The Institute of Evangelism

Every Church an Evangelizing Community!

Val Michaelson

About Val Michaelson

Val Michaelson is an Anglican priest who works at St James' Anglican Church, Kingston, Ontario as minister to children, youth and students at Queen's University. She has completed her DMin through Wycliffe College and regularly tests out her ideas on intergenerational ministry with her own family, Kris, Ceilidh, Charis and Hannah.

Reimagining Children in the Church.

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A fresh approach to raising our children in Christ7cover

Have you ever longed for a better way to teach children the Christian faith? Something that offers substance and depth, something that helps children engage with the Christian story in a way that will stay with them? In this booklet, Tiffany Robinson and Val Michaelson share what they have learned from many years of working with children in church. They begin by reminding us of the richness of the gospel, and give lots of space to offering us original and practical tools for use in our own classrooms. This booklet will help teachers, parents, and congregations who want to be better equipped to welcome children into their midst and to nurture them in the Christian life

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Reimagining Children in the Church

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The Wycliffe Booklets are an occasional series addressing current issues in the life of the church. Here the authors of the newest booklet tell us what it is about, and why they are convinced it is crucial.

We believe that the church’s calling is to be a sanctuary for children. It is one of the few places in our society that is naturally fitted to be a place of nurture, safety, welcome, reliability and guidance. Yet sadly, our churches do not always function as sanctuaries, nor are they places where children are able to feel deeply at home over the course of their lives.

Not only what to teach but how to teach

DSC03393In a culture that increasingly isolates, entertains, and markets to children, we as a church struggle to know what it means to be a “sanctuary” for our children. We struggle to know how to build into our children from an early age the depth, riches, and demands of the Christian gospel. We struggle to know how to give our children the best opportunity possible to live and grow within God’s community so that they are given a chance to know and love this God deeply and fully. We struggle not only with what to teach children, but how to teach it effectively.

In Reimagining Children in the Church, we address these struggles. We propose an approach to raising children in today’s church that recovers some of the wealth that the gospel has to offer. This model, which we invite you to explore, has been tested and tried in many churches over the last decade, and has been first imagined and then developed by many people in the church who care deeply about children, about the church, and about God. We are not proposing a whole new program, or the need to hire a new, dynamic leader; neither are we encouraging you to purchase an expensive new curriculum. Instead, we propose a more modest way forward. We want to provide a vision for children in the church that has both theological depth and pedagogical substance. We also want it to be simple, easy to use, and a lot of fun.

Maybe your church does not have a lot of children. Maybe your church is having trouble recruiting teachers. Maybe people cannot stop talking about the good old days when the Sunday School was overflowing, and do not seem to have a hope for the future. These are real and practical issues.

Using what you already have

Picture2Our proposal is that a congregation should take a step back and consider the kind of spiritual space they can provide for children. We hope that this handbook will help churches nurture the soil out of which a vibrant intergenerational ministry can flourish, no matter how many children are there. We hope this handbook will be something that any church—even a small church that does not have a children’s ministry or a church building—can use with the people and materials that they have at hand.

Our goal is not to help you grow a big Sunday School, nor is it to convince you to make radical and immediate changes in your church. (This kind of goal is not only unrealistic, but can often be destructive in a community anyway.) Instead, our goal is to encourage you to start on a journey of actively shaping a “sanctuary for childhood” that nurtures the children God has brought to you. We hope to give you tools that will help you create a learning and worshipping environment that truly communicates God’s good news to children, and empowers them to find their place in his work and in his world. We want to help congregations be better equipped to welcome children so that they can be apprenticed in the Christian faith for the sake of becoming Christ’s body in the wider world.

How does this work in practice?

We propose three approaches and in each case we give not only a rationale for that approach and why it is particularly suited to Picture5children, but also simple, practical ways to try it in your church. We call the three approaches intergenerational, embodied, and storied.

In our first section about the rich, Intergenerational potential of the church, we argue that the church is uniquely fitted to be the kind of intergenerational community our youth and children need in the midst of their fragmented and often isolated lives. We offer practical ideas for involving children in regular services and special church events. We encourage a vision of the everyday work of the church, whether in outreach or community building, as a multigenerational task. We suggest ways that a broader range of the church community can easily connect with youth and children.

In exploring an Embodied vision of raising children in Christ, we present a pedagogical approach that intentionally reflects the integrative, full-bodied reach of the gospel. We offer creative ideas for inviting children to explore God’s story and experience it in every part of their lives; we give ideas for making spaces that allow children to more vividly engage with Scripture and we focus on prayer as an embodied activity for children.

Finally, in talking about Storied learning, we argue that a life-long engagement with the Bible is one of the main ways that we grow in understanding, and being a part of, God and God’s work. In this section, we suggest practical ways to teach the children how to begin to find their place in the Christian story, now and at every stage of their lives. We delve into fun games that open up the world of Scripture to the natural wonder and curious minds of children, allowing the Spirit to work in new ways in their lives. Our desire is to find creative ways for children to see, and get in on, the wonder of God himself and his story for them and for the world.

What the church most naturally offers

Pews turned round to make a child-friendly space in church
Pews turned round to make a child-friendly space in church

In the midst of the challenges the church faces today, we need reminding that the church has an extraordinary gift to offer our children and families. Indeed, the church can offer unique wisdom and practical help in navigating the stressed, anxious, consumerist culture in which most of us live. We suspect that what our children and families not only long for but desperately need are some of the very things the church is most naturally gifted to offer.

The way forward for catechesis in the church is not a fancy new program or curriculum, but a holistic, integrative way of thinking about children in the church that flows out of the fullness of life offered to us in Jesus Christ, such that our church communities become “a sanctuary for children”— and for childhood—in our own place and time.

How to Nurture Intergenerational Community in Your Church

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How and why to break down the barriers between the ages

When I read the story of Joseph and Mary’s anxious search for a “lost” Jesus in Luke 2 through my own cultural lens, I see parents who walk halfway to Brockville, a city 70 km from my hometown of Kingston, before they realize their kid is missing.

My reaction is to put in a quick call to Social Services to check these parents out! But in Jesus’ cultural context, the web of intergenerational community is so strong that Mary and Joseph simply trusted this community would hold her child.

The story has a happy ending, and I recount it now not because I want to draw into question the parenting strategies of Mary and Joseph – but because this story gives us a glimpse of the kind of web of community that the Church can be to hold our young people in prayer, practical help and love.

Often in the Church, instead of celebrating the gift of intergenerational community, we segregate our ministries by age and interest, thinking that if we do something that will attract the youth we’ll have a better chance of keeping them in the church.

While this model is commendable for its desire to connect young people with the gospel, it may inadvertently cut off our young people from the worshiping life of the Church. It’s no wonder then, that when these young people grow up, they have no sense of what it means to be a mature adult Christian living out a life of faith in the Church.

When we isolate teenagers from the adult world, we deprive them of the opportunity to learn mature, adult values through dialogue and meaningful relationships and mentoring. There are significant repercussions to this kind of isolation. In his fabulous book Family Based Youth Ministry Mark Devries argues that teens don’t learn what they need to learn to be healthy, mature adults from their peers or from the Internet.

If our teens wanted to learn to scuba dive, writes Devries, we wouldn’t set them down with a computer or with a bunch of peers to talk about how they feel about scuba diving. We would go with them, mentor them, drill safety guidelines into them, and carefully help them navigate something exciting, yet potentially dangerous. We would ensure they have all the tools they need to succeed and thrive.

But we don’t always do this intentional mentoring with life. And we don’t always do this with the Christian life.

Our teens will not learn the skills that mature adults need in order to thrive by talking with their friends or from Google. They require meaningful interactions, over the long haul, with mature Christian adults who know them, pray for them and who invite them to share something of life and ministry together.

Devries writes: “By denying our young people opportunities for this kind of involvement with adults, our culture sends many youth into the “adult” years relationally, mentally, morally and spiritually unprepared for the challenges of adulthood.” Our young people today are growing up in a fast paced, over-stimulating, over sexualized, consumerist culture. And they need us.

They need this web of support — this gift of being known and held — in God’s family. They need the Church, and after the gospel and the power of the Holy Spirit, the grey hair in our midst might just be one of the greatest gifts God has to offer to our young people today.

10 Practical ideas for nurturing intergenerational community in your church:

 Get kids involved in the life of the church (not special “youth services” that cater to what we think the kids want, but with the everyday, worship life of your particular church).

 Set up prayer partnerships between the children, youth and seniors (studies show that teenagers who are connected intergenerationally in the church — with both older AND younger members — are more likely to stay involved in a faith community after graduation).

 Invite adults to mentor children in leadership roles in the church (reading, technology, serving, greeting, hospitality, altar guild duties, etc).

 Regularly invite adults to children and youth gatherings to share their own story of faith (interviews work well).

 Share skills and interests: invite seniors to teach youth skills such as knitting, handwork, woodwork, etc.

 Invite tech savvy teens to put on a few workshops for seniors about how to use the Internet effectively (communicating with grandchildren will be a big incentive!).

 Learn each other’s names and use them. Regularly encourage the whole community to greet someone who is of a different generation (perhaps during the passing of the peace).

 Ask youth in the church: “If you needed help, is there one adult in the church family — not a parent — who you could go to?” If the answer is not yes, be intentional in setting up relationships between teens and adults.

 Invite elderly parishioners to share how they have experienced God over a lifetime, including joys and challenges, and to share their thoughts on death (a topic children don’t get much chance to talk about).

 Parents often ask their children, “How was Sunday school? What did you learn in church?” Equip parents to then share from their own experience: “This is what the sermon was about today…. This is how I think it might apply to my life this week….”

 

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