i got to thinking this morning about the work we do with our children. when DF was being created as a community, one of the mandates was to make sure we pay attention to the kids. that they were a primary concern. we have, at times, done a wonderful job at keeping this clearly in our sights and, like most things, there are times when we have let this slip. we are blessed that god has brought among us quite a few people that are willing to sacrifice their time and energy and resources to be involved in the spiritual life and development of our kids. i love that we have a special time of our community worship set aside just for our children. i love the consistency of our teachers that are invested in their classes. i love that there was a period of time dedicated to conversation about the spiritual development of children.

i received an email this morning from emergent village that had a brief snippet from ivy beckwith. she is in children's ministry and has written a book, Postmodern Children's Ministry, that is pretty popular and some say, thought provoking. i am going to pick up a copy and read it. here is what she had to say in the email i got this morning:

It’s been a while since I’ve written an Emergent C missive so I’ve been casting around about what to write about. And I’ve decided to write about children. I hesitate to do that sometimes because I don’t want to be pigeon-holed as the Emergent Village Children’s expert (I’m very interested in theology, too.) – but the truth is that in some ways I am the voice of Children and Family ministry for Emergent Village.

Several of us on the Emergent Village Board of Directors and in the Coordinating Group have been discussing putting together a gathering on Children’s and Youth Ministry in the emerging church. To that end a group of us will be getting together in Kansas City in late September to talk about this and put some plans together.

I am convinced that Emergent Village and its friends have interesting and innovative things to say about children, their spiritual formation, and their place as full participants in the community of faith. And I’m eager for a formal discussion to begin. For too long emerging churches have either not had to think about children because of their young demographic or have simply foisted existing church educational paradigms on their children rather than thinking through how their take on theology, formation, and methodology translates into ministry to and with children and families. It is time for Emergent Village to put our stamp, creative, and great thinking ability on Children’s Ministry.

I’ll end this with a paragraph from the introduction to Postmodern Children’s Ministry:

The church’s ministry to children is broken. A cursory look doesn’t reveal its brokenness. From the outside children’s ministry looks healthier then ever. But it is broken. It’s broken when church leaders and senior pastors see children’s ministry as primarily a marketing tool. The church with the most outwardly attractive program wins the children and then the parents. It’s broken when we teach children the Bible as if it were just another book of moral fables or stories of great heroes. Something’s broken when we trivialize God to our children. It’s broken when we exclude children from, perhaps, the most important of community activities – worship. It’s broken because we’ve become dependent on an 18th century schooling model forgetting that much of a child’s spiritual formation is affective, active, and intuitive. It’s broken when we depend on our programs and our curriculum to introduce our children to God – not our families and communities. It’s broken when we’ve come to believe that church has to be something other than church to be attractive to children. It’s broken when we spend lots of money making our churches into play lands and entice children to God through food fights and baptisms in the back of fire trucks. And perhaps most importantly it’s broken when the church tells parents that its programs can spiritually nurture their children better than they can. By doing this we’ve lied to parents and allowed them to abdicate their responsibility to spiritually form their children. A church program can’t spiritually form a child, but a family living in an intergenerational community of faith can. Our care for our children is broken and badly in need of repair. Let’s imagine together a new way, a new future.

i think at DF we have done a good job of breaking the mold and i am excited to continue. there is still lots of room for growth as we consider the spiritual development of our kids. the part of the quote above that i think we need to continue to understand and develop is the idea of living ingenerationally as a community of faith. i want to continue to consider what this looks like and find ways to make this a reality.