Sunday Lunch

As to some new ideas to stop the bleeding, first of all I would like to recommend family devotions. From the earliest times in the lives of your children, awaken your whole family around 4:30 am, and put together an hour long presentation of scripture, sharing, prayer requests, and prayer. Everyone should share, and sleeping is absolutely forbidden…

Okay, not really.

Look, I don’t want to diss anyone. Seriously, if family devotions were a part of your upbringing and it was meaningful and life-altering, I honor you and especially your parents for what they were able to do. Unfortunately, as well-intentioned as they might be, it is not the experience of most people, including parents and their children that devotions accomplished what was intended. More often than not they were forced, dreaded by everyone, too long (no matter how short), ineffective, and generally… uh…hated.

The intentions of family devotions are so good. But is there a way to engage your family in meaningful conversations about your faith and about the things that count? And can we find a way to make that happen naturally and spontaneously?

An idea came to me as I walked through my own home one afternoon. I was picking up papers, crafts, worksheets, coloring pages, loose cotton balls, and some multicolored pipe-cleaners that were all over the house that day. And it occurred to me that this represented just one week in the church life of my daughter. This pile was a collection of work that she had been given beginning with Sunday School on Sunday morning, Children’s Church after that, Sunday night worksheets, Wednesday night choir, and followed by her age-appropriate missions program. Wow!

Talk about drinking from a fire hose! She had at least five different lessons from five different teachers about five different subjects with five different scripture verses to memorize. But then, she would be doing that all over again starting the next Sunday morning. Five more of everything. I started looking through the pile and realized that none of what she had heard that week matched any of the three sermons I had heard in the same time frame.

Then a thought hit me. If the church wanted to help facilitate my being the point man in my daughter’s spiritual formation, why couldn’t they plan it out to where all the pastors were using their creativity to coordinate lesson plans? Wait, hear me out. It would have really helped if my daughter and I were learning the same things, you, know, at our own levels, but the same concepts, maybe even the same scriptures at the same time. That might actually spark some authentic and unforced conversation between us.

Then I thought about Sunday lunch. The Sunday afternoon meal after church has always been a family thing for us. How cool would it be if the conversation around the table at lunch time on Sunday afternoon was to eventually come around to the subject matter of the day? What would it do for our kids if they were to become involved in, included in the deep issues discussed at table on Sunday afternoon? Not compulsory, not strained, but naturally included, encouraged. What if their opinions actually mattered? (I’ll go here next.)

This is something with which we have experimented, and we can see real potential for the future as we grow into having just such a creative planning team. Some object lessons work for all ages. Videos, movie clips, and larger metaphors can bridge or can be made age-appropriate. Whatever tools we have at our disposal. Shouldn’t we be the most creative people on earth?

Just my first idea. What do you think?

Strapping on the Feed Bag

Some of you who are as frustrated as I am sincerely want to know how we fix this. And some of you who are upset with me want to say, “Okay, Mr. Smarty Pants, if you think it’s broken—and I’m not saying it is—how are you going to fix it?” To both of you I would say, “I don’t know. Do you have any suggestions?”

With that being said, I do have a couple of ideas that we might try, as well as some kudos for the good things we do.

Let’s start with the kudos. Although I am not a big fan of short term missions trips (I will elaborate on that elsewhere), I do think that any exposure our kids get outside the walls of our churches is a plus. Whether it’s across town or half way around the globe, the experience of seeing the world through the eyes of the homeless man or the third world child is life-changing.

I do think that it is important to try and replicate and repeatedly perform these kinds of activities on a regular basis right here at home. For fledgling faith, mission trips are often like trying to drink from a fire hose. No wonder our kids come back from such outings all fired up! Unfortunately that furor fades quickly when nothing back home commands their attention and demands their hard work like being “on mission.”

Secondly, there is no doubt that our kids, of all ages, are given excellent instruction. If a kid will pay attention, he or she will learn so much about the Bible and about God from the strong teaching that they receive. Knowledge is a very good thing. Unfortunately, unlike knowledge, discipleship is not learned in a classroom or a church sanctuary. Discipleship comes from doing life together. We will save that discussion for later also.

Now, before I enumerate any ideas of my own, let me state that I think it is important that we first consider something. If we believe this, then the church should both teach and equip parents to be the primary source in the spiritual formation of their own children. And, I believe that in addition to teaching youth pastors how to be relevant to kids, our universities and Bible schools should be strategizing as to the methods to end the exsanguination of our young adults. But that must begin when they are young and proceed throughout their school years.

However, for any changes to work it would take a complete paradigm shift from the lead pastor to the parents to the earliest children’s workers. It would have to be taught from the “pulpit” and bought into by Mom and Dad. And first of all, Mom and Dad would have to buy into the idea of taking responsibility for their own discipleship, let alone for the discipleship of their kids. If you have ever heard anyone leave a church saying, “We just aren’t being fed,” then you know why we are in trouble.

I guess it’s weird that I started feeding myself as a toddler. What’s ever weirder is that I started in my teen years to question everything I had ever been taught. I tried to dig it out of the Bible for myself. But for some people, I guess their view of church is strolling in and strapping on the old feed bag.

Next we will examine some new ideas for accomplishing our purposes.

“Send” the Indigenous, Part 3

So, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. The only reason I have used the word “send” is because it is such an important word in “Christianese” that most of us understand with regard to missions or with fulfilling the Great Commission.

*Warning! Rabbit trail!*: Along with the word “go.” We understand what is meant by “go” as well as “send.” However, both words are loaded—like so many words used in the subculture of Christianity in America.

Let’s think of some other examples: “Evangelical.” Do people who are in the church have any idea what a nasty word this is to the people on the outside? “Missionary.” Here’s a word that people outside our subculture think of as an invasion force. To them, missionaries destroy the culture and the traditions of entire civilizations, turning the people into Americanized Christian clones. (That’s not a good thing to them, by the way.) Every day the Prime Directive is being violated by well-meaning Christians. *And the rabbit trail ends abruptly before it gets out of hand…*

Okay, back to the theme. The word that is better—the one that I believe we are called to do for the “Next Generation” (another Star Trek reference)—is “empower.”

Empower the indigenous.

Some of you are asking, “Where do Bible school and Seminary fit into the mix?” And I would respond, “Where do we ‘send’ the indigenous to learn the ‘God stuff’ without overwhelming them with the ‘man stuff’?” When you find that place, you let me know, will you?

In the meantime I think we have to mentor while being “reverse mentored.” Treating them and accepting them as equals, we need to come along side the next leaders and allow them to develop their own expressions with very broad, spandex-like boundaries.

If we can control ourselves and give the Holy Spirit room to do his work, I believe that the Church of the future will naturally, organically become more like the New Testament church than it has been since the first century.