Elemental Children's Ministry

(picture originally uploaded to Flickr by eye2eye)

A month ago, ChurchRelevance.com had a post that quoted this article about a book recently put out by Ken Ham from Answers in Genesis. Then a few weeks later Anthony Prince tweeted this in relation to the ChurchRelevance.com post:

Then, most recently Scot McKnight posted his brief observations on the declining numbers of churches doing Sunday School.

I’ve been meaning to post my thoughts about the original article that ChurchRelevance.com references for a while. So, a month later, here it is!

I’m always skeptical when I hear about the downfall of the church or how major sections of the church are failing or that we are losing a whole generation. I’m not skeptical of the information. I know that the numbers show less people going to church, less people opting to follow Christ, less people seeing the importance of giving control of one’s life to God. What I am skeptical of are the “solutions” to this phenomenon as well as the interpretations of the data. (Yes, I know that saying that makes me sound like I am smarter than those people who do the polling thing for a living… I’m not… I simply am trying to look at the data from a different lens.)

Many of the solutions say something like this:

We have a problem! People are leaving church or questioning God or not following Christ!

We are supposed to be creating disciples!

We’ve become lax in how we create disciples! We’ve let too much slide in our programming/Sunday School/etc.

We need to go back and do what we did but even better! That will solve the problem!

OK, I’ve oversimplified the thought process but it still comes out the same in the end: We need to go back to how it was in the past when people loved going to church and didn’t walk away from God and do that better. Or another variation would be: We need to find out what we did right then and update/spruce it up/make it more relevant and that will fix our problem.

It doesn’t matter how you mix it up… you are still doing more of the same and expecting a different result than what we currently have.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. -Albert Einstein

I know there are those out there trying to pave a new road to how discipleship is done and what that means. When I say that I don’t mean we shape scripture to fit the current culture. What I am saying, though, is that how we communicate scripture and how we foster an urgency in people to become disciples of Christ–those who “hear the music of God” (a la Larry Crabb) and help others to hear it as well–needs to change so that our current culture can hear and understand us.

What would happen if, instead of telling children what to believe, we help them discover God’s truths as we explore God’s redemptive love story throughout all of Scripture?
What would happen if we helped children to see that we were created to live in grace-filled community realizing that we all are imperfect/broken images of God in need of the Spirit to continually work on us?
What would happen if we helped children realize that being a Christ follower didn’t mean you turn a blind eye to all that is wrong in the world because “it’s all going to burn anyway” but means you can bring tastes of eternity… tastes of God’s Kingdom… to earth now by being an agent of positive change?
What if we allowed children to be participants in faith formation rather than passive consumers sitting in their seats?

We need to look at the sobering statistics facing the church today and see them not as the end of an age but an opportunity for the dawning of a new one. We don’t need more of the same… only better. We need something different, we need something new… yes, informed by our past but something new nonetheless.

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