You have our deepest gratitude!

August 6, 2014 by admin

Several months ago when we started planning the Kickstarter Campaign with our son Randall Mains, head of Pathmaker Marketing, we went back and forth wondering what amount would be best to set for our Project Goal—that critical point where no funding is received if the Goal is not reached.

When we evaluated our financial needs to republish 3 books against our perceived capacities of a crowd funding channel, we actually wondered if $6,000 would be too much to reach for!

Here we are at the end of our Campaign with $38,316 in pledges sitting at # 14 in Kickstarter’s all-time Most Funded Children’s Book projects, from over 2,994 projects on Earth!

This is deeply moving to us because we wanted this effort to honor our son, Jeremy Mains, and his love for the wide variety of people on this beautiful yet tragic planet. The three books of the Tales of the Kingdom Trilogy, as long as they are in print, will stand as a memorial to Jeremy who died November 5, 2013 of an acute and rare lymphoma. He was 41 years of age, and as theologians often say, was filled with amor mundi—love for the world.

When we read through the Backer’s list, we are also touched by the generous support from old friends and from new! THANK YOU!

Throughout this Campaign there were email exchanges and Facebook comments that shared with us of the value and impact of these books – reminders that we humans often work beyond our own capacities through that strange and undefinable activity called God-given inspiration.

Simply put, the impact of these three books on many readers is more than our creative energies combined could produce. So, we look back with gratitude to have been present at their inception and nativity. Like Jeremy, going out into the world he loved, they continually surprise us. And as we prepare this special 30th anniversary edition for you to receive before Christmas 2014, we pray and hope they will continue to surprise and delight your family for many years to come!

Thank you deeply for giving us this opportunity! Thank you deeply for letting us honor our son!

David & Karen Mains
To the King! To the Restoration!

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The Influence of Millennials

July 29, 2014 by admin

My wife Karen and I probably wouldn’t have known about KICKSTARTER if we hadn’t worked at establishing social relationships with younger people. Most folks our ages (78 and 71) don’t know a whole lot about these alternative funding channels.

So, we’ll admit it, one of the reasons we entered a project on KICKSTARTER was to better understand how the younger generation thinks. Millennials are into these different approaches to raising working capital.

In reality, KICKSTARTER funding can be seen as advance orders for the product we were wanting to fund. To be specific, we wanted to republish a new edition of our Kingdom Tales Trilogy with all-new, multiethnic art. This was as a legacy project to honor our son Jeremy (41), who died last November from aggressive lymphoma.

We didn’t have the capital to pull this off. So we figured out what the cost would be and then, through KICKSTARTER, asked people to help us reach this $22,500 amount. Praise the Lord, last week we made our goal. This was important, because if we hadn’t reached it, we wouldn’t receive any of what was pledged.

This final week, we are into what are called “Stretch Goals.” All donors, old and new, receive extra bonuses if new levels are met. In our case, for example, these are like free color prints of some of the new art, prints suitable for framing.

Hey, we’re feeling a little like we’re young again!

Check out the project by clicking here in order to go to the Mainstay webpage on KICKSTARTER, but you’ll have to do it soon, because our project ends on Sunday, August 3rd at midnight.

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Please click here to visit David Mains’ Sermon-Coach.com website.

You will also find a variety of resources for pastors and congregations at the Mainstay Ministries website. Please click here.

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Generation Z

July 14, 2014 by admin

Were you aware that there has been a 50% increase in the multiracial young population since 2000? The Website slideshare.net has released a comprehensive study of the age group they are tentatively calling Generation Z, those born in 1995 to the present. My wife, Karen, and I have conducted intensive research into the characteristics of the Millennial Generation—mostly because we are concerned with the fact that only some 15% of this group claim to be conservative Christians—and even many of those have little or limited connection with any local church. These are the young folk born in the years before 1995—specifically, sometime in the early eighties.

Interestingly enough, the Web site Slideshare.net makes the point in its study regarding the next generation (“Z”) following hard after the Millennials, “Modern families come in all colors and sizes. Long-standing views have been challenged by culture: celebrities, artists, politicians and athletes of mixed heritage have changed the discourse, along with trans-racial and international adoptions.”

In other words, the demographic for the coming generation is going to be a very mixed racial bag. This is one of the reasons Karen and I have decided to redesign and republish our award-winning children’s books, Tales of the Kingdom, Tales of the Resistance and Tales of the Restoration—we want the artwork to reflect this interracial and multiethnic makeup of what will be the next generation of Americans (not to mention the children of the world).

The beautiful illustrations by Jack Stockman in the first two books don’t reflect the racial demographic of the members of our youngest society.

For the last four months, we have been working with the Pathmaker Marketing Group to design a Kickstarter campaign to re-illustrate, redesign and republish these books. Crowd-funding and crowd-sourcing are some of the exciting means that the Internet has evolved in recent days order to raise funds to launch new products or underwrite charitable projects. Our campaign to raise $22,500 by inviting backers to pre-order these newly reissued books can be viewed here. Check out some of the artwork we want to fund. Become a backer and receive a Kickerstarter Heritage Collectible Numbered Edition. Help us make these works visually accessible to the next really, remarkably mixed, culturally sophisticated young generation.

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A Legacy Project in Honor of our Deceased Son, Jeremy

July 10, 2014 by admin

A little over 30 years ago, the first book in the Kingdom Tales Trilogy was published. It was titled The Tales of the Kingdom, and won a Gold Medallion Award. This book was to be followed over the next decade by two more in the series, Tales of the Resistance and Tales of the Restoration. For whatever reason, the original publisher chose to use a different artist to illustrate Book Three.

As many of you know, our son Jeremy died last year at age 41 from a rare and aggressive form of lymphoma. Because of his travels through the world and his growth as a multicultural specialist (he taught Spanish at Wheaton College and ran his own Dynamis Immigration Aid to counsel people seeking U.S. citizen status), it was always his wish to someday redo the 36 illustrations in the three books with artwork that included an array of multiethnic faces.

As a legacy project in his honor, we held a contest in which some 87 artists from various countries competed for the honor of illustrating the three books in the Kingdom Tales Trilogy. A winner has now been chosen, Zhivko Zhelev from Bulgaria. You can learn more about what’s happening by going to this website. For those of you who have been concerned for the Mains family, this is a perfect opportunity to be personally involved in this special legacy project, which will continue on Kickstarter through the end of July.