This Spring and Summer will begin a new chapter for Children's Ministry International as Hank and Carolyn Thigpen plan to enter a new phase in their work with CMI with their role becoming that of volunteers and teachers for the ministry. Hank will soon announce his resignation as Director. The Thigpens are planning to move to their family home surroundings in Florence, Alabama.

Sixteen and a half years ago the Thigpens moved from Alabama, where Hank was Pastor of a PCA Church, to the Atlanta area to direct the children's ministry of the Presbyterian Evangelistic Fellowship. When it became apparent that a good portion of the ministry would be in the development of materials for churches and parents, CMI became incorporated as a separate entity.

The CMI ministry has centered around the Thigpen's home in Tucker, Georgia, for these past fifteen years. A visit to their home would see room after room full of volunteers developing lessons, shipping orders or assisting in some administrative function. The ministry quickly spread to the breakfast room, the porch, the basement, as well as the outside sheds and storage areas.

Today, CMI has the capability of printing in color, collating, binding and high speed copying our visual lessons and other teacher's aids for children 3-18 years old. In addition, the staff is producing teacher's training aids such as our Gospel Worms and Magnetic Bible Bookcases. Seminars are held acquainting Sunday School teachers and parents with how to teach their children the Word of God.

Just about every other weekend found the Thigpens in another church conducting a seminar. In the seminars they encourage the teachers to be sure God is the center of every Bible story they teach. Thrilled with this new concept, teachers began asking where they could buy lessons that approached Bible teaching in this way. Search as the Thigpens did, there was no such material on the market (especially from the reformed perspective). The Thigpens then decided to try their hand at writing CMI Bible lessons beginning each one with a doctrine about who God is and what He requires of us. This led to many of those teachers in the Atlanta area becoming volunteers who come into the Thigpen home to prepare lessons.

At that time CMI had on staff, Dot Musante from Milton, Florida, whose dream for many years had been to visualize the "Catechism for Young Children". Each doctrinal truth could then be taught with pictures in a way a child could understand. The deep truth of each lesson was enhanced with a memory verse, Bible Lesson, song, craft and review game. She began to outline the Children's Catechism by breaking the 145 questions into 14 separate, topical series. Dot wrote Series A and B and soon much of the focus of the ministry was to completely visualize the entire group of questions. What better way to teach basic Bible doctrine than to use the outline already prepared in the question and answer approach to Bible knowledge based on the Westminster Confession of Faith.

In the late 1980's God sent a very capable husband and wife writing and music team to do the lessons for us. Pastor Tom and Lil Wildecker came from Illinois where Tom was a Pastor of a PCA church. Lil had a remarkable ability to write Scripture Songs and arrange lessons. Her death in 1993 was a setback, but the Lord has brought new volunteers to fill every position we have needed. Soon lessons began to pour out as other volunteers helped in the editing and testing of the materials. Tom continues to serve the Lord as a very valuable volunteer with CMI.

New equipment was soon added for printing and storing the text of the newly completed lessons. The mailing list of our newsletter "REACHING" expanded to over 4000 names. New storage facilities were added to allow the production of large numbers of copies of Series A and B. New equipment now allows us, through our desk top publishing and computer ../graphics programs, to quickly upgrade lessons and improve them. A new color printer purchased in January 1997 now allows us to make color visuals. The old, "put together packet," idea will soon be a thing of the past as our bright new color visuals are being produced. Our lessons are looking better than ever!

Another aspect of the ministry has been teaching children of Mission to the World Missionaries (MTW is the missionary arm of the PCA church) during their Regional Conferences at Bryan College in Dayton, TN, and overseas in Europe, Asia and Latin America. So far CMI staff, a teaching team of 12 or more CMI certified teachers, has travelled to 7 overseas locations to minister to these missionary children. The CMI staff considers this opportunity a privileged ministry and travel at their own expense. This year, April 13-22, will once again be overseas, this time at Montpellier, France.

The MTW conferences in the USA and overseas have helped in several ways. Besides the privilege of influencing the lives of the missionary children, we have been motivated to more fully complete series after series to prepare us for these conferences. We have been able to test and upgrade our materials as a result of the feedback we receive from these events. More importantly we have established key relationships with missionary families who now want to translate the CMI material for work in their countries.

These translation projects have been largely funded and carried on by the dedicated missionaries and their supporters. Currently the two translation projects that are underway are in Spanish and Russian. A test project, coordinated by MTW missionaries, is testing a Spanish Series A in more than fifteen churches of three countries in Latin America. With these tests we hope to discover whether there are problems with the text between countries and the applicability of our materials throughout Latin America. In Odessa, Russia, other MTW missionaries have now translated series A, B, C, and D into Russian and are testing them out in various Ukrainian Churches. We pray that other missionaries will soon get the vision to do similar projects in the language of their mission field.

As we conclude this article of how God has founded and sustained CMI step by step, we reflect again on the "BIG MOVE." Now that the Thigpens are leaving this spring, we must find new facilities for the ministry. Our ideal requirements today are for approximately 1000 square feet of office and production work area and another 500 feet of warehouse space. (Of course we could crowd into less space again if necessary.) If you know of any such space please contact us.

As the Thigpens now change their status from full time workers and directors of the ministry to a more supporting role in another state we need to pray for the new director. Brad Winsted. Brad joined the staff in the summer of 1995. Thankfully, his family has a long history with CMI. Fawn, his wife, has been an editor, tester, and teacher of our materials for over 12 years. His older children have taught CMI materials in church and at the regional conferences. His support level only allows him to work part time for CMI. As director he needs to be with us full time.

Chapter One of this ministry is coming to a close. What God has in store for the ministry remain2s to be seen. New initiatives in Bible Clubs (outside the Sunday School hour), updating and improving our lessons for teenagers, and the development of new training resources remain2s to be done. Our homeschooling initiatives have just begun. Pray for us as the transition continues; that we may remain2 faithful to God's calling to teach our children His life-changing doctrine.