Our crew at Key Ministry has been working on a little surprise for the churches we serve and the larger disability ministry community for the last six months…actually four separate surprises to be exact. And we’re ready to share a sneak preview of the first surprise tonight at 9:00 PM Eastern (8:00 Central, 6:00 Pacific) with our blog readers, Twitter followers and Facebook fans. You can find it through clicking this link.

We’ve been wanting to develop a cost-efficient way of taking our training to church staff, pastors and volunteers everywhere…and we wanted to share our solution with like-minded leaders and organizations in the disability ministry movement.

We’re doing a beta test tonight of a disability ministry training platform that will allow us to prerecord video training that will be accompanied by the availability of live chat with the presenters who developed the training. The site is integrated with Facebook…if someone is participating in a training that may be of interest to friends and colleagues, they can “share” the training within seconds by posting to their Facebook wall. We will also have the capacity to lifestream through this site…our team will be able to train churches live anywhere high speed internet is available without leaving our alpine paradise here in Chagrin Falls!

Tomorrow is Rebecca Hamilton’s last day with us. Rebecca has been a passionate advocate for respite outreach during her time with us, and our team wanted her to have the honor of being the first leader to train on the new platform. We’re going to share a series of videos she helped develop for churches interested in providing respite to families this evening. While the video is playing,  Rebecca will be available to chat live. Join us tonight for a discussion of respite outreach and help us to find the bugs in our new training platform by joining us here at 9:00 PM Eastern time. If you look carefully tonight, you may see hints of the other three surprises we’re rolling out this late winter/Spring!

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Confused about all the changes in diagnostic terminology for kids with mental heath disorders? Key Ministry has a resource page summarizing our recent blog series examining the impact of the DSM-5 on kids. Click this link for summary articles describing the changes in diagnostic criteria for conditions common among children and teens, along with links to other helpful resources!