Child Evangelism Fellowship

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Child Evangelism Fellowship

Founder(s)	Jesse Overholtzer
Type	501(c)3 non-profit religious
Founded	1937
Headquarters	Warrenton, Missouri, US
Key people	Reese Kauffman, President, Marshall Pennell, Executive Vice President
Area served	US, 159 countries
Volunteers	40,000 (US & Canada)
Employees	2000 (full-time)
Slogan	Reaching children worldwide
Website	www.cefonline.com

Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF) is an international evangelical nonprofit organization founded by Jesse Overholtzer in 1937, headquartered in Warrenton, Missouri, United States. The organization lists as its purpose to teach the Gospel to boys and girls and to get them involved in local Christian churches, focusing specifically on teaching children the Bible. It has programs established in all 50 states and 159 countries around the world, with 750 full-time workers in the USA, and an estimated 40,000 volunteers in the USA and Canada, and over 1,200 missionaries overseas, approximately 1,000 of whom are nationals. During the reporting year ending in August of 2006, they reported teaching more than 8 million children, mostly in small group settings. CEF is a member of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA).

The primary ministries of CEF are Good News Clubs and Five Day Clubs. Both of these programs focus on training church members from various evangelical churches to effectively teach children in homes, neighborhood centers and schools. On June 11, 2001 the USA Supreme Court ruled in favor of allowing CEF's Good News Clubs to meet in public elementary schools after school hours, based on equal access and protection from viewpoint discrimination. Since that time CEF has been working to establish Good News Clubs in public schools around the USA.

Children's Ministries Institute is the official training institute of CEF, and holds 12 weeks training sessions in at least 15 countries around the world every year including two complete 12 week sessions on the CEF campus just west of St. Louis, Missouri. The organization has fair, camping, open-air, telephone and correspondence outreach programs for children, and provides classes to train their workers and other Christians who are burdened for evangelizing children. Additionally, CEF Press produces and distributes Bible and missionary lessons and related materials for use in teaching children to help accomplish the goals of the ministry. They also publish a bimonthly magazine which offers instruction, teaching tools and inspiration for children's workers called Teach Kids. One evangelistic tool that CEF promotes is the Wordless Book.

Since 1998 CEF has had a high volume correspondence course program called the CEF Mailbox Club. Lessons are available for every age group of children and for adults as well. The program is staffed primarily by volunteers who come from all over the country to help with the work. Hundreds of thousands of students have enrolled in the program and more than 15,000 lessons are graded and mailed on a normal week. The CEF Mailbox Club is used by several other organizations as a discipleship program for the children whom they reach. These partnering agencies include the Jesus Film Project, Prison Fellowship International and Samaritan's Purse with the Operation Christmas Child program. Children are enrolled not only from around the USA but from countries all over the world.