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Amy Dolan Re-Imagines Partnering with Parents

I love Amy Dolan‘s perspective on spiritual formation and how to engage families from all walks of life. Check out this amazing post over at her blog on what I believe is a much better way to see what are job is as children’s ministers when it comes to partnering with parents.

“helping parents identify things that get in their way, and then leading each to cast aside the preventers. a new way of partnering with parents.”

Happy Holidays? Does it really matter?

Reblogged from From Gordon West, KidZ PreZ:

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We just heard yet another news story about the evergreen tree with colored lights on it being called a “holiday tree” this year. We attended the Phoenix Symphony yesterday for a wonderful afternoon of “Holiday Pops,” where Santa Claus wished us all “Happy Holidays.” And last night a very kind Home Depot employee noticed my VBS t-shirt before telling us that he refuses to obey corporate policy and always wishes people a “Merry Christmas.”

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Here's a great post from Gordon West about how we need to spend more time living out Jesus every day and not focus just on "putting Christ back in Christmas."

#OrangeTour comes to the San Francisco Bay Area!!!

#orangetour #thinkorange #sanjose @reggiejoiner

I’m excited to be at the Orange Tour at Westgate Church in San Jose, CA.

#orangetour #thinkorange

I thought these name tags with your Twitter handle were great!

Reggie opened up with a great challenge to meet the changes of culture in a positive light. I love this emphasis by Reggie and the ReThink group. He challenged all of us to think about how we are trying to reach the 75% of the people who will never enter the church. I can go on about my ideas of the theological and sociological ideals that have led to the church focusing on just the 25% who are already here, but that would take too long and many of you would nod off. In short, I agree with Reggie that we have lost sight of one of our imperatives to go outside of ourselves and respectfully engage those who don’t believe what we believe.

If you haven’t attended anything Orange, and you are in any type of ministry that engages families, what are you waiting for? Check out one of the Tour stops or go to the Orange Conference!

#MAKEASTAND

Have you heard of this amazing 8 year old?

“Gandhi was one person. Martin Luther King was one person. Mother Theresa was one person. Why can’t you be one person?”

Vivienne Harr, an 8 year old girl in Fairfax, CA saw a picture of two boys who are victims of modern-day slavery carrying huge slabs of rock on their backs. She decided that she wanted to raise enough money to free 500 kids from slavery. With the help of her family, she set up a lemonade stand in May of 2012 to accomplish this. She has made lemonade and shown up to sell it everyday since then. So far, she’s raised $20,000! She has inspired people all over the world to join her efforts and is even collaborating to come out with her very own brand of lemonade of which all profits will go to Not For Sale.

What are we doing in our children’s ministries to inspire children like this? Is it even important to do so? How do we go beyond inspiration to empowerment?

Family Ministry Blog Tour

I’m a couple of days late on getting this post up for the Family Ministry Blog Tour. (You can take a look at all the other posts on this tour here.) Life’s been crazy between being a dad taking care of kids on summer break, beginning research for my masters thesis (which has yet to take any coherent form), and working part time as part of the children’s ministry team at Menlo Park Presbyterian.

Figuring out what it means to minister to families has been something I’ve wrestled with since I stumbled upon a Children’s Ministry article in 2001 about a church in Atlanta that was doing a shared family experience. It talked about how this church was finding ways to intentionally partner with parents in the discipleship of their children. Following that, I had the opportunity to hear the family ministry director of the church at that time speak at a conference. While at that conference, I was able to grab lunch with that ministry leader and was challenged about my ideas and prejudices in children’s ministry.

Fast forward to the present… I’m still wrestling with what it means to minister to families! My views, thoughts, philosophies, understandings and practices continue to change. I’ve been in ministry as a volunteer and on staff. I’ve been in megachurches, small churches and churches in between. I’ve worked as a solo children’s minister and as part of a team. I’ve also served in various contexts in the United States and Canada. Family ministry has looked differently in each of the different places I’ve been.

I’m currently reading a book by Stephanie Coontz, a historian and family researcher, entitled “The Way We Never Were.” In it, Coontz details and debunks our fascination with the idea of a “traditional family” by shedding light on what families, especially American families, have looked like over the past 200 years. One of the themes in the book is that we will not be able to move forward and help families thrive if we continue to long “for a past that was never as idyllic or uncomplicated as we sometimes imagine” (p. xxviii). While Coontz is referring to helping families thrive socially, I believe the same issue is keeping us from helping families thrive spiritually.

As I survey the different discussions surrounding family ministry, I have heard many voices calling for a return to “gospel-centered” or “biblical” families. While these calls are well-intentioned, I don’t think they do much to help families enter into what Skye Jethani refers to as the “with-God” life. The reason for this is because those calls infer that there is an ideal style or model of family that exists or existed. Those calls berate families for falling short of this mythical ideal and, in turn, discourage parents who already feel deficient in how they are conducting the direction of their families.

Family has always been in a continual state of flux. (Note that I did not say that the Gospel has been in a state of flux.) There has never been a “golden age” of family life and there never will be; trying to point back to one is pointless. So, how do we move forward and frame what family ministry is?

First, we recognize the gospel story is a story… God’s Story. It is a story of hope, love and redemption that God began at creation, turned on its head with the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ and continues to write today.

Second, we recognize that the idea of family is a continually changing story. Families throughout history and locations will look different from each other, and each of those families is writing their own stories.

Third, we help families discover how to allow God to rewrite their stories rather than God simply being a recurring character or footnote in their stories.

This kind of family ministry is messy. This kind of family ministry doesn’t have all the answers. This kind of family ministry isn’t about replicating an ideal family type. This kind of family ministry empowers each family to uniquely become more like the family God wants them to be rather than the kind of family I think all families should be like.

The King Jesus Story for Kids

This past Fall, Scot McKnight‘s book The King Jesus Gospel came out. In a nutshell, the premise of the book is to reframe “The Gospel” as something more than just personal salvation. It’s a story about Jesus and his mission to establish his kingdom here. I haven’t read the book yet, but Ben Irwin did. After reading the book, he decided to reframe the gospel story that Scot tells in The King Jesus Gospel in a way that kids would understand.

What follows is what Ben came up with. I think it’s pretty good and needs to be edited, illustrated and put into a picture book for kids to read.

The King Jesus story

It all began with God.

God made everything you can see.
(And even some things you can’t see!)

God made the world to be his home.
Then God made the very first people
so he could share his home with them.

God gave them a beautiful garden to live in.
He gave them a job to do:
take care of God’s good world;
rule it well on his behalf.
But they didn’t.

They didn’t like doing things God’s way
and not theirs.
So they took what wasn’t theirs,
and tried to rule the world their own way.
They tried to be God.

So the very first people
had to leave the garden.
They had to leave God’s presence.

Without God,
they began to die.
But God never gave up on his people.
He still loved them.
He promised to fix the world
so he could share it with them again.

But it wouldn’t be easy.
Everyone who’s ever lived,
from the very first people
all the way to you and me,
have gone the same way.

We’ve all taken what isn’t ours.
We’ve all tried to do things our way.
We’ve all tried to be little gods.
Things kept getting worse.
But God had a plan.

God chose a man named Abraham.
He gave Abraham children,
and grandchildren,
and great-grandchildren.
God turned Abraham into a great nation
and called it “Israel.”

God made Israel his chosen people.
They would help him fix the world.

God went with Israel
everywhere they went.
When they were slaves in another country,
God remembered them.
When they were treated badly,
God rescued them.

God gave Israel a home.
He gave them a job to do:
show the world what it’s like
to be God’s people.

God gave Israel priests
to teach them how to love God.
He gave them laws
to teach them how to love each other.

God told his people,
“If you follow me,
you’ll have a good life.
You’ll get to help me fix the world.”
But Israel didn’t listen.

God’s people didn’t want God
telling them how to live.
They wanted to do things their way,
just like the very first people — just like all of us.

God’s people didn’t want God
to be their king.
They wanted a king of their own,
a person just like them.

So God gave Israel a king.
Then another king.
And another.
Some were good. Some were bad.

Mostly, the kings did whatever they wanted.
They took what wasn’t theirs.
They ruled Israel for themselves, not God.
They tried to be little gods.

So God sent prophets
to tell the kings and their people
that there is only one true King;
there is only one true God.

But the kings and their people wouldn’t listen.
So they had to leave their home.
Other nations came and conquered Israel
and carried God’s people off by force.

Israel lost everything.
Then there was silence.
Years went by.
No one heard from God anymore.

Until . . .
something new happened.
God sent someone:
a person just like us, yet different.
Someone who could rule the world
the way God wanted.

God sent Jesus,
his chosen one,
to rescue Israel
and fix the world.

Jesus did good wherever he went.
He healed the sick.
He fed the hungry.
He rescued people from all sorts of problems.

Jesus did everything God wanted,
but it wasn’t what God’s people wanted.

They didn’t want Jesus to be their king.
They didn’t want the kind of kingdom he would bring.

So one day, some powerful people decided
they’d better put a stop to Jesus
before he took their power away.

So they arrested Jesus.
They stripped him naked.
They nailed him to a cross
and watched him die.

Jesus didn’t fight back.
He didn’t raise a sword;
he didn’t even raise a finger.

And so the powerful people
thought they had won.
They thought they had beaten
God’s chosen one.

But there was something they didn’t understand.
They didn’t know that Jesus died
not because he had to,
but because he chose to.

They didn’t know that they,
like all of us, deserved to die
for all the times we’ve gone our way
and ruined God’s good world.

They didn’t know a servant’s death
was the only way to live.
They didn’t know a servant’s cross
was the only crown worth having.

The one true King had come
and given his life for the world.
But they didn’t even know.
No one did.

But then God —
the one who made the world,
rescued Israel,
and sent Jesus —
raised him from the dead.

Lots of people saw him alive
before he went back to God.

But Jesus didn’t just rise from the dead.
He defeated death,
so it wouldn’t have power over us any longer.

God gave us the King we needed,
a King who loves, forgives,
and changes everyone who comes to him.

This King gave us a job to do:
love each other with all we’ve got.
Because that’s how we show others
what it’s like to be loved by God.

That’s how we show others
what kind of King we serve.
For now, the world is still broken,
still waiting to be fixed.
But someday, our King is coming back
to rescue us and share his home with us again.

Never again
will anyone take what isn’t theirs.
Never again
will anyone ruin God’s good world.

God will live with us,
and we will rule the world for him.
Forever.

Walk 4 Water

This past Saturday, Menlo Park Presbyterian Children’s Ministry held an even called Walk 4 Water. For the summer, we wanted the children to raise money towards a specific missions project. We chose to partner with World Vision to build a well in Ethiopia, which would amount to $2,600 over June and July. In addition to Sunday mornings, we had those kids who were a part of our Zapped Day Camp and Creative Kids Camp also give towards the well project.

The Walk 4 Water event was meant to help kids and families experience a little of what it might be like to walk some distance to retrieve water and bring it back. We also wanted to create some intentional conversation around the issue of those who don’t have access to clean water in the world. Families walked half a mile to a home of someone from the church carrying buckets. They filled up their buckets and returned to the church where they weighed their buckets comparing their weights to the 44 pounds most women carry on average.

We weren’t sure how many people would participate. At the end of the day, there were 190 parents and kids who walked! There were even some people from the neighborhood who saw what we were doing and joined in! We raised over $1400 that day!

Take a look at the video of some highlights from Walk 4 Water. (Just FYI, as of our final count we’ve collected just over $4800 from the kids! That’s almost 2 wells!)

Open Kidmin and Stumin Positions at Menlo Park Presbyterian!

(picture originally uploaded to Flickr by ***Karen)

Menlo Park Presbyterian (where I am currently working!) is expanding and restructuring in the areas of children’s ministry and student ministry, which means we are looking for some great people to join our team!

Here are the open positions:

If you or someone you know is interested in applying for any of these postions, check out the listings on the MPPC website.