I was thinking too small

This could not have been orchestrated.

The setting was a 5th-6th grade event at Horizon Christian Fellowship on Friday night. We took a handful of kids down, and I drove two. One was a ministry regular, the other a friend he invited. Three hours later, the inviter and I were engaged with the invitee in a deep discussion about sin, forgiveness, and eternal life.

Experiences like these a real shot in the arm. I had lamented to a co-worker a couple of weeks ago that much of the work in ministry has little to do with the gospel. You do a lot of arranging, organizing, troubleshooting, and envisioning - and you hope that work is facilitating the spread of the gospel, but a lot of it is labor without any apparent fruit.

And then...bam! The opportunity to articulate the heart of God's purpose falls in your lap, and you balance the euphoria with wondering why that can't always happen.

The answer is complicated, but the crux of it is that we minister to individuals. Each brings his or her own set of preconceptions and experiences and family backgrounds and level of emotional maturity and myriad other factors that can affect spiritual interest and readiness. The ideal is that a person who is at the point of spiritual seeking will just then encounter the church. The reality is that churches and ministries contain lots of people who for various reasons are spiritually disinterested, unmotivated, or turned off.

So what is the job of a ministry like ours - or a church in general, for that matter? Is the mission to key in on those who are "ripe", so to speak, and to get them across the finish line, as many as possible? Or is it to walk alongside a kid until and after he or she is ready - if ever?

The mistake, I think, is in thinking that's an either/or question. But if we are - if I am - not careful, ministries can become focused on one to the exclusion of the other. I was guilty of this Friday night - I was thinking too small. In my mind, we were attending an "outreach", and I'd been to enough to know to keep my expectations low. Outreach = high on fun, lots of non-Christians, some soft references to Jesus and a closing prayer. My own expectations limited God - until he came roaring through to remind me that so much of what we want to engineer isn't really in our control anyhow.

So where's the balance? I'm not sure there is one. Just when we think we've created the "ideal" environment, and controlled for all the factors, the unexpected happens to throw the balance off. But these thoughts stand out:

We need to cast a wide net. The gospel message doesn't need to be made relevant - it is relevant, by nature, and therefore people outside the churched community are just as ready for it as people on the inside.

We need to be longsuffering with our kids' growth. I am really amused reading the marketing materials that come from publishers of Christian Ed materials. "Your kids will grow spiritually" or "Your kids' lives will change as they learn the word of God"...how in the world can they promise that? We can prepare the soil, we can plant seeds and water, but only God makes it grow. It's unwise to map out the end product of our input as if spiritual growth was a process of A+B=C, and similarly, to demand that kids mature spiritually according to our timetable.

We need to reconsider how we gauge success. What constitutes spiritual growth? What are our own assumptions and biases about what undergirds spiritual formation? Are we satisfied with "right answers" regardless of whether those answers are evidenced in a child's life?

Are we providing enough and the right opportunities for our kids to use their Christianity? Do we bring them into enough contact with the non-Christian and non-affluent world? Have we too narrowly prescribed the outlets available to them? Do we know how to capitalize on teachable moments?

"Expect great things from God! Attempt great things for God!" -- William Carey, missionary to India and Father of Modern Missions

Making the Net Safe for Kids

Quiz time:

1. Are you ROFL?
2. What's the difference between MySpace and Facebook?
3. What's a buddy list?
4. Is Ebaum's World a good place for kids to hang out?

If you faltered on any of the above, you need to come to the seminar on Internet Safety April 30. But for that matter, if you have a home computer at all, you need to come to the seminar on Internet Safety April 30.

The internet is great. I don't know how we got along without it. But parents scarcely appreciate how vital the internet becomes to a teenager's social life. The day is coming when your kid will be eager to travel beyond disney.com and nick.com. As a parent, you need to know about chat rooms, instant messaging, social networking sites, and other places a pre-teen is probably not yet interested in frequenting.

Do you need a filter? How do they work? Is file sharing ok? All of these questions and more will be answered at this presentation, featuring guest speakers Brian and Julie Dixon.

Plan to join us in the 4th-6th grade room - Room 100 - on Monday, April 30 at 7 pm. Need more information? Contact April in Marriage and Family Ministries, at april@northcoastcalvary.org.

And if nothing else, you'll get to spend some time among fellow parents who are walking the same road you are, which is something we're trying to do more and more of.

OK, here are the answers, in reverse order:

4. Ebaum's World is a site with games, prank phone calls, videos, and other comedy items. Some are appropriate for pre-teens, but a lot of it is not. (Many of the funny videos you've been e-mailed are archived there.)

3. A buddy list is used in instant messaging programs, like AOL Instant Messenger. By glancing at it, you can tell who is available to talk, who is "away", and who is signed off.

2. Both are used by young people to stay in touch and express themselves, but Facebook is more commonly used by college students.

1. ROFL is internet shorthand for "Rolling on the Floor Laughing."

And if that's what you're doing now because you went 0 for 4 on the quiz, you really need this seminar!

And Now, The End

This week we entered uncharted waters in our class: End Times. If the questions we got from kids are any indication, we've struck a chord.

Kids are curious about heaven. They want to know to know if they'll see their pets, play video games, have bodies, and be able to fly. It captures their imaginations, and that's a great thing.

I don't know about you, but our Sunday School never got to this stuff. Each year started with Abraham (maybe Noah), finished Jesus in time for Easter, and saved something about Paul for VBS. Revelation was the stuff of mystery. Our youth group got to see "A Thief in the Night", but that was before I got there. So End Times remained cloudy, unknown and a little spooky.

But the truth is, End Times are not scary. They're not. And that's one of the themes of our series, which will carry us through the rest of the school year.

Here are the "Big Ideas" we want to communicate through the next 8 weeks:

1. God has a BIG plan, and the life you live while on the earth is only the beginning.
2. "God is with us" will take on a whole new meaning. Spiritually, God is with us now, yes, but when the Old Earth has passed away and God "makes all things new" (Revelation 21:5), God will actually live among his people. It's a tough thing for an 11-year-old to grasp why that's significant, and why life with God trumps life with video games, but that's what we're pressing in on.
3. The End Times are exciting, not scary. The tribulation is scary. The deception of the nations is scary. But it all has a purpose - the execution of God's justice on the earth and the establishment of the new, eternal Heaven and Earth, where sin and evil are gone and there is no more "death or mourning or crying or pain". So...for that reason, we are teaching the End Times backwards, which is to say that we are starting at the end of the story and working our way back to now. The progression looks like this:

• The New Earth and Heaven will be absolutely perfect places
• In order to create the New Heaven and New Earth, the old earth must be rid of sin
• In order to rid the world of sin and evil, it must be judged
• In order to judge the world, the judge - who is Jesus - must return to the world
• The world will receive judgment and consequences for its rebellion - but - believers will be spared from this

4. Christians disagree about the timing and sequence of End Times events.

One more note: when you talk about End Times with your kid, it's ok to say "I don't know". I'll be doing that a lot. For one thing, the Bible isn't clear on when everything will happen or how or why. For another, many of their questions reveal an innocence about the nature of eternity or God's holiness or the sin and corruption of the world. Who can blame them? Kids just don't tend to think beyond the here and now. That's why these are, truly, uncharted waters. And if we can get them to think for a few minutes about what heaven is and why in the world anyone would want to go there and why it's a great thing to be with God and why we're limited in our ability to experience God while here on the earth...well, that's a really good thing.

The Five Things Your Preteen Knows About Sex

So what do we make of four 5th grade students in Louisiana who recently reportedly engaged in sexual activity while their classroom was left unattended for 20 minutes? (The story is here) And the Indiana 6th graders in December who had sex in shop class while another stood watch? (Read about that one here)

Are these gross aberrations? An example of what exceptionally undisciplined kids do when left to their own devices? A sign of the times? A trend?

I think it's hard to generalize from two incidents and say that they "mean" anything on a national scale. But, they should be a wake up call to parents on opposite ends of a spectrum: those who deny the consequences of sexualizing children and those who are naïve about preteens' interest in and knowledge about sex.

Most pre-teens are not unaware of sex. To be sure, it's a mystery, off-limits, and misconceptions abound. But as the age of the onset of puberty has dropped, exposure to sexually-themed TV shows, music, and movies has increased, and cultural taboos against pre-marital and extra-marital sex have eroded, the buffer between kids and sex has become very thin. There is a cost to unrelenting exposure to sex - it becomes normalized at younger and younger ages. At the same time, we are neglecting to teach values in any systematic way. As a result, we have extremely unsophisticated kids entering what used to be an adults-only world of sexual imagery and temptation. And, as Christians, we are expecting them to weather that storm for a decade or more until they are married.

How do we, as parents and Christian educators, respond to these new realities? First of all, our level of shock and alarm cannot be the engine that drives our reaction. Sex apart from a marriage commitment is sin, at whatever age. From a worldly perspective, we might be less moved if the students in question had been 17 and having sex at home, or 21 and hooking up at a college party. But from a Biblical perspective, that misses it: a Biblical view of sex and morality has nothing to do with age and everything to do with lifelong commitment (which, needless to say, no 11-year-old and few 17- or 21-year-olds can make).

What we need is a comprehensive body of knowledge and values dealing with love, sex, commitment, and purity that we pass on to kids as they mature. I can't tell you what the "right age" is talk with your kid about sex, except to say that it needs to be an ongoing dialogue, not one blast of information, and that school programs are generally years too late in what they present and awkward in their attempts to present it in a value-neutral way.

"But my kid isn't interested in girls (or boys) yet." That's a valid consideration. Too much information too soon can be overwhelming, creating a false sense of security in parents - "we've had that talk" - when in reality the message wasn't internalized because the kid couldn't relate. But the other consideration is that by the time a kid does become interested in the opposite sex, they have already formed a value about sex. If you wait until the wind starts to blow to protect your house from a hurricane, you still might survive, but wouldn't you feel better if all you had to do was execute the plan already made?

And that's what you're doing when you talk with your kids about sex before they become teenagers - you are constructing the plan and the defenses that will help guide them through adolescence. The trust and rapport you would hope to have with your future teenager is being built now.

Which leads me to the five things your preteen does know about sex:
1. They know whether their parents are able to talk openly to them about it
2. They know if their parents consider it dirty or shameful
3. They know what sort of moral standards they are held to on other issues ("My parents don't care what I do." or, at the other extreme, "I am expected to be perfect.")
4. They know whether mom and dad are easy to come to when they have a problem
5. They know whether mom and dad can talk about values with them without dictating or sermonizing

If you suspect the answers to numbers 4 and 5 above to be no, here are some things you can do right now:
+ Be the person who puts them to bed, every night
+ Have family dinners together without the television on
+ Ask them their opinions
+ Learn to listen non-judgmentally
+ And most importantly: clarify your own values when it comes to sex, so that when they do ask, you can give a clear message. Think about it: beyond, "Don't...yet", what is your message?

Wanted: The Right Bible for Your Kid

Time magazine's cover story last week was about school districts that are beginning to offer classes on the Bible. It's not a surprise to know that many irreligious Americans are ignorant of basic Bible facts and references: the names of the Gospels, "An eye for an eye", the Sermon on the Mount. What's more shocking is the numbers of Christians who don't know those things. (Read the article here.)

So what's the best Bible for your kid? Honestly, whichever one they'll read.

Fortunately, there are lots of Bible products out there now that are specifically geared for children, pre-teens, and teenagers. Kids don't have to be stuck with text-only or translations that are written at adult reading levels. Here are the Bibles we showed in class this weekend, and the church bookstore carries or can order all of them:

Personal Compact bibles. These are pocket-sized, leather bound, and come with a variety of covers. They are New Living Translation (easy to read, see below) and have several pages at the front which give practical Biblical guidance on subjects like family, forgiveness, goals, etc.

The ICB Illustrated Bible. Presents the Bible - full text - accompanied by panels of pictures. It's like reading a comic book. The Illustrated Children's Bible can be purchased book-by-book or as an entire volume. Great for kids who can read, but for whom pictures are helpful.

The Picture Bible. Similar to the ICB, but it is selective - that is, you are not getting a full translation of the Bible. Instead, it is a volume of Bible stories, re-worded so they are easy to understand. Fully illustrated, and fully in color. Don't let the fact that this isn't "The Bible" keep you from it - if you have a child who cannot read well or doesn't like to read, this is not a bad alternative.

Bible 'Zines. A fairly recent innovation, a "zine" is a Bible in magazine format. "Refuel" is aimed at young teenage boys (12-15), "Revolve" at the same age of girls. You get the entire New Testament text, but it's interspersed with sidebars, like Q&A with experts, character profiles, lists of do's and don'ts…in other words, it reads just like a magazine. There is also a version aimed at 8-to-12-year-olds.

Similar to the Bible 'zines is a paperback targeted at pre-teen girls called "between - a girl's guide to life". This is not a Bible, but a series of articles on relationships, faith, and healthy self-image.

A word about Translations
There are two basic kinds of translations. One tries to get as close to the actual words in the original Bible texts (technically known as "formal equivalence"). The other tries to communicate the meaning of the passage or book, even if they have to sacrifice direct translation of the words (functional equivalence). Most translations are a blend of the two. Strictly speaking there is no such thing as a direct, "word-for-word" translation, since some words don't translate and the sentence structure of the original languages is different.

Generally, the translations that try for word-for-word accuracy (such as the King James Version, the NASB, or the Revised Standard Version) are too hard for kids to understand. They use outdated language and awkward construction that is not easily understandable to an elementary school student. Even the NIV, which is the translation of choice among most adult evangelicals, is written at too high a reading level for most kids to easily comprehend.

I like the New Living Translation for kids because it's written at a 5th grade reading level. The language and expressions should be understandable to any boy or girl who is reading at grade level by the end of their 5th grade year. Other easy translations include the Contemporary English Version (CEV) and the English Standard Version (ESV).

What about the Message? I'm a fan. The Message is a paraphrase of the Bible - while it presents every verse, it doesn't aim for direct translation, but rather tries to communicate the ideas of each passage. Expressions & dialogue are presented in modern language. It gives a very "now" feeling to the Bible, which could be good for kids who have a hard time with the Bible because of its cultural and historical setting.