NRB Chronicles - Kids Beach Club Story

So how fun! We are always just amazed at all the people that God places before us here at the National Religious Progcaster Convention. How does God take your passion and use it to build the kingdom? And I have in front of me, someone that's clearly his passion, is kids.

Yeah. And I like the way, what's it? Kids Beach Club. So Jack Terrell with Kids Beach Club, tell us. Jack, what are you guys up to? That's a loaded question.

It is! Typically, we do after-school Bible Clubs. Last year, March hits, COVID hits, and we had over 10,000 kids in our Bible Clubs.

And then March hits, COVID, and then we're like, what are we going to do with all these children that are coming to all our beach clubs, elementary schools across the nation? And so we pivoted, and I'm telling you, I'm telling you, this was the best thing for us. Really? Yeah, it really was.

I mean, God can take the calamities of life and turn them into his blessings and joy. Oh yeah. And so that's where we are. And so we started Kids Beach Club at home, and it eventually evolved into Kids Beach Club TV. And so we've now been able to do two seasons.

First season was 15 episodes, and we're in the second season where we're finishing up 20 episodes. And they're beautiful. The kids are great. And we simply took the ministry and the school and adapted it to a TV program, and boom, here we are.

So how fun. And so from your standpoint, I mean, I discovered years ago that almost everybody's ministry comes from someplace where God touched them, right? Like 2 Corinthians 1, God comforts us with comforts. So something tells me there's something in your own personal story that led you to children's ministry to where you felt like that's where God had you.

You're a prophet and you didn't even know. You know, I'm like any other boy here in America. I grew up in a home, mom and dad. Mom had a beauty salon called the House of Venus. Daddy had a service station, a Texaco service station. Really? You can trust a man with a star.

You can trust your car to the man who wears a star. So I grew up with a perfectionist dad and I could never, ever, ever pleasing. So I had that inferior complex growing up as a child. I ended up getting married, had a child conversion, but I didn't know anything about the relationship. And it was when I was 25 years of age that I fell in love, came to know Christ, fell in love with who He was because I learned that He loved me unconditionally. I didn't have to perform.

Hello? I didn't have to perform. And so this guy, Jesus, loved me unconditionally. So I started working with boys and girls in my little church back home a million years ago and I just started loving them and I just started loving them. Back then we used to kiss them on top of the head. You can't do that anymore.

But I would just love boys and girls. Then I eventually went to school, learned how to know my trade, and then Father blessed me. I was able to be in some amazing, amazing church. Long story to this.

Fast forward to 2000. And I'm at my church at First Euless and I'm doing kids ministry and the pastor calls me in and he says, Hey buddy, I want you to take what you're doing in Treasure Island, which was our children's worship, outside the walls of the church. So where did all this come from?

Where did Beach Club come from? Where does this enthusiasm come from? It comes from a love of communicating the gospel of Jesus, His hope, and His faith to boys and girls. And my pastor helped me understand that there's a greater vision. And so we took what we were doing in our children's worship to go outside into the walls of an elementary school and I had no idea. No idea.

None. That what he was preparing me for was for this. When Father called me to do this, I was at a camp because children's pastors do camps, right? You're at a camp, you're speaking, you don't expect Father to talk to you, right?

I mean, you don't. Hello. And so God began speaking. And He said, Jack, do you know what your baton is? And I'm like, yeah, Daddy. Father, I know.

And He was silent. And I'm like, okay, I thought I did. And then I said, Father, are you telling me that my baton that you want me to do is this Beach Club thing? And He said, yes.

Can I back you up just a minute? I can see Jack when He get him going. He can roll. Which is good because he's got a great voice. He ought to be on radio.

But he's done TV, so it's all good. But I just want to back up for a minute and review the story, maybe from a perspective that I encourage you that's listening right now. So if I'm hearing what I'm hearing, is Jack kind of missed out on his own childhood because his dad wasn't probably have his own childhood. In other words, you've got something so God, in that we call it the cowboy ranger stage, you know, in the John Eldredge, and where a boy needs to know that you're the beloved son, you're the apple of your dad's eye, right? And so God has given Jack, if you can see the look in his eye. You can tell he's the beloved son. You can tell he's the apple of his dad's eye. And you can tell that he wants to transfer that every child the way that he got it from God. And so then, right, then God opens up these doors because he sees, wow, this is something uniquely gifted Jack, his enthusiasm and his love for that ministry. And so then he opened up the door, right, for the kids beach club.

You're amazing, dude. So the reality is, moms and dads, when they get a boy or a little girl, they bring them home from the hospital. There's not a manual that comes with the child. My parents were the same. My parents were pursuing, you know, trying to fund their family, make sure that everything, all the kids had what we wanted. But what they forgot was the heart of the child. And so they drug us to church.

They drug us to everything. But we didn't pray as a family. We weren't nurtured to love the Lord. You didn't get into the relationship, right? They didn't teach you, hey, this is your dad.

You got to talk to him. So when you ask me about me having the apple of my father's eye, I bring that to the boys and the girls, the children that I got to serve in the 40 years I was doing children's ministry. I got to love on them in a way that was unique. Because here's the other thing. My wife and I, we can't have kids. We've been tested.

She's been tested. We can't have kids. So the daughter we have, we adopted. So the Lord allowed me to love on all of these thousands upon thousands of kiddos with a love that was genuine from him to them. And so I teach my volunteers when I was in professional ministry, if you call it that. I said, look, our goal is to let these boys and girls see that we love the book and we want them to fall in love with the book because the book talks about Father.

And the book is Jesus. Amen. It's life changing. And so we helped boys and girls for years. And so my Sunday school group, my children's worship group, because I equipped volunteers to simply fall in love with Jesus. And then translate that. That love, translate that into the life of the boys and girls.

And it's a relationship. So I used to get all kinds of grief. Robbie, I used to get all kinds of grief as a children's pastor because I'd walk into a Sunday school classroom and there would be all these word searches and stuff like that.

And I would rip them up and throw them in the trash can. And I'm like, they don't want that. What they want is you to say, how are you doing? Tell me about your day. And so I started writing these goofy questions for my Sunday school teachers to engage with these boys and girls in Sunday school. And guess what? Children began to come. Leaders began to buy into what I was leading them to do.

And then our Sunday schools grew and our children's worship grew. And I think that's when Father said, you know what? I can trust this crazy old mechanic.

I can trust him with millions. And now we have the opportunity. Oh my goodness, I'm getting a little emotional here. But now we get to see millions of boys and girls hear the message, the hope, the love that only Christ can bring. So COVID for us, Robbie, it was a great thing. It caused us as a ministry to pivot into a world that I don't know. I don't know TV.

I know live children engagement. But brother, it has been sweet and Father has been good. And then our first episode, get this brother, our first episode, it won four tellies. We don't even know what we're doing. We're just simply being obedient unto the Lord. And God gave us four tellies. You can't make this stuff up.

Yeah, you really can't. But if you could see, Jack, his enthusiasm, you're going, wow, this is like he reflects God in a very beautiful way that would certainly be attractive to the young at heart. And what God has for us is we attract kids.

Guess what? They bring parents. There's nothing like child evangelism because how many parents get a chance to know Christ as a result of a child that gets it from a childlike heart.

So amazing stuff. So how do people get Kids Beach Club? I mean, what are the sources? How do they find out about it? They go to our website, kidsbeachclub.org, or they can go to kidsbeachclub.tv and they can find us. But the byproduct of what you were just talking about, Robbie, the whole byproduct of this Kids Beach Club thing, is that when I go and knock on a door and I've got my beach club t-shirt on, do you know what I'm received?

You know what? I'm received by a parent that goes, come on in. So when we help a church get outside the walls of the church to actually be the church, the hands and feet of Christ in the community, and they go and knock on these doors of these children that come to their beach clubs, we get bazillions of testimonials of these volunteers that are seeing families, moms, dads, come to know Christ. It's absolutely great. So yeah, anybody can go to kidsbeachclub.org, find out about how to do a beach club in your elementary school, go to kidsbeachclub.tv, and then learn how to watch a beach club in your home. It's available. It is.

Beach Club, you know, who could, Kids Beach Club, that's pretty easy to remember. And wow, thank you, Jack, for, you know, just following where God had you. Thank you. And I mean that sincerely, brother. Thank you, thank you, thank you. What a joy. What a delight to be with you.