My Ramblings

Just wanted to share a little of what is on my mind today…

I am in the planning stages of an interdenominational promotion for our city. For now, I am calling it “every child in church”. The basic concept is that on a designated Sunday, every church in the city will make a special effort to get as many children (ages 5-12 specifically) into the services as possible. The plan is to have this done not as a competition among churches, but as a cooperative effort to reach every child in our town of about 21,000 people.

I hope to have a proposal ready for my pastor by next Sunday.

Let us pretend that you are the parent of four children. All of your children attend Sunday school in their own age appropriate class while you and your spouse attend an adult class. During the service time, your youngest children attend the children’s service while the oldest child attends a preteen service. During the three hours that your family has been at church, they have been exposed to eight different lessons. If there are no take-home papers (or they are lost), how do you – as a parent – know what your children were taught?

Now, pretend that you are a new member of a church that offers several adult classes on Sunday. Several of the classes sound interesting, but you are unsure of which one you want to attend and you don’t want to change classes after only a couple of weeks in it.

In the first situation, you could go to each of your children’s teachers to ask what the lesson was. In the second situation, you could talk to the teachers of the various classes for more information. My experience has been that many people just don’t stick around at the church very long after service. Even if they did, can you imagine the chaos of having the parents of 20 children trying to talk to the same teacher. Even in a church of 100 people, you could easily spend 30 – 45 minutes after church trying to talk to everybody. Unfortunately, personal communication is not the answer and take-home papers are frequently lost by the children (or their parents).

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One of the things I do is to ask questions. Our service “officially starts” at 10:30 so at around 10:20, I get on stage and start asking questions. These questions range from basic Bible knowledge to details of recent lessons. After asking the question, I say “GO” and call on the first person to raise their hand. Sometimes there is a prize for each answer. At other times, we give out a ticket for each correct answer and let the kids “buy” a prize with the tickets they have won.

At 10:30, we do the 10:30 question that is good for a special prize. The 10:30 question is always the same – “What was last weeks lesson?”. I do not expect the child to repeat the whole lesson, just the title. (I am hoping that the title will bring back some of the details of the lesson to the children.) When we did a lesson a few weeks ago on Jesus being the vine and us being the branches, we emphasized the need for us to be living and growing branches. The title of the lesson was “Don’t be a dead branch”. It is rewarding to see several children raise their hands to answer the 10:30 question. I’ve challenged the pastor to try asking the same question in the adult service, but to this date – he hasn’t.

To help the children remember the lesson, I have created a blog site where I post a short summary of each week’s lesson. There are several children in our group that will check the blog on Saturday if they missed the previous week or to remind them of the lesson. (Parents are also encouraged to visit the site weekly to see what their children are being taught.) The “Sunday Sermon” site can be found at http://bagkfc.org/ssermon/ .

I believe that the many of the children are retaining at least some of what we are teaching. I enjoy hearing parents tell me that their child is excited about coming to church and shares what happened with them. I have even talked to teachers at the public schools that have heard a “rerun” of what we talked about on Sunday.

We don’t have an exact way to measure how much the kids are learning. By using a combination of questions, the attitude of the children, and feedback from parents/teachers – we get a pretty good idea of what the children are retaining.

Normally sometime before the “lesson time”, we do a skit or show a video that hints at what the lesson is going to be about. The skit never really tells the story, but it is intended to get the kids to start thinking. I usually refer to the pre-lesson warmup sometime during the lesson to reinforce the truth we are trying to teach.

The Sunday before last, we were talking about the arrest, trial, and torture of Jesus. I did a skit that day with my son and his girlfriend(kind of?). My son, David, was on trial and sitting on a stool. His girlfriend, Kayla was standing to one side as the jury/accuser/. I was standing slightly in front and playing the part of the judge/defense. My son was accused of taking cookies without permission. Everytime I pointed out that he could not have taken the cookies, Kayla would yell “you’re guilty” and hit David with a pool noodle. We did this for a couple of minutes with some of the kids cheering for Kayla and others saying that it wasn’t fair. To conclude the skit, I announced that since it was the second Sunday of the month, I was allowed to release David if the people agreed. Kayla and “her followers” (who were not prompted or pre-selected) wanted David punished. Kayla pushed David off the stage with a promise of more punishment to come.

After the offering time and bookmark time, I talked to the kids about Jesus being arrested, put on trial, and tortured. I told them how Jesus had been hit while He was being questioned. I emphasized that Jesus never really did anything wrong and that He went through this for us. We talked about how Jesus could have had angels come down to rescue Him at any time, but He didn’t do it because He loved us. Near the end of the service I asked the kids what they thought the lesson was about. Several of them responded together that they thought Jesus was framed.

When service ended and all the kids had left, I sat down to prop my feet up and drink a Pepsi. This is my normal post-service routine where I can relax and reflect on the service.

One of the girls that was in kids’ chapel came running back in the room yelling “Brother Allen – I figured it out!” . When I asked what she figured out, she said she knew what the skit meant – I was all the judges that saw Jesus, David was Jesus, and Kayla was all the people that accused Jesus and had Him put to death. Before I could respond, the little girl got tears in her eyes and told me that she was one of those people. She said that now she knew that Jesus died for her because Jesus knew she was going to do wrong things. She wanted to thank Jesus for dying for her and tell Him she was sorry for all the things that He went through for her. Her mother walked over and we all prayed together.

How many times do we wonder if the kids really understand what we are trying to teach them?  I know that I ask that question of myself frequently and got an answer to it that day.

Something clicked for one little girl that day and I was very glad that she shared it with me.