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Small Churches Can Reach Out to Unaccompanied Children

Our Ambassador visits have revealed some stereo-types of small churches. We heard some professional leaders referring to them mockingly as “old-folks homes.”

Offensive as this terminology is — some congregations are aging. Unfortunately, leadership mindset sees this as the end of ministry. Pastors adopt, sometimes with the encouragement of denominational leadership, a caretaker approach to serving. There are no plans for growing the church or any reason to look for mission opportunity. They are playing a waiting game.

It may be up to the laity to turn things around.

Our ambassadors have seen some small, aging churches making the transition to becoming welcoming places for families and children. They invariably have only supply pastors or part-time professional leadership. Imagine what might happen if the leadership saw this as a door opening for ministry.

Our own church made this transition and grew from a church of seniors to a church of young families.

Our transition began when we noticed a number of children returning week after week without parents. At first a couple of girls (about aged 10) came and sat in the front row. After a few weeks, they brought an older brother (about 12). Soon they started bringing younger children.

We weren’t prepared to deal with this. That’s not the way church works! Parents bring their children to Church and Sunday School.

Things have changed!

We have noticed some similarities in other churches we visited. The early focus of our visits was the urban church. In cities, children pass the church as they walk home from school. Curiosity brings them back. Yes, their parents should accompany them. But children are playing the cards they have been dealt. They may come from homes with only one over-taxed parent. The parent may know the children have gone to church and consider it baby-sitting, or the parent may be at work unaware of that their children have turned off the TV and wandered out on their own. In the worst case, the parents may not care. In that case, the church must not turn their backs on the children because they have arrived on their doorstep in an unconventional way. Small churches with aging memberships can be particularly attractive to children who are seeking.

Young children have some things in common with older folks. They are crossing paths in life. Children are dependent growing into independence and older folks are independent growing into dependency. Young children often like the attention of seniors who can understand them in a way their parents don’t. They have time for them when their parents are preoccupied. It is validating to seniors.

Congregations can see this as a nuisance that must curtailed, or they can see it as outreach coming to them.

There are good reasons to discourage unaccompanied children.

  • They do not contribute to the offering.
  • They do not behave.
  • They are lively, energetic and strong and may seem threatening to the frail.
  • They may be there only only for donuts at fellowship.
  • Raising them is the responsibility of the parents.

Or

  • They may, in their own ways, be seeking.
  • They may enjoy the music.
  • Older children (as young as 11 or 12) may have been left in charge of yournger siblings and are following an instinct to parent them.
  • They might might feel part of a family of God when their own family is dysfunctional.
  • Raising them is the responsibility of the community of God.

Here are some first steps to take when children start coming to church by themselves.

  • Make sure an adult sits nearby, perhaps in the pew behind them.
  • Teach the church service. Pastors can give a brief explanation as your worship moves along. The adult sitting near them can whisper in their ears. “We are now going to stand to honor the reading of the Gospel that tells us about the life of Jesus Christ.”
  • Engage the children in conversation. Find out where they live and who their parents are.
  • Plan to visit their homes with the pastor. You may be hitting a brick wall, but you may find a parent receptive to help. At the very least, the parents should know with whom their children spend Sunday mornings.
  • Pray for them. Assign each child to an adult as a prayer partner. Engage the children in the prayer if possible, but they don’t need to know you are praying for them!
06 Dec 2011

Who Should Deliver the Children’s Sermon?

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!

The story of Jonah from Corinth Baptist Church on Vimeo.

04 Dec 2011

6 Reasons for Pastors and Congregations to Blog


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:

  1. Blogging is team work. Maintaining and growing a blog is work that should be shared. Working together on developing a good congregational blog will help your members and leaders bond, build community, and find ministry and mission opportunities.
  2. Blogging provides direction. Blogging is a tool to help your congregation stay connected with the people you serve. Posting content several times a week is good lubrication to keep your ministry from getting rusty. You will be looking constantly for issues to address. You will meet new people and organizations. Who knows how this could impact your ministry?
  3. Blogging builds trust. Bloggers wear their hearts on their sleeves. Publishing daily in a forum where your thinking can be challenged as easily as applauded keeps your thinking grounded. Readers will notice, respect and trust that you have others’ interests at heart.
  4. Blogging helps you reach out. Blogs help seekers find you. This won’t happen with four posts a year though! You need to treat your blog with the same importance you treat the preparation of a sermon or worship service. It is likely that it will be read by many times the number of people who attend worship! (2×2 started our blog nine months ago. We now have 100-150 new readers every week!)
  5. Blogging expands your point of view. Blogs allow for interaction. Your readers can comment on the ideas you present. Commenters influence the dialogue. They may applaud your efforts; they may point you in a different direction. Good bloggers listen and respond to all legitimate comments whether they agree or not.
  6. Blogging returns us to Christ’s approach to outreach. Congregations often exist with a fairly narrow focus on the world, fashioning ministries around tradition and doctrine. Outreach efforts often focus on trying to find people who fit into the community culture as it already exists, with thinking that mirrors their own. In contrast, Christ’s approach was to build upon encounters with the least likely prospects. With disciples grumbling in the background, Christ approached lepers, the possessed, children, women, criminals, rulers, church authorities and outcasts.

There is power and momentum in blogging. It takes work, but it is work that can  bear fruit and multiply.

04 Dec 2011

Worship with Children Is Quality Family Time

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.

02 Dec 2011

Preparing Young Christians for Church Life Today

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.

  • Families live in increasingly secular worlds.
  • Sunday Schools struggle with sporadic attendance and diminishing supply of teachers.
  • Vacation Bible Schools have retooled to teach only the youngest children with few teachers willing to give more than a five days of their summer to leadership.
  • Fewer youth participate in church life. Youth programs seem to be struggling to identify their purpose and structure.
  • Many congregations combine forces for confirmation and still have only a few young people. Confirmation programs which once entailed two or three years of study are often weeks long today. Consequently, confirmands enter church life less prepared for leadership. But at least they have some training. Far more young adults have none!

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.

01 Dec 2011

Can Hierarchical Churches Survive?

The Lutheran Experience

In the Church there are two types of churchwide structure — congregational polity in which congregations maintain rights to manage their own affairs and property and hierarchical in which an umbrella leadership has rights to manage outpost ministries. Denominations tend to be one or the other but some find themselves on the fence. They started out as one or the other but have drifted in practice. Confusion has resulted in some cases. Major legal battles have resulted in others.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (2×2’s roots) is a denomination formed in the 1980s by a merger of three Lutheran bodies. At the time of the merger, the polity was clear. Congregations owned and controlled their own property. Laity and clergy were equal partners in ministry. Synods existed to serve, not manage.

Leaders in predecessor bodies were called presidents. The new body decided to change the name to “bishop” for only one reason — to boost status in ecumenical dialog among denominations that were more familiar with “bishops.” Only the name was to change. Their role in the church was to remain the same — a servant leader.

It was not long before our “presidents” began to assume the authority of “bishops” in other denominations. Clergy and laity have come to accept the change. The further removed they become from the memory of true Lutheran polity, the less is questioned. The Lutheran church today finds itself in conflict. Governing documents become less recognized with each unchallenged infraction.

Leaders vs Managers

The resulting conflicts parallel similar challenges faced by the business world in the much discussed topic: Leaders vs Managers.

Congregations look to their denominational bodies for leadership but often what they get is attempts at management. Congregations are frustrated that people so distant from their situation are so ready to tell them how to do ministry in their own communities with their own resources. Pastors in the field  are forced to balance allegiance to bishop with responsibility to parish.

In severe cases, denominations are forcing closure against the will of the congregation and laying total claim to the assets. This has intensified as the economy strains the resources of all.

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review can shed some light on this shift from congregational polity to ecclesial hierarchy.

In the article, “First, Let’s Fire All the Managers,” Gary Hamel provides a description of hierarchical business leadership as inefficient, cumbersome and costly. This is true in the church, too.

  • Hierarchies create expense.
    A boss oversees supervisors who oversee managers who oversee foremen who oversee workers, creating layer after layer of expense. Management becomes the job of everyone but the lowest level workers! (ELCA constitutions are written the other way around!) Congregations cannot afford this structure. This does not automatically translate to inability to fulfill ministry, but this conclusion is often reached by hungry denominational bodies.
  • Hierarchies lead to poor decision-making.
    “The typical management hierachy increases the risk of large, calamitous decisions.” Hamel explains that as the power of the hierarchy grows, the ability of the lower ranks to challenge their decisions wanes. When power becomes incontestable, expect royal screwups, he warns. You do not have to look far in either the business or religion section of the newspaper for evidence. This may be the root of some of the challenges the ELCA is facing today exemplified by a 10% exodus of its congregations and escalating court battles.
  • Hierarchies are sluggish.
    As a hierarchy becomes more complex, initiatives and responses become more difficult. (Remember the Middle Ages from which Protestantism emerged. It was the pinnacle of the era of church hierarchy!) Managers can spend more time protecting authority than reacting to ideas presented by the lower ranks. Add to that the power to kill ideas that might threaten their own and the result is status quo at best — decline, conflict or demise at worse.
  • Hierarchies inhibit innovation.
    When lower level workers have little voice they must work harder to implement even simple decisions. Volunteer church workers become less valuable as they become demoralized and lose incentive to improve either their own status or their congregational mission.

Our Ambassadors have encountered this quiet desperation of the faithful. They have high hopes for their congregations but cannot find a way to make it happen. They are fighting an uphill battle with leadership claiming powers to dictate. Dictating managers are finding themselves with fewer people to manage — but they expect the same salaries and benefits.

That’s something the church hasn’t grasped: Participation of the faithful is optional.

All of these issues were faced by Lutherans before. We hashed out the relationships we wanted to have 500 years ago. We revisited the issues 200-300 years ago as Lutherans began to populate the New World.

Apparently, the polity of our faith requires vigilance which is much more difficult in congregations that have dwindling parish education programs. Newcomers, unacquainted with our history, can easily accept attempts at adopting hierarchical leadership. In the resulting vacuum of tradition and knowledge, laity with firm roots in Lutheran tradition can be seen as trouble-makers. In reality they are protecting their traditions which have been tested over centuries and which are protected in their founding documents.

Lutherans must return to their heritage.

30 Nov 2011

Categories Give Blogs Structure and Direction

Categories are collections of content that relate to a designated topic.

A previous post explored how “categories” help readers wade through pages of valuable content. They can also be a valuable tool for you as author.

If you are like most people, you started your blog with just a couple of posts in mind. Categories were the last thing you were thinking about. Now, several months later, you have a blog with a dozen or more posts and your interests are beginning to broaden.

Scroll through your posts. You are probably finding some of your best content buried, requiring a dedicated reader to scroll for seconds to find them. Placing them in a category is the fastest and easiest way to make your older posts more prominent.

Look again through your blog posts. Do you see any recurring themes? Make a list. These are your categories.

You do not want to create a category for only one post. In your mind you are just starting to write on the topic. To readers it looks like you have no passion or authority on that topic. So hold off until you are sure you can offer your readers more than a fleeting opinion.

Creating categories becomes a useful planning tool. You will begin to understand your blog and its structure. This may give you insights about your blogs future and help you plan future posts.

Here are the steps to take when creating categories and developing your blog into a useful resource.

  • Review your content.
  • List the topics you are writing about.
  • If you see a topic that is of great interest to you, but you’ve posted only one article, pull out your editorial calendar and brainstorm more topics for that category. Hold off on creating a category until you have at least five posts to add.
  • Your review of categories might identify a dominant topic. This could lead you to create a separate page for that topic or even to create a separate blog.
  • Once you’ve identified a few categories, plan for how you will continue to address each topic. You might want to address each topic every week. Soon you may find a structure. Write about topic A on Mondays and Topic B on Wednesdays, for example. You might want to add a special feature such as a poll on Fridays. Soon you will have a PLAN!
  • Review your editorial calendar and make sure each category is regularly represented.
  • While you are at it, brainstorm new content ideas for each category you’ve identified.

As you develop your blog, you will want to start publishing newsletters, white papers and perhaps even ebooks. If you’ve carefully maintained your blog categories, you’ll be able to easily identify content to adapt to other purposes. A good bit of the organizational work for larger ventures will be done!

28 Nov 2011

Ambassadors Visit St. Michael’s, Unionville (Kennett Square)

St. Michael, UnionvilleSecond time’s the charm. Last week we set out to visit St. Michael, Unionville, and ran into multiple detours and road blocks. We returned this week and experienced no problems.

St. Michael’s appears to be a thriving congregation that relocated to a 7-acre rural lot about 25 years ago and has undergone some major expansion projects since. We entered an unusual sanctuary, much wider than long. Attendance on this Thanksgiving weekend was probably a little over 100, although we didn’t tally.

Their worship was traditional with an LBW liturgy. A hostess explained after the service that the choir had a week off in preparation for the busy holiday season to come. Two members sang a beautiful duet. They introduced one new Advent hymn and used several other more traditional Advent hymns.

Their new associate pastor gave a nice sermon and children’s sermon and blessed the work of their knitters and crocheters who had made prayer shawls. They seemed to be in the midst of a stewardship drive — seems to be that time of year!

We also heard a talk from a son of the congregation involved in mission work in Mexico. He talked about taking an ethnocentric approach to spreading the Gospel and noted that their were 8000 ethnic groups or “nations” waiting to hear the Good News. He claimed that the Gospel is often best shared in setting geared to individual ethnic traditions. We talked with him extensively after the service and shared our multicultural approach.

We talked to several members after church and learned a good deal about their ministry experiences.

We inquired about their new web site project which we had reviewed before attending.

We had a delightful visit and enjoyed sharing our story and learning from theirs.

27 Nov 2011

Blog Categories Help Readers Find Your Posts

If your church has a blog — and you should — you will encounter the option in blogging software to list your blogposts in a “category.”

Categories are helpful organizational tools for three reasons (at least):

  1. Categories give search engines more opportunity to find your blog.
  2. Categories help readers wade through dozens of blog posts.
  3. Categories can guide you as you develop your blog’s mission and help you keep content balanced and on topic.

Using Categories is totally optional, the option becomes desirable…and soon necessary to maintain sanity!

Categories can be described as a Table of Contents in a cyber sense. Unlike a book, this Table of Contents is not linear. Readers do not move from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2. Instead, categories organize the content in an interwoven tapestry. You, the author, get to choose where the information goes. It can go in both Chapter 1 and 2, and maybe even Chapter 30!

You can add a single post to any number of categories. For example, a 2×2 post on Social Media Outreach might be placed in a “Social Media Ministry” category AND a “Church Growth” category AND a “Transformational Ministry” category. Be judicious as you decide which categories to place your blogs. It defeats the purpose of Categories to place every post in every category!

Placing your blog in a Category does not remove it from the daily blog feed. It adds it to the collection of topics on the same subject. A reader can click on the Category and read all the other posts relating to the same topic without scrolling through posts which are not of immediate interest.

Placing your posts in a Category gives them longevity. As a blogger you may be writing on several topics of interest in no particular order or changing topics from day to day. Your list of blog posts will grow quickly if you are serious about publishing. You may have great posts on an important topic that you published months before. If you do not place it in a Category, it will be buried.

Using categories helps your readers focus on the content of most interest to them. Once you have a dozen or so posts, take time to create a set of categories and assign each blog post accordingly. Each new post can be assigned a category before posting.

Now sit back and feel satisfied. You’ve helped search engines find your content. You’ve helped readers find the content that interests them.

Tomorrow’s post will show how that same few seconds you spent placing your post in a category also helps you!

26 Nov 2011

Redeemer Faces Adversity with Thanksgiving

Redeemer (2×2’s sponsoring church) is in its third year of exile from the ELCA. As we approach Thanksgiving we remember that this sacred national holiday grew from our nation’s darkest hour — the Civil War.

Our bitter and divisive national conflict ultimately unified our nation and made us stronger. Nevertheless, we wonder what the thousands who died at the hands of brothers might have accomplished given four years of peace and nurture.

We do not know what will grow from our own civil war. This Thanksgiving, we reflect on what we have learned. We have learned that:

  • church community can thrive without buildings. Buildings are tools for ministry but not requisite.
  • church community does not depend on clergy. Redeemer remains grateful for the handful of unnamed clergy who have provided occasional pastoral care.
  • the secular community is often more helpful and spiritual than the Church. Secular organizations of East Falls have shared generously. Churches have been silent.
  • our quietest members sometimes have the most strength given circumstances that draw upon them.
  • individuals are more likely to take action than organizations. The support we have received has been from individual Christians, not organized Christianity.
  • we are not alone in our struggles, but it has fallen upon us to bear the standard.
  • Christian community can reach beyond traditional definitions as we begin to attract support from around the world.
  • the difference between talking our faith and living our faith. We encounter that difference each week.
  • it is possible to live our faith, but we cannot count on church leaders for guidance, encouragement or conscience.

This Thanksgiving — our third since being excommunicated from the Lutheran Church and evicted from our property — we give thanks to our anonymous supporters who have contributed generously to our defense. God bless you and your ministries.

Most important, we give thanks to God 

  • for the strength He has given us to bear attacks from our brothers and sisters in Christ.
  • for the lives of those who passed through our community before us, setting examples.
  • for the lives of the named saints whose struggles teach us that the Way is not easy.
  • for the sacrifice of His Son, which makes our sacrifices seem insignificant.
  • for the challenges that have taught us things about ourselves.
  • for the opportunities which have led us to new ministries we might not have nurtured had we been focussed on the more traditional ministry.
  • for scriptures which mean so much more when facing hardship.
  • for His continued protection and love.

2×2 is taking a two-day Thanksgiving break. Happy Thanksgiving to all.

22 Nov 2011