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Religious Education

Transform Your Church: Make Like a Preschooler


Where do we look for answers?Preschoolers may be your most valuable church members.

Preschoolers understand God. It comes naturally to them. A preschooler’s faith is pure. So much of religion involves the ability to embrace the imaginary, to befriend the unseen, to live day to day, trusting that all needs will be supplied.

All of this faith is wrapped up in the ability to ask questions. Simple questions. Obvious questions. Surprising questions. Questions for which adults are embarrassed to admit they don’t have sure answers.

By the time we drop out of Sunday School — and these days that’s at about age 10 — we like to think we have the answers. From that point on we avoid forums that might reveal our shortcomings. This has two results: we either become inactive or we begin to follow blindly. Who or what we follow can determine an entire congregation’s success or failure.

Some congregations look to their pastors for answers and accept decisions. This does not create healthy Christian community. Pastors change. Viewpoints change. Circumstances change. Today these changes shift with jackrabbit speed and unpredictability. Congregations must be able to ask and answer questions independently. This is a trait that must be nurtured.

How? Someone has to start — by asking questions!

Transformational change will not occur without fostering this congregational habit. Emulate your preschoolers.

There are six types of questions.

  1. Questions that clarify
    What are we asking? Why do we believe this?
    How does this relate to our faith or our lives?
  2. Questions that challenge assumptions
    Are we sure our church wants to grow? Are we ready for growth?
    What alternatives are there to the course we are about to take?
    Is this really what we want? Is this good for us?
  3. Questions that look for reasons and evidence
    Why are we considering this?
    What brought us to this discussion?
    Has this path been followed before? With what results?
  4. Questions that shift viewpoints
    Is this the only way to look at this issue?
    How would someone with a different background view this discussion?
    What would our foreparents think? What will our children think?
    Ask, why do we think this is a good idea? Is this even necessary?
    Play “devil’s advocate.”
  5. Questions that look for implications and consequences
    Let’s say we took the actions we are proposing.
    What good or bad will come of this?
    How will it affect us? How will it affect others? How will it affect the future?
    Are the potential outcomes in line with our beliefs and desires?
  6. Questions about the question
    What is the point of this discussion?
    Why are we asking these questions?
    What are the real issues behind the questions?
    Is this something we should be considering?
    Is this important? Is this necessary?
photo credit: HikingArtist.com via photo pin cc
11 May 2012

Ideas for Object Lessons for Adults

The most popular all time post on 2×2’s web site is a short article published last fall after Redeemer’s Ambassadors visited a small congregation in Fort Washington, Pa. We wrote about the pastor ending the service with a brown bag object lesson. An adult member of the congregation presented an object hidden in a brown bag and the pastor gave an impromptu sermonette about the object.

The feature was obviously popular with the congregation, almost all of whom were adults.

That little post gets search engine traffic every day!

We had seen this technique before—used with children who enjoyed the approach for the novelty but were not able to make the cognitive connections required in object lessons. Adults are better at abstract thinking — but we tend to limit the technique to children!

The challenge in developing object lessons for adults is to enhance the “sermon illustration”—the staple of any adult sermon. Objects for adults can be more complicated. But it’s still possible.

Next Sunday’s gospel is the “I am the vine. You are the branches” scripture.

The most obvious object is a vine and branch. Use two vines, one with a flourishing branch and one with a withered branch cut away. Vinca minor (periwinkle) is in bloom right now in Pennsylvania.

What other “adult” images would work? With adults, you don’t have to present the actual object. It helps, but adults can think abstractly. Here are some other “objects” that might illustrate the relationship Jesus describes.

  • Computer networks. Most adults know how it feels to be have your email disrupted.
  • Spinal chords. Once broken the limbs are paralyzed.
  • Family trees. People who don’t know their family backgrounds or feel separated from family devote their lives to finding family connections. Perhaps you know a story to tell from your own experience. There was a story in the news this week about a boy who grew up not knowing his background and then saw his picture on an old milk carton from 30 years ago.
  • Have someone call you while you are starting the sermon, so you can pull out your cell phone. Have a short conversation, perhaps feigning embarrassment. Then tell the person that you are in church right now and invite the people to shout out to them. Talk about connectedness. Invite the congregation to pull out their cell phones and connect with someone right then and there. Point out that their presence in the sanctuary, God’s House, is connecting to whomever they may have called and the connection can reach all over the world. Message: Stay connected to the vine, but take the role of being a branch seriously.

There is a great website for children’s sermons — almost all of which include an object. (Redeemer and 2×2 were major contributors to this site before our doors were locked.) Use this site for research and apply the ideas to adult sensibilities. Check out the sermon submission collection in addition to their featured sermon ideas.

03 May 2012

5 Ways Social Media Will Change Your Church’s Life

If your congregation wisely chooses to invest time and passion in social media, be prepared for many things to change. We’re not talking about self-centered Facebook prattle; we’re talking about online interaction that looks outside your parish to the community and, by the nature of the internet, the world.

This may be the hardest thing for the Church to grasp. The internet connects individuals with the world. There is no intermediary. No church council, no pastor, no synod or its equivalent, no bishop, no national church can control congregational interconnectedness.

This means that congregation’s must be more mindful of  things which may have been neglected. While it is easy to reach the world, one mission of the individual Christian community will become more intense—the care and nurturing of individual Christians.

  1. Congregational Education is vital. A congregation must be confident in knowing who they are and what thy believe if they are to engage neighbors or the world in their mission. This has always been a focus of parish life, but educational components of many churches have been dropped in the last few decades. As long as the focus of congregational life was local, it didn’t seem to matter. This needs a remedy. Education must be intertwined with every activity.
  2. Social Awareness must be nurtured. You will begin to hear from Christians from places you never considered as being Christian. Congregations must understand, for instance, the challenges Christians face in Islamic nations, where Christians can be ostracized from their families or jailed. While freedom of religion is taken for granted by many Americans, some religions maintain cultural holds on their people even IN America.
  3. The Church needs to become attuned to the minute causes of community as well as the big picture. We live in an age where anyone can bring a cause to the public’s attention. Yellow ribbons, pink ribbons, donation cans, something-a-thons become very focused. Keeping up with them will be an ongoing mission challenge.
  4. Personal faith must be deepened. Savvy companies teach every employee that they are a representative of their company culture. The Church needs to foster the same sense of ownership among members. Every member reflects on the congregation. Congregations will want their members to be knowledgeable and engaged as representatives of their church.
  5. The biggest change is that many congregations will be able to rebound from survival mode and see themselves as important. Their interconnectedness will give them energy, resources and renewed purpose.
19 Mar 2012

Recognizing Jesus

Too bad none of the disciples were artists! They could have helped us all with one of the biggest questions of our faith. What did Jesus look like?

Biblical evidence is that Jesus looked like most people in Galilee and Judea. It took the kiss of Judas to help soldiers distinguish him from the others in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Artists over the centuries put their imaginations to work depicting Christ until the images began to look startlingly similar — however unlikely.

The earliest Christians didn’t seem to care about appearances. They had first-hand accounts of the disciples and apostles. The first depictions surviving today are from the 200s and 400s and are not very detailed. In fact, the depictions show Christ in action. His physical appearance is secondary to his works. They are like cartoons in simplicity.

The Eastern Church and its emphasis on icons in worship began to concentrate on the details of Christ’s appearance. Although they are stiff and representative, they are also beautiful, designed to be contemplated.

The Western church developed a genre of story-telling and teaching in church adornment and architecture that took the Eastern representations and made them breathe with realistic features in familiar biblical settings. The depictions were stereotypical and stiff in the Middle Ages but became more realistic with the rise of humanism. Jesus became easily recognized with features recognized to us today.

Modern people still want to know what Jesus looked like. We are accustomed to treasuring photographs, which is a very new historical phenomenon — not even 200 years old.

Our curiosity is insatiable. Recently anthropologists decided to answer this question once and for all. They used forensic methods to analyze excavated skulls to rebuild the face of the typical Jewish male who lived in Israel in the era that was unknowingly passing from BC to AD.

Now we know!

Jesus looked like the typical Jewish male of 2000 years ago.

Jesus looks like us today.

Jesus will look like our descendants to the thousandth generation.

But does it matter? Jesus asks us to see him in each other. Treat others well and you will be honoring me, he tells us.

No matter who takes the brush or chisel in hand, we don’t have trouble recognizing Jesus in art. It’s harder to see him in each other!

12 Mar 2012

Generation Y’s View of Religion

If you think technology will not affect religion, think again.

Back to School night at my son’s school was always an education. He is a college man now, but I remember the stark contrast to my own schooling I found when I entered his classroom every fall.

Today, very few classrooms are arranged with rows of desks and chairs facing a teacher’s desk and blackboard. In grade school the desks are clumped in little communities. Lessons are taught with the children sitting with their teachers on the floor. Furniture becomes more meaningful in older grades but is usually arranged in circles. A teacher’s desk is off in an obscure corner. Class discussions are more like an afternoon at Arthur’s Roundtable than a lecture hall. Assignments are often group projects with individuals responsible for the success of classmates.

Smartboards or laptops are the hub and spokes of the learning circle. The conversation can be broadened beyond the walls of the school with an effortless Skype or internet connection. Teachers are facilitators of learning more than relaters of factual information. This is the world our young people know five days a week.

Then, with decreasing frequency, they go to church on Sunday.

They encounter a service or liturgy with its roots in ancient times. If their family has brought them to church from their cradle days this is not a shock. To the uninitiated this is an aberration. Young people are asked to stand and sit and stand and sit and no one tells them why anymore. They settle back for a 20+-minute sermon when they’ve never before listened to any one person talk for more than five minutes.

The current coming-of-age generation (Generation Y) is not accustomed to the Church’s standard model for communicating the Gospel. They have not experienced it.

Faced with this as the only option for being part of religion, they find it easy — to use the term of the internet — to opt out.

How is the Church going to answer this new reality? We have some ideas. We are sure you do, too!

We will start exploring this topic this week. — Administrator, Judy Gotwald

photo credit: juicyrai via photopin cc

04 Mar 2012