Tag: children

Will Your Kids Follow Jesus?

TirePlayI can’t tell you how many times over the past 10+ years I’ve had a discussion with other parents and church leaders about the struggle of discipling children through our current church programming models. The following is an excerpt from a Verge Network article by Ben Connelly called “How To Incorporate Kids into Your Missional Community” (full article here) that articulates this challenge well:

Focusing on the right things
The focus of a “kids ministry” shouldn’t actually be kids; it should be parents. Whether preschool or high school, the same principle applies: churches and leaders who put time, effort, money, resources, and intentionality into equipping parents instead of merely entertaining children accomplish two significant things:

  • They help develop the whole-life spiritual maturity of the children
  • They put parents back in the place the Bible places them.

Churches with Sunday-focused kids ministries spend 50-100 hours per year (of the 8,760 hours in any given year) with your kids. Minus vacations, sickness, and other reasons to miss, trained workers teach kids biblical concepts for an hour or two on Sundays. And even the most intentional churches might host a second age-specific gathering sometime during the week.

In those few hours, trained leaders must cram in entertainment, music, a snack, and often a Bible story that immediately transfers into a life lesson. “Discipleship and spiritual growth” become limited to a few hours a month, and generally limited to one “style”: in a group, with lots of energy, listening to a teacher teach a broad lesson.

What about the rest of the week?
But what happens in the rest of a child’s week when the teacher isn’t there? Who hears about getting made fun of on the playground? Who’s there to encourage the student in the midst of a specific high school struggle? If a child is in school until 4pm and goes to bed at 8pm, parents interact with their kids 1460 hours a year!

Parents see the daily struggles. Parents have conversations in the car. Parents are asked the hard questions. Parents deal with the specifics, the scenarios, the struggles, the sins. Parents meet their child – every single day – where the real-life rubber hits the road.

The author makes the argument that we need to be spending more of our time training parents as the primary disciplers of children. I agree. Yet, look at the job description of just about any church children’s minister or youth minister and you will see just how little of their time is expected to be spent doing this kind of work. In fact, it is entirely possible (and I have seen this many times myself) where we end up with adolescents in this model that “know” more about the Bible than their parents do. Can we see how backwards this is if we really believe that the parents are the primary teachers and disciplers of their kids?  I personally believe that when we talk about the issue of so many young people leaving the church after high school that it is related to this issue. Their spiritual training, their so-called discipleship is totally disconnected from their life at school and at home.

So what is the solution? I imagine that for many programmatic, attractional churches they might be tempted simply to hire more staff to teach more classes at the church building for parents. Personally, I don’t think that is the answer. The didactic teaching style has its place, but it is no substitute for discipleship in the everyday life. I don’t want to claim that missional communities are the answer, but I do believe that they are a step in a better direction because the focus is on reorienting our lives to be on mission in our home, work, school, family, neighborhood, life.

It is good to read about how others have approached the missional community gatherings with children. We have been stumbling along with this without a lot of intentionality or planning so far (in regards to children). It has worked for the most part, but I like the idea of having the “on call” adult for each meeting. So far, we have attempted to integrate our children into all that we do as a missional community. I am finding that, at least for me, some of the most profound learning moments have happened when our children have been engaged with us in our story time or discussion. It is a difficult challenge to navigate, but I agree with Jayne that each missional community will need to address their own unique challenges with kids. It will change as the age of kids in the group change over time.

The Story

We were sitting down to dinner last night and our youngest son (6 years old) agreed to pray and give thanks before we ate. He takes this “giving thanks” quite seriously and will often pray a long list of “Thank you for…”s. Most of the time I really enjoy hearing all of the interesting things he is thanking God for. “Wii”, “water,” and “babies” often top his list along with the usual “food” and “family.” Sometimes his list goes on and on and if the rest of us are especially hungry, and our food is sitting in front of us waiting to be eaten, we become quite charismatic and began mumbling encouraging “Amen”s hoping to wrap up the prayer!

Last night he ended with “…and thank you that boys are no longer mean. Amen!” My wife and I opened our eyes and gave each other a look that translated into “What is that about?” I was worried that there had been an incident at school or on the bus that we didn’t know about. But after questioning him we finally discovered that he was talking about The Story of God. Let me explain.

If you’re not familiar with The Story of God, this is something developed by Soma Communities in Tacoma to be used with Missional Communities. The resource is free and can be found here: Story of God Resources. We are currently working through the “Story Formed Way” version in our missional community. We weren’t sure how it was going to work with the kids since it really is not the “kids version” of the story. However, the kids have really been engaged, especially when we do the retelling! The Story of God is a form of “chronological Bible storying” that presents the overall Biblical narrative in condensed, oral story form. Another way to describe it would be a sweeping “big picture” of the story of redemption.

Back to my son’s prayer: He was apparently very disturbed (and rightly so) that in the beginning of The Story there is a repeated theme of people “doing what is right in their own eyes” and that “their every thought was evil.” Now that we are deeper into the story and have arrived at Jesus, he is experiencing relief that, in his own words, “boys are no longer mean.” What I love about this, is that even though he doesn’t have the theological or church language to talk about sin,  evil, redemption, etc., he is grasping the story! He is getting the “good news” – the Gospel! And not only that, but he is personalizing it! “Boys” and “meanness” is something that he can relate to in that he has both experienced it and he has been the mean boy at times.

I have no idea how we will look back on this later. We haven’t even finished going through The Story of God once yet, and ideally we will do it once every year in our missional community. I just have a sense that we are onto something that I have longed for since the day that my children were born: that they would know God’s Story and see themselves as an ongoing part of that story in the world!

Sometimes, You Just Want to Share!

Camano Island State Park in the fall.

One of the things that I love about new technology is the ability to snap a good quality photo with my phone at any time and share it instantly via text, instagram, Facebook, etc. Sometimes, you just want to share what you are seeing, and even though you can’t capture it fully in an image, it somehow becomes more rich when others can enjoy a piece of it too. I took the above picture during a walk and prayer time. My intention was to be alone, but as I walked upon this scene on a still day with the birds singing I desperately wanted others to experience it too!

I had a similar experience that I wished I could share with everyone last Sunday night.  It was our missional community meeting. We packed into our little home to have dinner together, connect, share stories, and then share the “Story of God.” We had a lot of kids there, and at moments it was pure chaos! Oh, but what a beautiful chaos it was! Even though we are only in our second week in the “Story of God,” we can tell that this has the potential to shape us as a community in new ways that line up with God’s mission. How absolutely wonderful to have young children helping their adult parents retell the story and remind us of what we forgot! I can’t wait to see where this all goes and I do hope that more of you reading this will have the opportunity to join us someday and experience it for yourself!