Children and Church

Excuse some generalizations

Church isn't really designed with kids in mind....or their parents. OK that's HUGE generalization. Let me point out some things that have come to my mind in the past couple months or so.

TIME. Why would we have church at 11am? That's just prior to lunch and naps? That's right when kids get cranky. And we expect them to sit quietly? Yeah right. I will grant you that many churches now have an earlier service which could conquer this problem....but then you would have the problem of getting children up/fed/dressed and to church by 8:30 or whatever it is.

SPACE. We really don't want children to be part of worship. (I know another broad generality.) Think of it this way though......we hope we can keep them quiet for the first 15 minutes of worship, or until the junior sermon, or until they're dismissed to the nursery or second hour or whatever it is. We hide them away and then when they're 5 or 6 or whatever they're finally allowed to sit in church with us.....but they don't know how to do that....because they've never been to church. How do children learn how to worship God? What would happen if in your church there was a small area that was like a plastic half wall......with no chairs in it.....where kids could just stand up and move about? And parents could sit on the floor with their kids? It would be expected that these kids would make noise on occasion......but it would be expected by everyone. They would be part of the worship.....which lead me to another point.

STYLE. If we created space in worship for kids....we would be required (and challenged) to make worship a little something for everyone. We would instantly be forced to break down our high and might airs and meet the God who said, "Let the children come to me." in a new way. We would be forced to sing Jesus Loves Me from time to time.....which often times we forget is the biggest truth of our lives. Maybe we....(gasp).....do motions to songs. Perhaps our sermons wouldn't use words like justification and sanctification and covenanted and dispensational........because quite frankly most people who've grown up in church don't really know what all that means anyway.

SNACKS. Ok this one isn't very real. It's just something I think would be cool. At 11am, I'm ready for a snack too. Many a Sunday I want to eat one of my sons crackers, but have resisted because I worried to much about what would people would say about that rebellious youth pastor.

I don't know what category this is.....but can we let boys just be boys! I don't care what anyone says....boys and girls are different. God made them that way.....as a church let's stop screwing it up! I'm not making excuses here because I believe that boys can be taught to sit and listen and pay attention.....but let's also remember that they're boys and that they move and make noise. Let me relate a short story here....

We took Corban to a local VBS for a night. He and 5 other boys were in a class together. That's 6 boys under the age of 5 years old! They take the boys into the "nursery" room. The room is filled with toys. The first thing the boys want to do is check stuff out, to play, to have fun. NO! It's time to sit quietly and color a page. Then we're going to play a no activity game where you stand in a line and be quiet. Then we're going to color another page. Then it's snack time. Then guess what? Color another page.

Can I say that my boy (and most of the other boys too) was ready to crawl out of his skin by the second coloring activity far less the third. He simply refused to do the last one at all. Just let them play! Look I'm all about lesson time. I'm all about coloring. But if they would've let the boys play for 5 minutes and then said, "OK now we're going to do this thing" they might have had better results instead of mild anarchy.

Hiatus

Sorry for the unannounced hiatus. My apologies for all who kept tuning in here hoping to find something new and haven't for weeks on end. I'll have some new stuff up in the next day or so. Probably several posts in a row to catch everyone up.

Quickly.....we're all still alive.

yep

Marjorie doesn't like my random stuff posts. She says they're too ADD.......except that I have ADD and that's the way I think sometimes....so here we go again.

-I'm headed out tomorrow with some students to work at the World Vision Distribution Center in Sewickley. I'm pretty stoked to be going back there. Your prayers are much appreciated.

-Since that's on my mind....I've been meaning to share this link with you all. It'll take some time to go through this so save it for when you have a little bit. It's an Aids Experience. It is very much like the One Life Revolution walk through tour they had at some of their big events. It's pretty amazing.

-How is it that "the man in the yellow hat" was able to keep George? He was a complete imbecile. George is always wandering off and creating havoc and yet he's never put in a zoo or taken away. If a parent let their child do 1/100th of that stuff they'd be in child custody like that (snaps fingers). It just seems silly.

-Pray for my dad please. He's having some minor medical problems but he's also going through some tough stuff. Thanks.

-It's fun watching Corban get sense of humor. His latest thing is to call everything by it's wrong name or color. Then he'll look at you like "did you catch that? I called it by the wrong name?" and give you a goofy look. Then usually he cracks up laughing.

-This Friday is a big day for us. It marks one year that our son has been home. God is good.

-If and when we buy a house....it's going to have central air.....so says me.

The Warren Phenomena

Tomorrow is July 4th (for those keeping score at home). Independence Day here in the good old USA. Now I love the country I live in.....but I'm not over the top either. I won't be going to Old Navy to buy their 2007 flag T-shirt, there won't be bunting hanging from our house, nothing like that. I've been enough countries to realize international perception of the US and our egotism. I also live with a Canadian and a little Ethiopian boy.

NONE of that has anything to do with this blog post though.

Every year on the 4th Warren has a parade. A big parade. Not a great parade, but it's big. AND it's a big deal. How big of a deal? Well most of the population of the county comes out for the parade. People you'll never see the rest of the year go to the parade. Since we're incredibly rural, that makes for an interesting crew of people.

Our parade is so big that no other town within 45 minutes to and hour of us has a parade. Any band that's going to play comes to Warren. Any service organization that's going to have a float does it in Warren. OK so what? Lots of towns have parades. Yes.

Here's the Warren Phenomena though. This parade is such a big deal to the people around here that they begin lining their chairs up along the parade route up to a week in advance. Seriously. Some tie their chairs to parking meters or street lamps. Some use chain. Some just set them there. And amazingly enough most 99% of them are left alone.

It's like people are saving their place in line for the new iPhone or something. "Don't want to miss out on the good stuff!"

I talked with a friend this morning who works downtown and he said there was a family sitting in their chairs most of yesterday....like they were seriously waiting. Please remember that the parade is still just under 24 hours from the time I'm writing this!

This isn't the NY Yankees winning the pennant. This isn't astronauts returning home after walking on the moon. This is Warren PA 4th of July parade. Come on! It cracks me up every year....and I've now see around 24 of them. Only in Warren.

Random thought Monday

Just a bunch of random thoughts today.

- To keep you up to date on the scooter decision.......I decided I'm too close to being done. I need to know at least if it'll kick over. It turned out we were able to temporarily fix the problem parts. There is hope ahead. Maybe even as early as tonight we could kick it over. We'll see.

-We don't often splurge on ourselves. A couple weeks ago though we did. I bought a snow-cone maker....and it rocks! We have 6 different flavors as of right now. It's the coolest thing. No more hand crank action like the old-school "Snoopy snowcone maching". This baby's electric. We took it to my dad's 60th birthday party and cranked out snow cones for everyone in about 3 minutes. It was the hit of the party. All for only 25 bucks!

-This a funny collection of real people and their avatars. Funny how life doesn't always imitate "art".

-I just noticed that my list of books and CD's on my wishlist at Amazon has grown considerably. Lack of time and prioritization (is that a word?) is to blame I believe.

-Even though I'm frustrated with NHL free agency and money (see yesterdays post), I'm also slightly obsessed watching who is going where. For the best way to do that, you can't look to ESPN or yahoo sports......you have to use a Canadian source of course. TSN.com.....they have a up to the minute blog rolling of signings here.

-Have I mentioned lately how much I love spending time with my son. He's just fun to be around (most of the time)

Disgruntled

So today is July 1st. Well there's not much left of it but still July 1st non-the-less. To my in-law family(and anyone else who might relish it) I say Happy Canada Day.

However July 1st is something else. It's the first day of free agency in the NHL. To sum up briefly. Since the lock out free agency has been a joke because teams haven't had money to sign players to big contracts because of a low salary cap. Last year and again this past week the league has raised the salary cap significantly. After the lock out the cap was at 39 million. This week it jumped to 50 million.

So what is the end result? Players are now holding out for much more money. And more importantly.......The Buffalo Sabres just lost both of their team captains today to free agency. Daniel Briere signed a giant contract with the dreaded Flyers and Chris Drury signed with the Rangers. UGH!

I am very very frustrated with the NHL right now. The league is headed in this horrible downward spiral.