The answer to this question is whoever can do the best job. Sometimes it is the pastor. Often pastors have a difficult time relating to children. Here is a video that illustrates that a congregation can find the best person to deliver a children’s message in the most unsuspected places. Enjoy! It’s a gem!
Our Ambassadors study web sites as we prepare for visits. A few have snappy web sites or adequate, static sites. Some have barely functioning web sites. A surprising number have no internet presence whatsoever.
Now and then we come across a web site that features a Pastor’s Blog. This raises our interest. Blogging is a passion of 2×2’s. We have come to expect disappointment. The blogs are often no more than a few posts, months apart, and the most recent post is often years old. The blog posts tend to be personal musings aimed at the congregation’s existing community. No wonder they ran out of steam!
Ministry opportunity is being lost! Pastors should blog. Congregations should blog. Here’s why:
There is power and momentum in blogging. It takes work, but it is work that can bear fruit and multiply.
As we researched the topic of Children in Worship we looked online for training or seminary programs specializing in chlldren’s ministry. We wanted to see what they had to offer on this topic.
We went to search engines and plugged in various combinations of key words — words like “seminary training for children’s ministry.” We found practically nothing — only a handful of seminars offered by independent religious trainers.
The closest matches were for youth ministers. Some denominations had a category called Children, Youth and Family Ministry.
It would appear that ministry to children is uncharted territory as a discipline of ministry.
Preaching to children does not appear to be an emphasis of theological training. We found a salary study that revealed that Associates in Ministry were sometimes filling this role. Salary packages were fairly low and have dropped in recent years.
Congregations do not tend to budget for Children’s Ministry. As congregations grow, the typical progression of staff development begins with a solo pastor and adding a visitation pastor (most likely concentrating on the elderly), and then adding an associate pastor who may double as youth pastor. The allocation of resources for children’s ministries is almost nonexistent.
The Church has traditionally relied on volunteers to provide leadership for teaching children. This approach is challenged by modern lifestyles — working parents and divorced parents all have less ability to commit their weekends. The volunteer pool is shallow. The need is greater than ever.
Small churches are the most challenged. Many cannot afford one full-time pastor much less pastors emphasizing children’s ministry. Any specialized help for children’s ministry is an unrealistic goal. Yet this is precisely the area of ministry small churches need to emphasize. Often, we do not get much encouragement from our denominations. They see a congregation with aging members and they determine that what these congregations need is a part-time pastor to tend to the needs of the elderly. They even have a term for it — caretaker ministries. While the needs of the aging must not be neglected, failure to concentrate on the potential of a congregation to reach young people in their neighborhoods is squandering opportunity.
The times are crying for a new approach to neighborhood ministry, but we seem to be locked into the mindset that teaching children should be the realm of volunteers and any programming should be run on shoestring budgets (in other words $0).
2×2 developed a program pioneering ministry to answer this need in aging congregations. We focused on beginning with summer outreach — the Vacation Bible School (www.vbsaid.com). This would be a short-term investment, something any church could try without fear of not being able to support it long-term.
VBSaid would bring a team of trained leaders to small congregations to lead a summer program and train congregational members to continue the programming, spending several months with each church to recruit teachers, students, provide training, run a two-week program, and work with each church to plan followup programming. The proposed cost was modest for the type of help offered — about $5000 per church. Calling a pastor dedicated to this type of work would cost at least $30,000.
Our first advertising for this program last summer drew responses from several congregations. None wanted to fund it. And so these congregations went another year without reaching out to the young.
We suspect that the Church is getting what it is willing to pay for. Sunday Schools are failing, VBS programs are being abandoned. Educational efforts are being fit into 40 minutes during worship. Congregations barely 100 years old are aging themselves out of existence without a viable plan to reach new generations with the Good News.
It is engrained in our thinking that successful mission must be done the way it was done for years. We are more willing to accept congregations failing than to find solutions. Nevertheless, 2×2 will continue to explore solutions. We invite your observations.
The need for worship is innate. The sense that we are part of something bigger than ourselves dates to Adam and Eve.
Children have this sense of wonder which is at the core of spirituality. Everything in life is big and powerful. The adults in their lives must teach them to encounter and embrace their sense of wonder. An alternative is to allow them to grow into adulthood living in fear and confusion about all things beyond their control.
Secular culture is geared to avoiding this, filling every waking minute with some form of self-gratifying, self-improving or money-making activity. Such activities have value, no doubt, but it is easy to be swept up in the “importance” of all this activity.
If a child’s natural sense of awe is not nurtured from their earliest years, it will be replaced in their youth with “busy-ness” that is easier to process emotionally. The easy temptation is to replace what is difficult to understand with activities in which rewards are tangible and immediate. There are so many activities to choose from. You win the soccer game and feel good; you lose and feel bad and direct your attention to winning next time. There is always that hope of bringing home a trophy.
Religion is more complex — but then so is life!
Often it takes a catastrophe — personal or national — to bring us to our knees. If our children have no experience in seeking spiritual help, they will be lost when crises occur.
In our Ambassador visits we have been surprised at the number of churches that dismiss children from worship before the scriptures are read (a large majority). One pastor announced that the children may now leave to attend age-appropriate activities. With the very few number of tweens and teens we encounter in church, we wonder if this approach is helpful in building Christian community.
When we dismiss children from worship, we are teaching them to expect the focus to be on them. At what age should that stop? Furthermore, worship becomes “something adults do.” Why do we treat worship as if it were an R-rated movie?
We also wonder how this practice affects the worshiping community as adults forsake worship to tend to the children. One church we visited emptied by half ten minutes into the service. A good number of mothers followed the children out of the sanctuary.
Worship has no age requirements.
There is something very special about time spent in worship with your children. It can be frustrating at first, as they squirm and fuss, but children soon learn that worship is time when the focus is not on them. They come to first accept this and later to participate. For this transition to take place, they must be present!
Parents should value the chance to sit with their children, perhaps with one in their laps and an arm across the shoulders of another. The opportunity for chldren to hear their parents voices raised in song, to see their fathers and mothers kneeling in silent prayer, or to hear the words of confession or prayer coming from their lips is invaluable to their own spiritual development. They will observe at first, just as a baby observes from its crib. But the day comes very quickly when they join in singing, prayer and understanding. Children in worship are learning to know their parents in a way they will encounter nowhere else. They are coming to know the family and presence of God.
Worship is exactly what so many parents seek — quality family time.
Today, December 1, we start our series of articles exploring Children in Worship. Let’s begin with how we teach our young people.
The Protestant Church has five traditional avenues of Christian Education. Roman Catholics and some Protestant churches add parochial schools to the mix.
Family Education
Martin Luther was a proponent for the family being the key educators. His Small Catechism was written to help parents with that important task.
Sunday School
Sunday Schools grew out of the Industrial Revolution. Churches saw that children working 12 hours a day Monday to Saturday had no opportunity for education. The movement began in England and spread to the United States and became a societal norm by the mid-1800s. Sunday School was such a strong force in the church that they often organized separately from sponsoring churches with their own leadership, budgets and even social events.
Vacation Bible School
Vacation Bible School had similar roots beginning in 1894, led by a school teacher who felt she did not have enough time to teach Bible during the school year.
Youth Ministry
A fourth component of most Church educational programs is some form of youth ministry. The history of Youth Ministry is more complicated. It also dates to the Industrial Revolution as an attempt to rein in young adults flocking to urban centers to work six days a week and live it up on Sunday. It matured into social and service organizations like the Epworth League and Luther League. These organizations became social mainstays for young people until marriage whether it be in a couple’s twenties or even thirties. In the mid-twentieth centuries the thrust shifted to teens and centered as much on fellowship as service or education.
Confirmation
Denominations have different ways of bringing their young people into full church membership. In the recent past, confirmation or catechetical classes often had a multi-year structure with even small churches confirming a dozen young people every year. These classes provided an intense look at the doctrines of the faith and mentored young people as they grew into church membership.
What we see in the church today are the remnants of these institutions. Things have changed dramatically and, although there may be congregations where elements of the above remain healthy, by and large, every avenue of Christian education faces challenges. This affects worship.
Education affects worship. Without education, both children and adults understand less about what a church service is all about. It is easy to drift away when a church service is a foreign language.
The church today needs to examine the realities of today’s world and find ways to re-introduce worship to people who have little background in what worship means.