Elemental Children's Ministry

(photo originally uploaded to Flickr by Sherlock77 (James))

Quick! What picture do you conjure up in your mind when you hear the word “evangelism?” Quick! Don’t think about it too much. Just describe the picture. Did it?

Here’s what I picture most of the time: walking up and down the streets of an urban area, approaching people who seem to not be doing anything, getting into a conversation with them and steering that conversation into questions about God and heaven and Jesus and asking them if they would like to pray a prayer with me. (Thank you, EE!)

For those of us who’ve been in traditional evangelical churches for a while, I’m sure your pictures are similar to mine.

A little while back I posted my reflections on Michael Spencer’s reaction to evangelism as a potential form of child abuse. You can go back and read the post if you missed it or want to relive the experience. The gist of my post was this:

“The key, though, is to help connect children and families to Christ and allowing the Holy Spirit to do the work of conversion. It’s more than just praying a prayer, raising a hand or coming to the altar. It’s about life transformation, and that is something that can’t be manufactured or manipulated into existence.”

A couple of days ago, I ran into this post from Mark Batterson. He had his congregation pray this prayer with him at their weekend services:

“Lord, I pray for an opportunity to share my faith with someone in some way. It’s not up to me to decide who or when or where. But I know why. Because you love them and want a relationship with them. So Lord, surprise me with opportunities to share my faith.

Forgive me for trying to do your job for you. You are the one who convicts of sin. You are the one who draws to Christ. But help me do my part as salt and light. Help me see those opportunities to react compassionately or listen patiently or speak kindly. Through word and deed, help me plant seeds of love in the lives of others. Give me boldness when it’s time to speak. Give me restraint when it’s time to listen. Give me words to say. But more importantly, give me ears to hear.

Lord, help me be sensitive to the prompting of your Holy Spirit so I can see the divine appointments you send my way. Help me not to be afraid of questions I cannot answer. Help me not to be afraid of people’s reactions or rejections.

Lord, help me preach the gospel every day, when necessary, with words.

In Jesus name, amen!”

What an awesome prayer for each of us to pray. Evangelism isn’t about what we do or say. It’s more about living our lives as Christ followers 24/7 and allowing the Holy Spirit to guide what we say and do. If that means we tell someone about Jesus, then so be it. If it means we keep our mouth shut, then so be it. If it means we simply listen and be a friend to someone who needs one, then so be it. It is not our job to do the converting. It’s the Holy Spirit’s job. We need to learn to work with him. For some of us that means taking a step back. For more and more of us, it means getting over our fears and hangups and taking a step forward.

It’s always fun to buy promotional products! Maybe it’s just me, but I love getting stuff with the children’s ministry logo on it.

Last year for our day camp and summer camp, I ordered water bottles because it can get hot, and we wanted to help the kids stay hydrated. So I ordered a bunch of bottles with the Redwood Kids logo on it.

This year I had to order some new ones because of all the negative press plastic nalgene-type bottles have been getting. I ordered aluminum ones.

Don’t they look cool? I thought so!

I also ordered some reusable shopping bags with the Redwood Kids logo on them, too! (You can thank my pastoral apprentice for modeling the bag for us.)

I don’t know about you, but stores here are phasing out plastic bags and encouraging people to bring in their own bags. I thought it would be great for people in our church to be using these bags as they grocery shop. They support the children’s ministry financially by buying a bag and advertise for us as well!

Buying stuff like this, though, can be confusing and daunting. There are soooo many companies and options out there. (Last year, I told you all about the company I use for ordering T-shirts: Terry’s Tees, who by the way is doing T-shirts for our camp again this year.) If you don’t already have a place that you purchase promotional items from, let me suggest you connect with Steve Rydin at True Summit Promotions. Steve and I were on staff together a few years back at a church in Oregon. Steve now lives in Colorado and helps organizations with their promotional item needs. He’s a great guy and will help you find what you need. Tell him Henry sent you!

(picture originally uploaded to Flickr by Daniel Greene)

I’ve began my journey with Kids’ Camps when I was 15 years old as a cabin leader for a bunch of Grade 2 kids. If you’ve never had to talk a kid out of being homesick, then you are missing out! Over the years I’ve been a cabin leader, activities coordinator, program director, assistant camp director, camp director, camp speaker… I’ve even written a couple of camp curriculums (Amazing Race and Faith Factor).

I love camp! Even Seth Godin loves camp!

I know that everyone has their opinions on whether or not to do camps. I think that camp can be a very important part in the spiritual journey of a child. There’s just something about creating an environment that is centered around a child discovering and encountering God through various activities, games and worship times that is removed from everyday life for a period of time where God decides to show up and uniquely touch the life of kids. I’ve heard story upon story over the years of kids who have taken that step to follow Christ while at camp or heard God’s call on their lives to change their world or understood for the first time that they are wonderful, unique, and loved by the creator of the universe.

Can these experiences happen outside of a camp setting? I’m sure they can, but there is something about camp that can’t be duplicated anywhere else. Seth Godin touched a little on it in his post about summer camp. At camp, you create a unique and close-knit tribe that experiences a certain aspect of life together. When community like that happens within the context of seeking out God for life change, I believe it is one of those times where space and receptivity is created for the Holy Spirit to come in and transform lives radically.

Can camp be a hindrance to spiritual growth? Yes. Especially if the camp experience is all about the camp experience. If what God does in the lives of kids at camp is not connected to our everyday lives and what it means when we leave camp, then camp simply becomes an isolated experience with no bearing on the rest of life. If what happens at camp, though, is connected to life outside of camp, then I believe camp can be one of those regular times kids can get away from the distractions of everyday life to connect with God in ways he is unable to in the midst of homework, sports, music lessons, iPods, TV shows, video games, shopping, etc.

Have you been to camp? What experiences have you had a camp that affected your life?

Do you do a camp or send your kids to camp? Why or why not?

This is Zeke. He’s our new dog. He’s a chow. He’s eight weeks old.

This past week has been a crash course education in dog training. Everthing from housebreaking to where to sleep to teaching him that our 2 and 4 year olds are not puppies, too. One thing that all the books and websites keep telling us is that regardless of the reputation of the breed, the most important indicator of future temperament is right training in the first 16 or so weeks of life.

You can probably already see where I’m going with this: dog training is a lot like training a child! Especially when it comes to spiritual training. Most of us can quote the verse from Proverbs: “Train up a child in the way he should go, Even when he is old he will not depart from it.” Parents quote it. Pastors quote it. Well-meaning friends quote it.

If this were true, then I wouldn’t hear stories from God-fearing parents whose children have decided to not follow Christ.

You see, training a dog is NOTHING like helping a child discover who God is and guiding them to experiencing a life transforming decision to follow Christ.

We read verses like Proverbs 22:6 and interpret them as prescriptive sayings. We think that if we can just get the right information into children… train them… by teaching them the right stories, the right verses and the right rules then that somehow guarantees that a child will serve God… eventually.

Nonthing we do can guarantee that a child will serve God. The Holy Spirit is the one who brings life transformation. Does that mean that what we do as chidren’s ministers means nothing? Of course not! We are called to plant and water. It is our job to plant the seeds of discovery within children that provide an opportunity for the Holy Spirit to work. We need to create space for the Holy Spirit to work.

So the obvious question is, “How do we do this?” There’s the rub! (Why I just used a very old and outdated expression… I don’t know.) If someone could just answer that deceptively simple question, then a book could be written and all problems would be solved! The even bigger rub is that there are hundreds of books just as many answers to that question. We want the easy answer, the magic pill, the one-size-fits-all solution to passing on faith to kids. The problem is that there is no easy answer. Yes, there are principles to take into account, but how those principles get played out in each context will be different. It takes time and effort and intentionality to work out that answer for each family in each church in each community. Here at Elemental Children’s Ministry we are working through a framework to approach the spiritual formation of children from a missional perspective. The real work comes in taking those principles and fleshing them out for our specific contexts.

What are your thoughts?

What are you already doing when it comes to the spiritual formation of children? And, more importantly, why?

(photo originally uploaded to Flickr by sean drellinger)

As I continue to explore children’s ministry in a missional paradigm, I wanted to throw out one more thing before fleshing out some of the ideas I’ve put out in this series.

As I’ve read and talked with and seen different incarnations of what emerging missional ministry might look like in a local church context, I’ve discovered some common values that would be important in children’s ministry. Now these values do show up all over the place whether “missional” or not. But I think these four values are key to a missional praxis of children’s ministry, which I will finally be fleshing out in future posts in this series.

The values are:

• Discovery
  Help children to discover who God is and how to best follow Jesus.
• Experience
  Help children to experience God’s love for them by connecting them to a dynamic relation with him.
• Action-Oriented
  Help children to live out what it means to love your neighbor as yourself missionally by providing a variety of ways they can change their community, country and world now. This includes reaching out in issues of justice and poverty locally and globally (I hate using the word glocal :) )
• Community
  Help children to find where and how they connect into their community of faith and the greater Church community.

Again, these aren’t values exclusive to a missional paradigm but ones I think are important to a third culture way of approaching children’s ministry.

What are your thoughts on these values as related to a missional paradigm of children’s ministry?

What would you subsititue, change or add to the list?

How would you “flesh out” these values to reflect a missional mindset?

If my 4- and 7-year-old daughters are any indication of what many little girls are like, they will want to get this plastic jewel-encrusted, tiara-bearing devotional Bible written by Sheila Walsh and published by Thomas Nelson.

“Every girl is a princess, the daughter of a King… the greatest King who created and rules over everything.”

This sentence from the Introduction for Parents sums up the purpose of the God’s Little Princess Devotional Bible, which seems to be a follow up to the Gigi, God’s Little Princess stories also by Sheila Walsh. The devotional Bible has selected passages from the Internation Children’s Bible followed by a number of features including Bible verse memorization, tips on being a beautiful person, highlights of “princesses” in the Bible, dramas, ways to worship God, etc. The Bible also features illustrations by Meredith Johnson from the Gigi stories (which bear an uncanny resemblance to Fancy Nancy).

While I appreciate the thought behind this devotional Bible, I was confused as to the age group this was targeted to. The illustrations would suggest that children ages 4-7 would want this devotional, but as you read through it you quickly find that the writing is more geares for a 10-year-old. In addition to that, a parent would have to have grown up in a conservative evangelical church to know any of the lyrics or tunes to the songs in many of the activities. This would definitely be a frustrating book for parents who are new Christians to use with their daughters.

I wish I could recommend this devotional because the idea is great and it looks cute. Unfortunately, this devotional needed the help of people trained in child spiritual development and education to edit and revise the the written features so they were age appropriate and aware of families who may be new to following Christ.

I recently switched hosting companies for Elemental Children’s Ministry because my previous hosting plan was expiring, and they had raised their fee substantially. I switched over to Dreamhost on a recommendation from reading John Saddinton’s blog over at Human3rror.com.

Switching was relatively easy when I got all my files over. I did most of the transferring manually (Google is great for finding directions to do that). Otherwise, I’m sure I could’ve worked with tech support to get stuff moved over.

I discovered something really cool about Dreamhost yesterday that I’m sure is true of other hosting companies. Once you pay for a hosting account, you can host an unlimited number of domains on it. That means you can have multiple blogs or sites on multiple domains by paying for one hosting account! Now that may not mean much to some, but if you own multiple domains and/or have multiple blogs, this is really nice. (I’m probably sounding like a newbie.)

Now, the other kicker is the price. If you sign up for a year, the regular price is $119.40, which might seem like a lot. They do a number of sales and promotions, though, throughout the year so I was able to sign up at a HUGE discount and ended up paying about $10 for the year. You can keep an eye on their site for other sales, or you can sign up or transfer now for $25 for the year by using discount code elementalcm when you sign up or you can click here.

For those of you who are tech savvy, there is a lot you can control and customize. For those of you who aren’t they try and make it easy for you, too. They also have an extensive set of articles to help you figure things out. Dreamhost isn’t a perfect hosting company, but hey for $25 for the year (which I believe includes one free domain) with unlimited storage… Now, you might not be able to host a site that gets hundreds of thousands of hits per day, but for things like children’s ministry blogs and such it works.

What are you waiting for? Start a blog! Switch over! Or not…

BTW, if you do click over from one of the links here, the discount only works on 1 year prepaid. It has the full price listed, but when you go to checkout, it should show the discount. If all else fails, just enter elementalcm in the discount code section before you checkout.

(photo originally uploaded to Flickr by Nick Konings)

Whether your realize it or not, everything you believe, everything you do, everything that defines who you are is based on a story that you tell yourself. You may or may not be aware of that story. Most of us aren’t. You inherited that story, most likely when you were a child. Some of us have refined those stories over time or completely rewritten that story or received a new one from someone else.

Am I losing you yet?

What I’m talking about is something called a metanarrative.

A friend of mine, Shah Afshar, recently wrote a post on metanarrative. Here is the definition he had:

“A metanarrative can include any grand, all-encompassing story, classic text, or archetypal (original pattern or model) account of the historical record. They can also provide a framework upon which an individual’s own experiences and thoughts may be ordered. These grand, all-encompassing stories are typically characterized by some form of ‘transcendent and universal truth’ in addition to an evolutionary tale of human existence (a story with a beginning, middle and an end).”

Now, if your eyes haven’t completely glossed over, and you are still reading this, you are probably wondering what does this all have to do with Jon and Kate and their announcement that they are getting a divorce (sorry for spoiling it if you didn’t watch last night’s show). I’ll get to that soon enough. First, I want to share more of what my friend Shah shared on his blog post. He talks about a young man who grew up in a Christian home and went to Bible school to become a pastor, got married and then was divorced 5 years later. He asked the question,

“‘…if my faith, obedience, dedication and spirituality were not enough to keep my marriage together, what else could all the “Christian experts” have been withholding from me?’

It was Tom’s last question that gripped my heart the most. A question that I never asked till I was well in my late 40’s, over 30 years after becoming a follower of Christ. A question that today Christians younger than my own children are asking me over and over again. How did we, evangelical Christians, come to the conclusion that our faith, obedience and spirituality should guarantee us of a life void of pain and failure? Of course, the preacher from the pulpit and the televangelist on TV are quick to point to the Bible. But I believe the answer lies in understanding the word metanarrative.”

Shah goes on to define modernism, postmodernism and metanarrative. He then asks this question:

“Do we, Christians, have our own metanarratives, or as I like to put it, ‘one size fits all stories’? Do we insist that all the stories in the Bible are universal and if something was promised or worked for Abraham, Jabez or David should work for all Christians?”

After giving a personal example of how he was told not to complain about surgery pain because Joseph didn’t complain when he was in prison and talking a bit about Bruce Wilkinson and his well-know book The Prayer of Jabez (read the entire post for more details), Shah makes these concluding remarks:

“To say that because God granted Jabez’s wish, He desires the same for everyone who prays the prayer, is as diluted and misguided as saying, ‘…rational thought, allied to scientific reasoning, would lead inevitably toward moral, social and ethical progress.’ To believe that is simplistic, naïve and denies the complexity and mysteriousness of the God we serve. But even more heart-wrenching is not realizing how much damage Christian metanarratives have done to the faith of Christians like my young friend, Tom, a man who was taught that his faith, obedience, dedication and spirituality should be enough to keep his marriage together. And, of course, the reason his marriage failed was because he wasn’t faithful, obedient or spiritual enough.”

I encourage you to read Shah’s entire post. After finishing the post, I said, “That’s it!” He so well articulated the “harm” that can be caused by traditional evangelical culture. Some people may thing that the word “harm” is a bit harsh, but if what is happening in churches all over North America with people leaving with no desire to return then I don’t think so. We’ve become so convinced that our traditional evangelical metanarratives are truth rather than looking to the source of Truth.

This is where Jon and Kate come in (had to tie them in! it’s news and it’s good for drawing search engine traffic!). There were so many reactions to their announcement to end the marriage yet keep on with the show. So many well-meaning people had their reasons for why they ended their marriage or what they should’ve done or how they could reconcile their marriage. Most of the reasons I read on Facebook, Twitter and blogs were over simplifications of how their marriage could’ve been saved. Marriage is complex, takes hard work, and add to that twins and sextuplets!! Who’s to say what would or wouldn’t have saved their marriage.

I think metanarrative is crucial in children’s ministry. We have the opportunity to help set up children with a metanarrative and is made up of more than simplistic rules or proverbs we need to live by. As children’s ministers, we have the opportunity to help children understand that there is a God out there who is crazy in love with them, has an amazing plan for their lives, is the creator of the universe and wants to use them to do some amazing things in the world. We also have the opportunity to help children understand that does not mean life is going to be easy or void of pain or successful in the eyes of people around us. What it does mean, though, is that we get to play a part in God’s plan of redemption of all of creation and that in and of itself is amazing.

• What metanarratives have governed your life?
• What kinds of metanarratives are you instilling in the lives of children you minister to?
• How are you equipping children to deal with a changing culture and the need to sometimes adapt our metanarratives without losing the Truth at the core of our metanarratives?
• How many of you want me to stop using the word metanarrative?