Before I had children, I felt I had engineered a secure little world for myself. I lived in a nice place. I had a few nice hobbies. My work was interesting. I could avoid, for the most part, the parts of our world I found unpleasant. I could ignore people whose lives were not as privileged as mine. I could ignore any problem that wouldn’t reach global proportions for, say, the next 70 years or so. I could insulate my little corner of the universe.

Then, suddenly, I was connected to every part of the world, both present and future.

This was, for me, the big wake-up call. Our children — all the children we love, not only our own — connect us to the future. The world is no longer bounded by our awareness. The future is of immediate concern. Not just the future our children will experience, but the future their children will experience, and so on, and so on.

It gets personal all of a sudden.

My initial reaction was to simply agree with him. Of course caring for our kids means we care about the world they will be living in. But then as I thought about it, I realized that it isn’t always that clear cut. Often when we have kids we get so consumed in the moment that we put up blinders to anything outside of ourselves. We stop caring about others and focus on the needs on the moment. This may mean we stop volunteering or donating to charity because we just don’t have the time or money. It may mean we dump more trash into the environment because, let’s face it, it’s easier to use paper plates than to wash dishes. Or we save money by buying sweatshop produced clothing. Our response to having kids can go both ways – increased compassion or increased (necessary) selfishness.

I know I struggle with looking outside of my own family. It is easy to just focus on us and forget the needs of others. Intellectually, I want the better world, but in the rush to make it out the door on time in the mornings, it’s hard to keep in all in balance.

Is this just me? Do others struggle with this? Has having kids changed the way you view things like environmentalism and changed the way you live?

When my dad died of pancreatic cancer, I’ll never forget the number of children, teenagers and young adults at his funeral who were openly weeping. I realized that day how much it had meant to them that an adult, especially an authority figure like a pastor, had treasured them—-not in a doting, condescending manner, but in a respectful and genuine way. Witnessing this has had a life-long impact on the way I view children and my thoughts on what they have to offer to us.

Our church is currently seeking direction on what to do with the 10 or so children (all under the age of 5) who come regularly to our Sunday services. We’ve been separating them for the majority of the service from the adults so that they can do developmentally appropriate activities in Children’s Church, while we adults do our grown-up things in corporate worship. But some of the parents, including myself, and our pastor are not comfortable with this arrangement. For one thing, I’m not sure that we know what’s developmentally appropriate when it comes to spiritual matters. And I’m not sure that the grown-up things we do in our Sunday service are the best ways to worship God as a body.

I’m part of a small United Methodist congregation where only a few of us are even aware of the emerging church conversation or the different ways people are worshipping instead of the usual Sunday Service model. We all want our children to experience a community of faith without the baggage many of us associate it with from our own childhoods. Another mom and I and our pastor have been reading Postmodern Children’s Ministry by Ivy Beckwith and are very much interested in intergenerational worship. We’re also exploring Godly Play and Catechesis of the Good Shepherd as “curriculum” options.

I know that we’re officially talking about Children in Church during January, but this topic is so much on my mind right now that I wanted to get some feedback. Maybe it’s something that merits talking about in October as well as January, after we’ve had some time to ponder, research, etc?

What are other folks doing regarding children and worship? What are your experiences with intergenerational worship? What do we need to do or change the way we think (as a church, as families/parents, as a society, as human beings) about children and what they have to offer, if we just take the time and make the effort to listen and see and encourage and believe and respect?

Ask any three parents about discipline and you get six opinions. And certainly there’s diversity in our nascent community on all the facets of the discipline deal. And that’s good, because my sense is most of us are detoxing from prescriptive church.

In company with some fellow parents in my congregation, I’ve been living with Hebrews 12 a lot lately, and a harmonic in it got through the noise in my neurons. This should happen to me more often.

Here’s the resonance: hardship = discipline = God making me like Jesus.

So, two questions: what are the connections between how you discipline your children and what you’re doing to disciple them ?

Parenting is the hardest thing I’ve ever set my hand to: How is God using your engagement with the sheer difficulty of shaping immature humans into whole adults to shape you in the image of Christ?

Peace,
Michael

There’s this great story in Joshua 4 where, in the midst of crossing the Jordan into the Land of Promise, Joshua has some guys pick up 12 stones to pile up later on. The rock pile has two functions – it’s a visual trigger for a communal memory. Every time they see the rocks, the generation that passed through the Jordan will flash on that day. But it’s also a faith transmission tool. Joshua intends it to provoke questions in a generation then unborn. And then the Jordan generation can tell their story/God’s story to their kids. And how surpassingly cool that the rock pile’s a dialogue initiator, not a lesson/sermon provoker?

So, what are your rock piles? What are the places, objects, rituals that prompt your kids to ask spiritual why questions? And – I am so bad about this – how do you dialogue with rather than monologue to your kids about God?

Peace,
Michael

So as we get to know each other here, I want to throw out the question – what is your hardest struggle? What aspect of holistic parenting has been the most difficult so far?