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With your help, KiDs Beach Club® distributed 17,777 Bibles in 2015 and is poised to deliver God’s Word to hundreds more children this spring.

At least seven new Beach Clubs – five in Texas and one each in Tennessee and Louisiana – will start this spring, putting approximately 600 more Bibles into children’s hands between now and March when those new clubs hold their Great Treasure Day.

That’s the exciting day when each child receives his or her very own Bible. They begin hearing about it on the first day of club and it’s usually celebrated when the club meets for the fifth time.

“My students came in and they were just so excited,” Sheila Fortenberry, a third-grade teacher at Cooper North Elementary School in Lubbock, Texas, said the day her club passed out Bibles this past fall. “They came over to tell me, ‘Miss Fortenberry, today is the day we get our Bibles.’ It just melted my heart.” 

Children are definitely excited to get something they can call their own. A girl who received her first Bible at her Beach Club at South Athens Elementary School in October couldn’t wait to start reading her Bible. 

“I’m going to get a flashlight and sit up on the top bunk and read it because it’s awesome,” she said. “I love the Bible and it helps me when I read it.” 

Aside from the reason kids embrace their new Bibles, school administrators, teachers and pastors love the benefits kids get from reading the Bible and the impact they can have on other students. 

“I think it’s incredible,” said a principal of one Beach Club school. “For them to have their own Bible so that they can read and study the Word of God is a precious gift that all children deserve and need.

“I think Beach Club benefits our students in a lot of different ways. Our job is to instruct and help to mold them as a whole person and helping them develop their spirituality is a very important part of developing them as a whole person.” 

The KiDs Beach Club® curriculum promotes good character which is supported within the KBC Explorer’s Study Bible and its tip-in pages. 

“The kids associate those character qualities with righteousness and not necessarily only with morality,” said Courtney Cain, a co-club leader at Hanby Elementary School in Mesquite, Texas. “I would hear the kids say, ‘that’s not what Jesus would do,’ in class, so I definitely saw them being advocates for doing the right thing with the perspective of doing it to glorify God and not to just do the right thing.”

Cain, who taught at Hanby the previous four years before moving to a middle school this year to teach reading, thinks kids understand the impact and meaning of Great Treasure Day.

“I think that saying it was a Great Treasure Day is not over-exaggerating because for these kids in particular, being given anything just means so much to them,” Cain said. “Being given the Word of God obviously is the greatest thing you can give them. I don’t think they’re unaware of that. I think they will just value and remember this day.”

“One of the exciting things about handing out all these Bibles is that many of these students don’t even have access to a Bible, so to give them the opportunity to have a Bible to call their own, means a great deal,” said David Griffin, a pastor at Community Life Church in Forney, Texas. “How awesome is it that we get to come into a local school and get to hand out Bibles to people and they’re just longing to have those.”

“The spiritual implications are huge because the kids are literally being taken from death to life. We saw several kids come to know the Lord last year. Obviously, that is going to have an impact in the classroom.” 

The impact is real. A total of 361 children made Jesus their Forever Friend in Beach Club this past fall.

KiDs Beach Club® will celebrate its 10th birthday at the annual Bibles for Beach Club Benefit Dinner & Auction April 16 at the Hurst Conference Center. Your monthly support combined with the funds raised at the last Benefit Dinner & Auction in 2014 allowed us to provide 20,000 Bibles. Please help us purchase an additional 20,000 Bibles to provide Bibles to every Beach Club child the next two academic years. Thank you for your continued support.

This month, Suzanne Massey and Dr. Rod Masteller have joined the KiDs Beach Club® Board of Directors. Each will serve a three-year term and will be eligible to renew for a second three-year term.

Massey lends KBC more than 26 years in the textbook publishing business and 20 years in education. Additionally, she has served on the staff as a bi-vocational preschool minister and children’s minister for 16 years.

A graduate of Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, Massey has experience both in the classroom with students as well as training educators in numerous areas of professional development, including KiDs Beach Club® leadership teams.

While serving as the children’s minister at Grandview Baptist Church in Mesquite, Texas, she helped that church bring a Beach Club to Porter Elementary. The club debuted with 93 children and remains one of the largest Beach Clubs today. 

“For two years, I said no to KiDs Beach Club®,” Massey said. “I didn't think my church could do it. One day I realized I was saying no to God, instead of listening to His will and following His faithfulness to provide. From that day forward, not only has my church been blessed, but personally God renewed a passion to serve in me with a "Yes, Lord" to His calling. I look forward to serving this amazing ministry in this new capacity.”

While children’s ministry was always a priority, Massey worked closely with families. Family activities, including women’s ministries, are a part of her passion to serve others.

Suzanne, a resident of the Dallas area since 1976, has two children and three grandchildren as well as a close-knit extended family. She is excited to be a part of God’s plan for KBC.

Masteller has been pastoring churches throughout the southwest for the past 40 years. In November 2011, he retired as senior pastor at Summer Grove Baptist Church in Shreveport, La. after 13 years. He is currently the Director of the Joseph Willis Institute for Great Spiritual Awakenings and Ambassador for the Caskey School of Divinity.

“I believe one of the ways we can turn America around is through KiDs Beach Club®,” Masteller said after founder and president Jack Terrell and his wife Tammy shared the organization’s vision with him. “Getting God's word into these children in the public schools and reaching their parents for Christ is how to do that.” 

Masteller also has served as pastor at Westwood Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, First Baptist Church of Harrah, Okla., First Baptist Church of Jenks, Okla. and Putnam City Baptist Church in Oklahoma City, Okla. Masteller is widely known for his role in helping and teaching leadership skills throughout America. Prior to his going to Shreveport, he was vice president with John Maxwell’s Injoy Stewardship Services in Atlanta, Ga. 

He received a Bachelor of Arts from Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Mo. He then went on to obtain a Master of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas. Masteller has also received a Doctor of Divinity from the California Graduate School of Theology, a Doctor of Sacred Theology from Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Mo., and a Doctor of Humanities from the Louisiana Baptist University in Shreveport, La.

Masteller and his wife Linda have four daughters and 10 grandchildren.

KiDs Beach Club® has added Ai-Ling Teng and Melissa Leach to its club relations team. Teng will serve as a club relations director in the Houston, Texas area, while Leach will serve in an interim capacity in north Tarrant County 

Teng is a student at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary pursuing a Master’s of Arts in Christian education. She is originally from Taiwan and has lived in the Houston area since 2007. In 2008, she answered God’s call to children’s ministry. In addition to her position with KBC, Teng currently serves as an intern in children and family ministry at Southwest Chinese Baptist Church in Stafford.

Teng has a clear call and passion to lead children to Christ and to equip parents to be faith trainers in their homes. She and her husband Samuel have two sons, Johann and Enoch. 

Leach graduated from Texas Tech University in December 2015 with a bachelor's degree in Human Development and Family Studies.

She has actively served in leadership positions in children’s and student ministry. While in college, Leach volunteered at a Beach Club in Lubbock, Texas.

She recently moved home to Hurst, Texas, and attends North Richland Hills Baptist Church.

KiDs Beach Club® is also looking to fill other positions, click here for a full list of positions currently available.

KiDs Beach Club® would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! May the peace and joy of Christmas be with you today and throughout the new year!

How is your family celebrating Jesus’ birthday? The Christmas Story can be found in the Bible in Luke, chapter two. Your child has already heard the Christmas Story in Beach Club, so please take the time to re-read it with your whole family. You can follow our social media posts during the week leading Christmas when we’ll share the Christmas Story there.

Beach Club will resume in early 2016. Be sure to check with the church that sponsors your local Beach Club or your child’s school so they won’t miss any meetings.

With 2016 just around the corner, it seems only appropriate to look back to see what KiDs Beach Club® was able to accomplish this year:

• Since September, 355 children have welcomed Christ into their lives by making Jesus their forever friend. 

• Great Treasure Day has been a tremendous success with more than 17,000 Bibles getting into the hands of children in 2015. 

• The organization added nine new staff members, created separate teams for strategic growth and club relations, and added a senior area director position. Suzanne Massey and Dr. Rod Masteller will join the board January 1. 

• Established a new college internship program in marketing and club relations.

• Paul McCollum added the responsibility of development director and has already implemented new donor-onboarding events, including the KBC Charity Hunt.

• Experienced a 24 percent growth rate, which equates to 35 new clubs, several new school districts and one new state: Louisiana.

• With the gift of a Bible to every kid in every Beach Club, found new ways to teach them how to be hands on with their new Bibles. Implemented new “Hang 10” pages that encourage kids to spend 10 minutes each day reading their Bible.

• Made commitment to offer a summer camp, which will start in July 2016. The goal is to help kids take what they learn at Beach Club to a new level and become leaders for Christ on their school campuses.

• Built database of 24,000 contacts in email distribution program that we regularly communicate to with the monthly Surf Report and Bibles for Beach Club e-newsletters. Our subscribers also get messages about other events like North Texas Giving Day and #GivingTuesday. 

• The organization’s Facebook and Twitter accounts are seeing new followers daily and we added Instagram and Vimeo accounts to help us better engage with our community and tell the incredible stories in KiDs Beach Club, including Great Treasure Day. Be sure to like us at @KiDsBeachClub and share our content. Share your own content by using the #KiDsBeachClub hashtag.

• KBC moved into a new corporate office space in Bedford, Texas the last week of 2015, thanks to a surprise donor who offered up office space in his building. There are currently 14 offices with additional room that will allow our ministry to continue to grow.

We could not do it with our donors, volunteers, staff and of course our amazing Beach Club kids. Our wins are your wins. Thank you for your support!

If you have not yet made a year-end gift to KiDs Beach Club®, your support would be appreciated. Click here to make a tax-deductible gift before the December 31 deadline.