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Charity Verlander and Robbie Sparkman have joined the KiDs Beach Club® staff as area directors. Verlander will serve in North Texas in an area that stretches from New Boston to Celina, while Sparkman will cover an area in Southeast Texas and Louisiana that reaches from Baytown, Texas to Lake Charles, La.

Verlander grew up in DFW and is a former elementary school teacher. She has spent the last 14 years serving as a missionary in Wales, U.K. with the International Mission Board along with her husband, Marc, who is now the associate pastor at Lifepointe Fellowship in McKinney. They have recently relocated to Melissa, Texas with their three daughters: Cerys (11), Bailey (10) and Addison (7). Verlander is excited to join KiDs Beach Club®, to serve the local church and their community. 

Sparkman has been a Beach Club volunteer since 2008 when her family moved to Mont Belvieu, Texas on the east side of Houston. She previously taught Bible in a private school and was eager to continue serving in her new community. Her son, who was in third grade at the time, came home with a permission slip for KiDs Beach Club®. She called immediately to volunteer. This is Sparkman’s sixth year volunteering as the Bible Connections Leader. She and her husband David have two children, Leah (19) and William (15). The family attends Second Baptist Church of Baytown, Texas.

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

Great Treasure Day, the day when every child in every Beach Club is given a KiDs Beach Club® Explorer’s Study Bible, is being celebrated in Beach Clubs again this fall. While most clubs will be participating this month, some of the festivities will continue into November.

While there are a number of new Beach Clubs that are observing Great Treasure Day for the first time, quite a few Beach Clubs are presenting fewer Bibles this year, giving them mostly to third graders and other first-time clubbers since everyone else received their own Bible within the last 18 months.

What clubs are trying to do now is make Great Treasure Day just as special for those children getting a Bible for the first time as it was for those who already have a Bible when they got to experience Great Treasure Day the first time. 

The Beach Club at South Euless Elementary, sponsored by First United Methodist Church of Euless, Texas, held Great Treasure Day the second week of October. Each child was presented with a lei when they arrived to club and there were special snacks on a beautifully decorated table. In the middle of the room sat a large table with stacks of new Bibles. Volunteers had arranged each Bible by Surf Team and placed a sticker in the Bible with each child’s name.

To begin the ceremony, the club leader at South Euless asked the children, “Who can tell me why we call it KiDs Beach Club?” A little red headed second grader named Maddie raised her hand high and was called on to answer. She said, “Because of the treasure we find on the beach and our treasure is God’s word!” 

Maddie was not being given a Bible that day, but she was being celebrated in a different way. Maddie previously had been given a Bible on Great Treasure Day last fall. Maddie was being celebrated because of her faithfulness to bring her Bible to club, taking good care of it and also reading it on her own. She was given a sticker and another special prize by her club leader, as were many other children who attend Beach Club at South Euless.

These children cherish the gift of a brand new Bible.

“It’s really a treasure to me and I’m really happy to have it,” said Ben, a third grader who started attending Beach Club this year at River Trails Elementary in Fort Worth, Texas. “I already had another Bible and I like reading different Bible verses. I felt really proud and excited when I got this Bible today. I can’t wait to start reading it. I think Beach Club is an awesome place and I really like the stuff we learn.”

Audey, a sixth-grade girl at River Trails, said watching kids get their Bibles this year brought back memories of when she received her Bible.

“Thinking back to when I got my Bible, it meant a lot. I was glad to finally get my Beach Club Bible,” she said. “Today, it looked like the younger kids were really happy. They were excited like I was when I got mine.”

Your monthly support for Bibles for Beach Club does not just put a Bible in the hand of a child for one special day. It gives children a long-lasting opportunity to know and learn the scriptures and that further connects them to Christ.

Children who attend Beach Club already bring their Bible to school on the day their club meets, but we’re encouraging everyone to bring their Bible with them to school another day next week. Bring Your Bible to School Day is Thursday, October 6. 

Bring Your Bible to School Day is a nationwide, religious-freedom initiative for students from kindergarten-age all the way up to college level. It was created by Focus on the Family to equip and inspire Christian students to be a voice of hope, understand their religious freedoms and express their biblical beliefs in a loving, Christ-centered way.

In recent years, you’ve probably noticed the increase in news headlines about students being told they can’t engage in simple religious-freedom activities, such as reading their Bible personally during free time or praying during lunch. That’s why it’s so important to come alongside our students and encourage them that they do still have religious-freedoms protected under the U.S. Constitution–and they don’t have to be ashamed of or hide their deeply held religious beliefs. 

Our Beach Club kids know they can have their Bible at school and read it during quiet time. They read it before school, in the library, music room, hallway, cafeteria, computer lab and even on the playground.

They are taught how to share their faith and pray with their classmates. These religious freedoms are protected. 

On Bring Your Bible to School Day, thousands of students across the country will take the lead on their campuses to celebrate religious freedom and share God’s hope with peers by taking a simple action: Bringing their Bible to school! We hope all Beach Club kids will participate. 

To learn more about what you can do to support the students’ efforts and help them get the word out, be visit bringyourbible.org. They have resources for parents and churches to help you share the event with your students. They even have explanations about myth vs. fact regarding students’ legal rights. 

I Timothy 4:12 says, “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity.” And that’s what the Bring Your Bible website seeks to equip students to do.

Parental support for students participating in Bring Your Bible to School Day will be absolutely key since it does require great courage in this culture of spiritual relativism to acknowledge the existence of redemptive truth. So we hope you will surround your student participant with prayer as they participate in the event.

Bring Your Bible To School Day from KiDs Beach Club on Vimeo.

Great Treasure Day – the day children receive their own KBC Explorer’s Study Bible – is just around the corner.

God’s word is the greatest treasure on earth and it is the centerpiece of KiDs Beach Club®. We want every child to have their very own copy to read, study, share and grow from, making a daily and eternal impact on their lives. This is a fun and exciting day for all involved.

Great Treasure Day is different for every Beach Club and usually takes place during the fifth club meeting each year. Most of those will fall in the month of October though some Beach Clubs will celebrate in November. There are even some Beach Clubs that have already had their Great Treasure Day, like the one pictured here from Hood-Case Elementary in Alvin, Texas, which celebrated Great Treasure Day on September 26.

Bibles are provided to the children and the churches at no cost thanks to our many great Bibles for Beach Club donors whether they give at the annual dinner and auction or are a recurring Bible donor. 

We want to encourage everyone to take photos and videos during their Great Treasure Day and to share them with us at KiDs Beach Club®. You can share them on social media by using the hashtags #KiDsBeachClub or #GreatTreasureDay. Also, you can email them to us at photos@beachclubs.org. Remember, when taking video with your smart phone, please turn it on its side so that the long edge of the device is parallel to the floor.

Ever had one of those moments that the apostle Paul talks about in Ephesians 3:20? A moment where God shows us that He is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us?

KiDs Beach Club® experienced one of those days last Thursday on North Texas Giving Day. From 6 a.m. until midnight, 116 people provided a gift and joined our mission to connect kids to Jesus Christ and put Bibles in their hands. Our generous friends provided nearly $26,000, which we praise God for. 

The part of God doing something more abundantly beyond all we ask or think came during the last four hours of North Texas Giving Day in a radio studio in downtown Dallas. Chris Krok, who hosts a talk show every weeknight between 8 p.m. and midnight on WBAP 820 AM, saw the state of affairs in our country and decided that enough was enough. The lawlessness of the night included riots after a police shooting in Charlotte, N.C and even protests through the streets of Dallas. 

Krok wanted to do something big on North Texas Giving Day saying “its an amazing night tonight to talk about something that stems at the source of all of this, not having God in a child’s life and they grow up and that void is filled with something else.” Krok said “I believe this is at the center of everything that is going on in Charlotte, in Tulsa, in Dallas. People are mad and angry and rioting.”

Krok then encouraged his listeners to give to KiDs Beach Club® which is giving every child in every Beach Club an Explorer’s Study Bible and then teaching them how to read it and apply it to their lives. His appeal to his loyal listeners was simply, “it gives you a chance to help stop this.”

For four straight hours, he repeatedly asked his listeners to give donations with the numbers of WBAP’s frequency, 820, to help track the impact this audience can make. Within the first hour, donations came in for $820, $82, $28.20 and $8.20 and after the show ended, more than 30 donors contributed in excess of $3,500.

The dollar amount shows an amazing measurable impact but the immeasurable impact will take place in the days to come. During Krok’s program, WBAP, a 50,000-watt clear-channel radio station, has a signal that blasts into 38 states. Krok, who was the keynote speaker at the KiDs Beach Club® Bibles For Beach Club Benefit Dinner and Auction this past April, educated his vast audience for four straight hours about how 62 percent of the children who attend a Beach Club don’t have a church home and how getting God’s word into their hands during Beach Clubs will change the culture of America.

One day later, a local politician who was listening to the show, called the KiDs Beach Club® corporate office wanting information about getting Beach Clubs in the elementary schools in his town and vowed to encourage other politicians to do the same.

Please join us in prayer that this seed that Krok spread about KiDs Beach Club® landed in good soil and will result in thousands more children hearing the word of God in many new Beach Clubs around America.

As Jesus mentioned in His parable in Matthew 13:3-9, the seed that lands in good soil “yielded a crop, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty. He who has ears, let him hear.” Many heard Krok last Thursday talking about KiDs Beach Club®, Teaching KiDs Truth, and we praise God for his provision and incredible answer to prayer.

Listen to the Chris Krok Show from Thursday, Sept. 22:

8:00-9:30 p.m.
https://audioboom.com/boos/5083897-9-22-krok-800-830?t=0

8:30-9:00 p.m.
https://audioboom.com/boos/5083898-9-22-krok-830-900?t=0

9:00-9:30 p.m. (with Alex Gonzales, Hickory Tree Baptist Church)
https://audioboom.com/boos/5083899-9-22-krok-900-930?t=0

9:30-10:00 p.m.
https://audioboom.com/boos/5083900-9-22-krok-930-1000?t=0

10:00-10:30 p.m.
https://audioboom.com/boos/5083900-9-22-krok-930-1000?t=0

10:30-11:00 p.m.
https://audioboom.com/boos/5083902-9-22-krok-1030-1100?t=0

Thank you to those who gave a gift last week on North Texas Giving Day. Friends of KiDs Beach Club® were able to help us surpass our goal of $25,000 and gifts continued to come in to us this week by mail or through our website.

A record total of 116 gifts were made to KiDs Beach Club® through the North Texas Giving Day website and those totaled $14,444. Eight donors made contributions directly to KBC through the website or mail totaling another $1,546. Another donor provided a gift of $10,000 of which half was earmarked for matching funds essentially doubling the impact of our first $5,000 in donations last Thursday. The total given to KBC as a result of North Texas Giving Day is $25,990.

One thing that stands out is that KiDs Beach Club® is reaching an even wider audience than ever before. There were 45 donors on the list who gave to KiDs Beach Club® for the first time, including several listeners of the Chris Krok Show on WBAP Radio, who essentially used his four-hour show on North Texas Giving Day as a radio-thon to raise money for KiDs Beach Club®. Those first-time donors helped raise more than $3,000.

One KBC family gave $2,750, which is the price it costs for a church to sponsor a Beach Club. Two other donors each gave $1,000 and another six donors contributed at least $500. Nearly all of the remaining gifts were $100 or less.

All donations will help KiDs Beach Club® provide ministerial assistance for churches or be used to purchase Explorer’s Study Bibles for kids in our clubs who have not yet received one. It only costs $20 to put a Bible in the hand of a child. If you were unable to give and would still like to, you can do so here.

You likely saw our aggressive social media campaign that reached a total of 45,121 people on Facebook. Our tweets on North Texas Giving Day were liked or retweeted 149 times and our Instagram account engaged with nearly 300 people. All three of our social media accounts added several followers last week. If you’re not already following us on social media, we would love to welcome you to those communities. If you do follow us on social media, invite your friends and colleagues to follow us as well.