Elemental CM is now Kidmin and Culture! Don’t worry there should be no need to update your RSS feeds or anything like that. I’ pretty sure I covered it so that those of you who subscribe to my feed don’t have to change anything. If you don’t subscribe to the feed, what are you waiting for?

You may be wondering, “Why the sudden change? Where have you been? Why haven’t you blogged lately? Now you go and change the name of your blog???”

Well, let me begin by saying that I had to intentionally step away from blogging in order to focus on my primary job of being a stay-at-home dad. I was finding that my blogging kept taking priority over me being fully dad to my kids. Rather than this blog being the “something extra” I did on the side, being a dad was becoming the “something extra.” Not good. So I took a short sabbatical from the blogging. I am back, but the frequency with which I blog will drop to once a week. I may blog more frequently than that, but I feel that once a week is a good place in order to keep my position as a dad firmly in first place when it comes to my responsibilities.

Why the change? Well, there isn’t an easy reason for it. Let me just say that my purpose for blogging has not changed. I’m still about exploring the mutual affect children’s ministry and culture have on each other. I’m also still passionate about what it means for children’s ministry to be missional and what that looks like in a church context. The only change is that I wanted to focus a bit more on taking a look at the greater culture around us and spark conversations on how we engage, leverage, affect and be affected by it in the world of children’s ministry.

Another reason for the change was the necessity of me to move this blog from self-hosted back to free WordPress.com hosting. At this time in our lives, we are simply unable to afford paying for hosting fees.

I look forward to future interactions as we grate against each other and move children’s ministry forward.

I’ve seen this video pop up on the Burnside Writers’ Blog and on the iMonk blog.

Now, I want to be careful here. I don’t want to bash the people in this video. I’m sure most of them were honestly trying to worship God. In the churches I grew up in, I remember going to gatherings which had elements like this (and I was uncomfortable then as well as now).

The question that still goes through my head when watching gatherings like this one is, “Why?”

Why do you think this is worship?
Why do you choose to worship in this way?
Why are you doing what you are doing?

My nine-year-old son was watching the video with me. I asked him, “What makes this different from what we do at camp, on Sundays?… We do actions to songs… Some of you dance around during the singing time…”

I love what he said. “I don’t get what they are saying. We sing songs about who God is and how much we love him, and we do actions and dance around not to get attention but for God. They look like they are just dancing around.”

Again, I’m not trying to pass judgement on the people in the video. There’s nothing wrong with dancing around and twirling your socks in the air. But I have a hard time seeing this as “worship.”

That begs the question, “Well, then, what is worship?”

The best definition I’ve found for worship comes from Teaching Kids Authentic Worship by Kathleen Chapman. She defines worship as “paying attention only to God.” She compares it to a boy playing a video game. The only thing he is paying attention to is that video game. He doesn’t hear anyone else, he doesn’t see anything else… his whole attention is focused on that game. In that instance, he is “worshipping” that game. The same goes for worshipping God. When we do something for God, paying attention to him while we do it, then we are doing that something as worship whether it’s singing, dancing, reading the Bible, taking out the trash… whatever. Worship is not about me, it’s about God. Worship doesn’t simply result in warm fuzzies, but results in action… in mission.

• How would you define worship?
• What do you teach kids worship is? How do you teach worship to them?