A New Year's Direction

Since it’s the New Year I feel compelled to look towards the future. I suppose it’s what you always do as a new year starts. Though I will not be making any resolutions in this blog.

One thought or comment constantly comes up when talking to people about children and families. How do we get the children and there families into church? And every time someone asks me I look at them and confess that I don’t have a neat solution. It seems my wife was right, I don’t know everything!

This question and even the future of children’s ministry has been wearing on me for some time. There seems to be this feeling that a new direction is there waiting to be discovered but it always seems to be just out of reach. Like a shadow moving in and out of the dark.

Over the break I did some catch up reading of some articles but also read The Jesus I Never Knew. Which has been beside my bed for a few months. It is a book I would highly recommend.

That book alongside other things I’ve read and my reflections on past experience has drawn me more towards one conclusion. The answer to the future of children’s, family, youth or any other ministry will not be found in a new club, event, or program.

This answer has been tried over and over again throughout the past and while they’re have been short term successes there has never been a long term answer. I am now convinced that it’s not just children’s ministry that must change but the whole of the church.

Two statements in The Jesus I Never Knew struck me profoundly. The first was this question, ‘When did the Church become an unfriendly place for sinners?’ The second was that the early Church was known for their care of the poor, oppressed, widows, orphans, etc. It was only after the legalization of Christianity that the Church began placing this responsibility on the state.

My feeling is that we, including myself, have tamed and domesticated the Lion of Judah. We’ve reduced God’s Kingdom to our individual relationships with Him. In the process we’ve made the Church and God’s kingdom an easy place to be. So long as you’re comfortable with a certain moral standard and you don’t interfere with my personal space. And we’ve reduced Christ to a moralistic teacher that gives us some facts and figures that we should memorize to know Him better.

But when I try and read the Gospels through eyes that aren’t western I don’t find a nice Jesus waiting to greet me. I find a Jesus who offended people, that was very wary of the religious middle class (most of the Church), that did the opposite of what I expected, told people hard truths and then watched them walk away. I fear Jesus would have been wary of me and that I might have walked away.

But what does this all have to do with children? That is after all what I’m employed to think about isn’t it?

When I look to the future I don't see a new program that teaches children more facts about a tame Jesus. I see a Church that has changed dramatically. A place where there is still age appropriate space but not segregated space. Where we learn together about the Jesus we put our faith in. Where we read that Jesus said to love your neighbor and we go out, I mean physically remove ourselves from the building, and find the neighbor we can love.

I don’t want my own children to form the view that the Church is a place of individual passion for God. I pray that for them it is a place of communal passion for God. A passion that manifest itself in communal acts of self sacrifice and service towards the poor, oppressed, ostracized, and lonely people that surround us if only we look for them.

But here is the problem. Changing a children’s program or ministry is not enough or even possible to bring about such change. Not without the willingness of the whole church body to change. So the question I pose for the new year is, ‘Are we willing to change?’ Or maybe, ‘Will we receive the kingdom of God or domesticate it?’