This is a brief piece I wrote for the Living Hope community as we continue to explore what it means to embrace a missional identity as a church community - specifically with regard to how we understand the place of children.
The first church I served at as a pastor was very large. We had all sorts of programs and services for people to choose from. We invested a great deal of time and energy as a staff in trying to figure out the best ways, times, and methods to get people involved in church activities. One of the things we were constantly wrestling with was how to have the necessary volunteers to pull everything off. No area of ministry struggled more for consistent and dedicated volunteers than our children’s ministry. My good friend Cyd, our children’s pastor, would ask the staff every single week to please talk to others about serving in the children’s ministry. It was an area of constant need and an utterly shameful reality which screamed of just how far off course we were in living out God’s dream for his people.
In retrospect, I am able to see that this need was a direct result of the skewed understanding we had of what it meant to be the church. We approached the church as though it were a volunteer organization. Basically, our mentality was, “People have busy lives already, we need to do what we can to make it easy for them to participate in church activities and be careful not to ask too much - lest they leave.” But the church is not a volunteer organization - the church is a family, a community invited by God to embody God’s good news of the Kingdom to the world around us. This makes all the difference in the world in terms of the way we approach how we live, worship, and share life together.
Children are God’s gift, not only to parents, but to the community of the church. In the context of this community, it’s not that we need volunteers to care for kids. Rather, it’s that part of the identity of this new community is a mutual concern for each other, including a vested interest in the care for each other’s children. In a culture so thoroughly individualistic, where we are led to believe that it is ultimately to ourselves that we are accountable and responsible, the church stands as a contrast. In the community called church, we find our true identity not in ourselves, but in our relationship to others.
For Living Hope, our desire to be a missional church community means that we are seeking to live out a peculiar existence; an existence in which the needs of others come before our own and the care of children is seen as a communal, not private, affair.
Practically speaking, here’s what this might mean and look like. Each Sunday morning people gather to worship - some gather at 9:00, others at 10:45. During these times, children who can’t or don’t participate in the corporate worship gathering, meet in age specific groups. This is our divine opportunity to experience what it means for the church to be different - to reject the dominant consumer culture. This is our opportunity to invest a little bit of time with the children of our community - to show mutual (and opposed to individual) concern and accountability. It’s not about volunteerism; it’s about Kingdom community.
Of course the ways in which we ought to show mutual concern and accountability run far deeper than this Sunday morning opportunity. There are implications for our small group times, for sharing meals, for sharing resources, for taking vacations, for involvement in extracurricular activities, and so on, but there is something unique about the significance of caring for the children of our church community during those times that we are gathered corporately.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Sarah Christoph // Jul 24, 2008 at 12:57 am
Wow! I couldn’t agree more- and not just because I have kids but because I was a kid once… we all were. As a side note- I firmly believe that the good and bad of what I experienced as a child shaped my thinking of myself and my view of others and maybe even my view of God from even the young age of 4. Kids absorb so much info and they are constantly seeking the attention and love they need to gain a sense of security and identity that will help form a foundation for the rest of their precious lives. For example, a lot of kids who are sexually abused are exposed to this nightmare because of a lack of involvement from those who weren’t paying much attention to that child (too busy) or simply didn’t care enough to respond to a “red flag” or - worse case- are those who actually do the abusing. As christians we need to be aware of our kids, involved with our kids, loving them so that, instead of always thinking they are “a hassle” or ”a distraction,” they think they are valuable; trust is built and in a time of crisis or pain they turn to us- the people who love them most. I know you didn’t write about child abuse- but it is so prevalent in our society - three in my own family experienced sexual abuse as children and all of us had to undo years of wrong thinking because of it. Neglect, abusive language, and physical abuse are other areas that can effect a child in equally impacting ways- I say all of this to say that as christians we need to recognize that Satan always strikes the most vulnerable of the pack- and as a community we need to gather and look out for our most vulnerable people -of any age. Thanks for sharing this JR. I admire your heart for the youngins’! :-)
2 Emily // Jul 24, 2008 at 8:23 am
Great word, JR, and I’ll take it even further… If we really want to embrace loving each other’s kids and seeing them as a gift, I think we have a long ways to go in terms of having an openness to their actual presence IN our worship services. We don’t put Evelyne in the nursery because at this age, she can’t handle it. That’s another thing entirely, but the point is that our parenting decision is to not put her there for her own best interest at this time. So where does that leave us? For the past six months or so it means that Clay and I go to different services and one of us stays home with Ev, thank God we have lived five minutes away or I don’t know what we would’ve done. Having a Family Room would be great, but logistically who knows if that would work in our context right now. Ideally, I wish that our congregation would embrace the presence of young kids in the worship service when their parents choose to bring them. It still feels like in our culture in general there is the assumption that children are to be seen and not heard and parents are made to feel like any noise their kid makes is a distraction to someone’s worship. What if we REALLY embraced putting ourselves out for the good of the kids in our community, both volunteering on Sunday mornings and in honoring the little noises from the back of the service as welcome and normal instead of an annoying distraction. Having a church culture that approaches life together and seeing my child as a gift (and in honoring my parenting decision that may be different than the norm) in that way would speak volumes to me instead of people giving me weird looks when I don’t sequester Evelyne to the nursery to cry her head off because “I need to worship.” My best friend is Orthodox and all the kids stay in their service. She says everyone takes turns passing the babies around, older women enjoy bringing trinkets to church to entertain the toddlers for whom they’ve become another parent on Sunday morning. The priest calls the noise of the children “holy noises.” Of course no one is talking about letting their kids run buck wild during the service, but in terms of seeing children as a gift to the community, we have a long way to go.
3 JR Rozko // Jul 24, 2008 at 3:11 pm
@Sarah - thanks for the thoughts. Truly, we must value and treasure the responsibility God has given us for children.
@Emily - you are officially not allowed to leave until you have passed your torch on to another.
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