Children’s pastors, youth pastors, and volunteers play an essential role in churches and faith-based organizations. However, many people enter paid or volunteer ministry with limited professional training on how to work specifically with challenging children and teens, which can lead to ineffectiveness, disillusionment, and burnout. Well Equipped, written by an experienced teacher and counselor, provides practical training and advice for workers in the church on the subjects of learning and development, lesson planning, classroom management, and working with a wide variety of special needs populations. Specific focus areas include autism, ADHD, language, culture, refugees, third-culture kids, poverty, trauma, depression, and anxiety. Well Equipped is filled with helpful information, guidance, and examples to equip pastors and volunteers to better connect with students as they grow in their faith.

A practical handbook for today's pastors. Extensively updated to aid in meeting the increased demands and challenges of twenty-first-century ministry, this edition includes expanded indexes, reading lists, and technological suggestions. Covering everything from policy programming to organizational management, each invaluable chapter serves as a vital resource for ministers facing the challenges of pastoral work today.

Like Cortés and Pizarro, Coronado Sought to Conquer a Native American Empire of the Southwest Winner of Two Colorado Book Awards The historic 1540-1542 expedition of Captain-General Francisco Vasquez de Coronado is popularly remembered as a luckless party of exploration which wandered the American Southwest and then blundered onto the central Great Plains of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The expedition, as historian John M. Hutchins relates in Coronado's Well-Equipped Army: The Spanish Invasion of the American Southwest, was a military force of about 1,500 individuals, made up of Spanish soldiers, Indian warrior allies, and camp followers. Despite the hopes for a peaceful conquest of new lands--including those of a legendary kingdom of Cibola--the expedition was obliged to fight a series of battles with the natives in present-day Sonora, California, Arizona, and New Mexico. The final phase of the invasion was less warlike, as the members of the expedition searched the Great Plains in vain for a wealthy civilization called Quivira.While much has been written about the march of Coronado and his men, this is the first book to address the endeavor as a military campaign of potential conquest like those conducted by other conquistadors. This helps to explain many of the previously misunderstood activities of the expedition. In addition, new light is cast on the non-Spanish participants, including Mexican Indian allies and African retainers, as well as the important roles of women.