Elemental Children's Ministry

If you haven’t read The Shack, you might want to seriously consider doing so… or at least buy the audiobook from iTunes, like I did, and listen to it. Whether you agree completely with Young’s theology, it does a very good job of addressing a lot of questions like:

• Why do bad things happen?
• What’s the deal with free will?
• Why do we pray if you already know everything?
• How can God be good and yet there still be evil in the world?
• And more…

I was recently asked to submit a blog post for the WCA Children’s Ministry blog about what I was able to take home from the Conspire Conference in 2008. You can check out the post on the WCA Children’s site.

While I attended the conference, I had blogged about it. You can check out my thoughts on being there, what the general sessions were like (one, two, three, four, five, and six), as well as how the point leader summit sessions were (one, two, three, and four), and my general impressions of the conference.

If you’ve never gone to the Willow Creek Children’s Conference, it is definitely one to check out.

As a staff, we recently went through Scot McKnight’s book, A Community Called Atonement. I love McKnight’s take on atonement. From my understanding, his view is that the evangelical community has limited what atonement is by picking one atonement theory and sticking to it rather than collecting a “golf bag” of theories to work from. He used a golf analogy saying that dogmatically sticking to a single atonement theory is like golfing with a single club: you don’t golf very well and in an incomplete manner. McKnight challenges us to expand how we see atonement… yes, there is still substitutionary atonement, but that is not it.

There are three themes that stood out for me:

1. Sin is a distortion of our relationships in four directions: to God, to ourselves, to other people, and to creation. The atonement brings about the restoration of all four relationships. For me, this is a more full view of the atonement.
2. We are broken images of God in need of being made whole again.
3. We take are meant to be agents of atonement (not that we provide atonement, but the Holy Spirit uses us in bringing restored relationships to God, self, others and creation all around us)

I was home for lunch and caught one of my favourtie cartoons, Grossology. Maybe it’s my penchant for science because of my chem-bio major in university, but I love how they highlight the gross parts of science in a fun and action-oriented way.

If you don’t know about the cartoon, it follows the adventures of sibling Grossology agents, Abby and Ty Archer, as they battle evil villains like the gaseous Fartor and insect-loving Insectiva, to name a few. When not battling these gross villains, Abby and Ty are unassuming junior high students.

The series is spun off of the popular book series by the same name: Grossology, Grossology and You, Animal Grossology, and Grossology Begins at Home (Grossology). I had a chance to hear the author a few years back at a symposium. It was a lot of fun as she talked about all the gross stuff in science. My favourite was the maximun tolerance levels of bugs in everyday food items like crackers and peanut butter… yum! There is also a touring museum exhibit of Grossology. I missed it when it was at OMSI a few years back when I lived in Oregon. I was bummed.

Anyway, if you have any boys (or girls for that matter) who might be interested in science… this might be a fun cartoon for them to check out. You should check it out, too!

A few weeks ago, I shared a message entitiled Make Us Orange at my church which inspired this post. Here is the video of that message.

Make Us Orange from Henry Zonio on Vimeo.

One of the blogs listed on my Bloglines is Dan Kimball’s. He had a fun post yesterday of an early Christian music group called Sonseed. I hope you enjoy it just as much as I did. My toes are still tapping!

October 10 (Tomato Soup with Toasted Cheese Croutons), originally uploaded by romanlily.

I’ve been thinking a lot about volunteers. Being in full time children’s minsiry as a pastor, I have the wonderful privilege to work with some amazing volunteers. (And I’m not just saying that because some of them might read this post.) The challenge in working with volunteers is how do you best enrich them and equip them for what they are doing.

When it comes to children’s ministry, much of what we think about first is giving them resources on how to be better teacher, shepherds, large group communicators. We give them resources on how to deal with ADD, curriculum and leading a child to Christ. I wonder, though, if this is where we should be placing most of our effort and time. Now, I’m not saying that we stop teaching our volunteers how to best do their jobs. I’m just wondering if we should put most of our efforts elsewhere.

A few months ago I was challenged by something our senior pastor brought up at a staff meeting, and I’ve been thinking more about it recently. The issue is which ministry area brings us the most Kingdom impact? While I do believe that children’s ministry is important and essential, I am becoming more and more convinced that a strong adult ministry must exist in order for a church to grow. You need healthy and growing adults in order for any of the ministries at a church (children’s ministry included) to grow and be successful. Without healthy and growing adults who would be involved in the different ministry areas?

With that in mind, I’ve been wondering about how to best equip the volunteers God has entrusted to me. In years past, I have focused on growing my leaders in skill pertaining to children’s ministry each year. I would pick a theme for the year based on something having to do with growing in children’s ministry. This year, I am going to put most of my efforts in growing the children’s ministry volunteers spiritually. Starting in mid-October when we have our children’s ministry summit for all children’s ministry volunteers here, we are going to be going through 40 Days Living the Jesus Creed. Instead of 40 days, though, we are going to go through it a week at a time.

I am hoping to help all of us get a better handle on what it really means to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength” and to “love your neighbour as yourself.” Scot McKnight does an amazing job bringing what he calls The Jesus Creed throughout scriptures showing how it permeates how God wants us to live and what that means. I am hoping for this to be a powerful experience for the children’s ministry volunteers. We’ll see how it goes!

What do you do in order to pour into the spiritual growth of your volunteers?

my subculture – your subculture, originally uploaded by extranoise.

A month ago I finally watched the 2008 Kids’ Choice Awards from Nickelodeon. Yes, I know… it was on a while ago… why hadn’t I seen it already… Well, it hadn’t been aired in Canada, so it took a while before seeing it. ANYWAY… I watched award after award being accepted. Then Miley Cyrus (a.k.a. Hannah Montana) received the award for Favourite Female Singer and Favourite Female TV Actress. She got up and thanked her “Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ” for her awards. Now, there is nothing wrong with doing that, but I wonder… why make a point of it? It’s almost as if she HAD to say it in order to legitimize her standing in the I’m-a-Christian club.

OK, maybe I’m being harsh. But anyone can say something like that. Anyone can say they are a Christian. What’s even worse than saying something like that when accepting an award is the response by the evangelical community. “Oh look! Hannah Montana is a Christian! It’s OK now to watch the TV show and buy all her CD’s!” We jump up and down and celebrate “yet another Christian shining their light in evil Hollywood.” We celebrate that she is part of the club… That is until she messes up. Then she’s thrown out of the Christian club. “Oh, we don’t let our kids watch that show. Can you believe what she did? <Gasp!> And her father… and he says he’s a Christian. Tsk, tsk, tsk…”

What are we doing?!?

On top of that we have Christian-ized everything from video upload websites to popular video games. You may wonder what’s the harm in doing stuff like that. Don’t we want to have “Christian alternatives” to “what’s out in the world?” I don’t know anymore. We are so busy creating a subculture called evangelical Christianity that we get obsessed with sanitizing everything so that it is acceptable rather than going out and engaging our communities and building relationships with those outside a relationship with God. Then we pass that on to our children.

I still remember the episode of Kid Nation. It was episode 4 entitled “Bless Us and Keep us Safe.” If you never watched Kid Nation, it was a show which aired in the Fall of 2007 that put a group of kids in a New Mexico ghost town to see if they could run a town without the influence of adults. It did have it’s own set of controversy surrounding the conditions there. Anyway, the kids quickly separated into their different belief camps. The most “vocal” kids were the Christian kids. I wish I could say that I was proud of this, but most of what came from those kids were statements like: “Christians Rule!” and “Christians are Better!”

These Christian kids polarized themselves into a group and ostracized the others simply because they had different belief systems. It was completely foreign to these kids to be respectful of other beliefs while holding onto their own. At the end of the episode, many of the Christian kids did finally enter into conversations about faith or lack thereof. The sad thing is… most of those kids became confused about their Christian beliefs.

Many of us would say: Well, the reason those kids got confused is because they weren’t given enough truth. They weren’t taught apologetics. They didn’t know enough Bible stories. They weren’t taught to be deep in their spiritual walk.

I would disagree.

When Jesus was asked which was the greatest commandment, he answered, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.”

We spend so much time on the first commandment that Jesus talked about. That is great. We should emphasize loving God. We should be teaching children out of the Bible. They should be learning verses. But we miss out on the second commandment Jesus talked about. The extent to which we teach children to “Love your neighbor as yourself” is to make sure we don’t hit and be helpful. We forget to teach children to treat ALL people with respect. We forget to teach children that just because someone else has a different belief system or has made different lifestyle choices doesn’t mean we treat them with contempt or avoid them or treat them as if we will win some cool supernatural prize if we convert them.

I think we do a disservice to the Gospel (which is more than about getting to heaven but has more to do with being a part of the transformational work God wants to do in the lives of people) by perpetuating a subculture of Christianity… a brand of Christianity that tries to insulate itself from the world and at the same time tries to make the world conform to its set of rules.

Instead of spending money on Christian t-shirts (which simply serve to identify you to other Christians as a fellow club member), sponsor a child who is in a marginalized part of the world. Instead of watching hours on end of Christian TV and movies, go outside and meet your neighbours.

A while back, the phrase WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) was popularized. It continues to be another one of those Christian subculture things. If we were to truly seek out the answer to that questions, I think many of us would be surprised and even shocked. Jesus spent his time with unpolished fishermen who probably didn’t use the best of language, embezzlers who threw some wild parties… hey, he even supplied some really good wine at a party where many of the people were already buzzed.

Now, I’m not saying that we should all go out and party it up. What I am saying, though, is that we need to engage our communities… the people in our neighbourhoods. We need to teach our kids not to be afraid of being contaminated. We need to teach our children grace. We need to teach our children how to love the Lord with all their hearts, souls, minds, and strength AND how to truly love ALL our neighbours as we love ourselves.

In the end, it’s not about who is right and who is wrong. It is about broken images of God reaching out to other broken images of God and pointing them the one who can make them whole again. We can’t do that from the inside of a clubhouse.