Bourand said.

In the new year, KiDs Beach Club® has expanded the corporate office staff as well as its field staff in Tennessee, Mississippi and throughout Texas.

Christy Hughes has joined the corporate office staff as a regional manager though she will continue to work remotely in Bartlett, Tenn. Missy Haladay has been hired as an independent area strategist in Southern Mississippi. Amber Goley and Traci Rosal have joined the ministry as club relations specialists. Goley will oversee an area around Weatherford, Texas and Rosal will guide KiDs Beach Club® strategy around Odessa, Texas. 

Additionally, Penny Eargle and Jordan Thomas have been hired in the corporate office. Eagle has been hired as the ministry assistant while Thomas has been serving as the communications specialist since last fall. 

Hughes has been a Beach Club volunteer since 2008 when her former church, First Baptist New Boston, Texas, started a club at the school where she was teaching. In her time at that club she saw first hand that KiDs Beach Club® brought change to the lives of children. She had not expected how much KBC had and would change her life. In 2013, she and her family moved when her husband took a position on staff at Faith Baptist Church in Bartlett, Tenn. In 2014, Hughes took a part-time role with the organization as an independent area director for Tennessee and northern Mississippi. She is thankful for the new opportunity to serve in this capacity. Christy and her husband, Terry, have one daughter, Grace (17).

Goley has been in children's ministry for five years and answered the call on her heart to join KiDs Beach Club® in early 2016. She lives in Weatherford, Texas with her husband Jon and their three children Layne (11), A.J. (10) and Tony (9). The entire family serves the Lord at The Fellowship at Weatherford. Goley enjoys making music with her husband, and cheering at her kids’ sporting events. She feels most connected with God while singing praise and worship songs at the top of her lungs in her car. She lives by the mantra, "I am not perfect, but I am loved deeply by the one who is."

Rosal has always had a heart for missions on any level. Rosal ahs spent several years as an administrative assistant at her church, so she knows how to help people and minister behind the scenes. Rosal loves to celebrate people and make them feel loved and valued. She met her husband, Romel, in Afghanistan on a mission trip. She is excited at this new opportunity and wants to grow several more chapters of KiDs Beach Club® in West Texas. She enjoys travel, helping people, learning about anything, and cooking.

Holaday has been a volunteer surf team leader with KiDs Beach Club® in southern Mississippi since 2015. Missy has been teaching and ministering to kids for 21 years and has a passion to reach the lost. She and her family moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast area in June 2005 as the Lord called them there for church planting missions. Missy and her husband Jon have two children, son Jordan (18) and daughter Hannah (15). Missy is excited and ready to start connecting churches with schools and seeing lives changed by Jesus through KiDs Beach Club®.

Thomas is excited to step into the role of communications specialist after previously interning for KiDs Beach Club® and being a long-time volunteer. Jordan is a graduate of Dallas Baptist University with a bachelor’s of business administration degree in marketing. Thomas is passionate about drama ministry and enjoys acting and performing in productions across DFW. She also enjoys narrating and producing audiobooks and creating greeting cards. Jordan is a member of Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, where she actively serves in Gateway Performing Arts.

Eargle has been serving as a military spouse to her husband, Scott, for more than 20 years. They will now be calling Dallas-Fort Worth home as he retires from the United States Navy. With their two children, Alaina (16) and Trent (13), they enjoy serving together in their church, North Richland Hills Baptist Church.

KiDs Beach Club® continues to grow and is looking to fill other positions. Please visit our employment website for a complete list of positions and to fill out an application.

This past fall when North Euless Elementary School celebrated Great Treasure Day, each child was given a brand new KBC Explorer’s Study Bible. With excitement and curiosity on this highly anticipated day, the children flipped through the more than 1,420 pages of scripture and turned to the colorful KiDs Beach Club® insert pages.

The children’s enthusiasm was evident, but for some children on that day a small worry began to surface. Each week during Beach Club, the children had been told how the Bible is God’s love letter to us and his sacred word. With so much focus on its importance, the children were nervous and a little overwhelmed to use their new Bibles.

During one meeting, Kelley Crow, a member of the strategic growth team at KiDs Beach Club®, who also serves as a surf team leader at North Euless, was passing around a pencil for her Surf Team to underline the day’s Memory Link.

A little boy named Joshua expressed his concern about writing and marking in his Bible. He didn’t know you were allowed to do such things to such a special and holy book.

Crow was able to tell her Surf Team how it is not only OK, but it is encouraged that the children mark verses in their Bible. She also encouraged them to write notes in the margins of the text.

“It is important to be able to look back on what has been studied in Beach Club, and marking the verses helps you to remember later,” Crow remembers telling the children. 

The club leaders at the North Euless Beach Club, which is sponsored by First Baptist Church Euless, realized the problem and offered a solution. Now, every week at club, volunteers bring highlighters for the children to use during Beach Club. They must bring their Bible with them to club in order to get a highlighter. Leaders taught the children how writing and highlighting in their Bibles is OK, and how it can help them study God’s word better. They are encouraged to highlight that week’s Memory Link in their Bible and mark the page so they can review it between club meetings. 

Children at North Euless and at some other Beach Clubs across the country cannot wait to get their highlighters and listen to the lesson. They turn to the scripture passages and the next thing they want to do is highlight the verses in their Bibles.

Instead of the children being nervous to study God’s word, their Bibles are glowing with different colors of highlights on verses they have learned in Beach Club.

“Any time they can get excited to open their Bibles it’s a great thing,” Crow said.

The ability for these children to receive their own Bible to write in and learn from would not be possible without your support of the Bibles for Beach Club program. Without KiDs Beach Club® going into the public schools many of these children would not know how to use and study God’s word.

Our time to reach these children for Christ is short, sometimes even shorter than the four years between third and sixth grade we focus on. Joshua, whose concern led to the implementation of highlighters at North Euless, will be moving after this school year. There is not currently a Beach Club in the town where his family is planning to move, but thanks to your support and his concern, he will be armed with a KBC Explorer’s Study Bible that is now filled with highlights and notes from what he is learning in Beach Club.

Merry Christmas from the KiDs Beach Club® family! We hope you will seek Him and
celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior by attending worship services on 
Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. If you do not have a church home,
please consider attending the church that sponsors your child's Beach Club.
For the complete list of our partnering churches, click here.

For nearly 11 years, more than 14,000 Beach Club volunteers have been sharing the gospel with elementary school children inside the walls of their public schools. One of the ways to measure the incredible impact KiDs Beach Club® has had on more than 77,000 children is that nearly 7,500 children have made Jesus their “Forever Friend” by asking Him into their lives during Beach Club.

KiDs Beach Club® invites all third through sixth graders to attend Beach Clubs and while many children continue attending Beach Clubs each year through sixth-grade graduation, KiDs Beach Club® recently discovered the increasing mobility rate in public schools has significantly shortened the window to reach many of these children with the gospel.

“With the frequency of parents moving in and out of school districts, the mobility rate of elementary school children is at an all-time high,” said Paul McCollum, vice president of school relations for KiDs Beach Club®.

“In many cases, we only have one year to reach these children and get Bibles in their hands,” he said. “As a former school principal, I can attest to the fact that it is a dual-edged sword. On one side, you have opportunity to impact a greater number of children in any given time frame, but on the other side, high mobility creates the need to be stealthily targeted in your resulting impact. If it is important for their education, it is imperative for their salvation.”

For many years, KiDs Beach Club® provided only 24 Bibles, one per week, to each Beach Club to give out during the 24 weeks of Beach Club.

In 2015, God clearly spoke to the KBC team that every child in every Beach Club should receive a Bible and through His provision KiDs Beach Club® started Great Treasure Day, the special day to hand out Bibles in each club, in the spring of 2015. On Great Treasure Day that spring, we handed out more than 11,000 Bibles. The expectation was that from that point on, KiDs Beach Club® would need about one-fourth of that amount or around 4,000 Bibles, to hand to incoming third graders plus any new child that would start attending Beach Club.

What KiDs Beach Club® discovered was that the number was closer to 50 percent, which reflects the high mobility rate within the public school system. In reality, because many of these children may only be in a school with a Beach Club for one year, the window to reach these children is much smaller than originally thought. The KBC leadership believes God is orchestrating events in the lives of many families, to allow children to be in a school with a Beach Club, even for one year, just so they can get a copy of His word.

In the first two years after implementing Great Treasure Day, KiDs Beach Club® has handed Bibles to 26,758 children, bringing the overall total for the ministry to 47,823.

Three times in the final chapter of the final book of the Bible, Revelation 22, in verses 7, 12 and 20, John wrote about Jesus coming quickly. It has never been more urgent to get the gospel to a lost and dying world than it is today.

KiDs Beach Club® is praising God that He continues to keep the doors open to the public schools to share His word in after-school clubs across America and give these children, many who don’t have a church home, the chance to hear about Him for the first time and receive their very first Bible so that even if the family moves, those children can take His word with them for direction in the years to come.

If you would like to make a tax-deductible year-end gift to support the continuing efforts of KiDs Beach Club® to provide every child in every Beach Club a Bible, please visit kidsbeachclub.org/give.

KiDs Beach Club® will welcome two new board members in January. Ron Cornelius will rejoin the KBC board of directors after one year away, while Julie Dalavai will join her husband Emmanuel Dalavai as a board member.

Cornelius has actively attended church since his youth and came to know the Lord when he was 13 years old. He grew up as the fourth of six kids on a 16-acre farm surrounded by hills near Springfield, Oregon, where his mom still lives in the very same house. Cornelius graduated from the University of Oregon in 1981 with a bachelor’s degree in business management and an interest in real estate. After graduation, he left Oregon to see the world including backpacking through Europe. In 1983, the Texas real estate market was doing well so he moved to Texas and in 1991 started his own commercial real estate company.

His heart for people and love for travel in the United States and abroad has taken him on mission trips to Africa, Russia, China, Brazil, India and Ecuador. He works with prison ministries and Big Brothers Big Sisters, where he is currently mentoring two young men that have been released from a Youth Correctional Institution in Gainesville, Texas. Cornelius and his wife Sherry married in 1985 and have two children, Tiffany and Logan. Ron feels called to serve the Lord with his time, talent and treasures through various activities and is excited about what God is doing with KiDs Beach Club®.  

Julie Dalavai began following her calling of international missions after working on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. for two years. With the Journeyman program, she was able to work in Paris, France on a church-planting movement.

After her time in France, Dalavai started working for Inventiv Health, coordinating logistics for medical education programs and has served there for more than 10 years. 

At church, Dalavai has helped organize and lead mission trips to France, South Africa, Armenia and Iran. She has also participated in mission trips to Tanzania, Columbia and India. Dalavai loves to watch musicals, read and travel with her husband.

Dalavai accepted Christ as her savior when she was 8 years old and currently serves alongside her husband at First Baptist Church of Euless. She is a graduate of Baylor University with a bachelor’s degree in foreign service.

“I am reminded all the time that we do not have to go to another country to be able to build relationships and share the gospel with individuals of other backgrounds and religions because our Metroplex is so diverse,” she said.

KiDs Beach Club® looks forward to seeing what these two community leaders bring to furthering the vision and strengthening the mission of KiDs Beach Club®.