This weekend finds me back home, in North Dakota, where my dad is being honored for his nearly 40 years of service as a coach at the local high school; sort of a big honor in a small town. About a year and a half ago, his career was similarly recognized at the state level. It was at that time that I wrote an essay called "The Incredible Influence of Dad", parts of which I've excerpted this week, below.
Of course the thing about Halls of Fame or honorary banquets or tributes or toasts or awards presentations is that they are momentary, and they are one-dimensional. If you want to know who a person really is, it can only be pieced together from the firsthand knowledge of those who've spent lots of time at their side. I suspect any kid whose parent has ever done anything noteworthy knows this: awards recognize what someone has done, but only begin to scratch the surface of who they are.
I recount this because I imagine there are parents reading this right now who are wrapped up in a rat race, gunning for some promotion or leveraging their own advancement or trying to cement a big deal or hoping to impress some power broker. Let me assure you: where you go professionally, as important as it is to you, won't matter nearly as much to your kids. They already know how great you are.
Dad decided early what he wanted to do with his life, and he followed through with a steadfastness that is rare and admirable. His three kids - myself and two sisters - have already proven unable to do what he did, which is to hold down the same position at the same school and do it well for 39 years. (We have each moved in and out of (and in one case, back into) education.) Teaching is tiring - physically and mentally. Coaching at any level is emotional. It helps to have a winning team, but Dad's teams didn't always win. They were occasionally great, often average, and sometimes terrible. The most we ever felt this was some weekend grumpiness now and then, but by Sunday night he'd bounce back to his normal self and when you heard him whistling and grading papers you knew all was well again. And when, in 2006, it was time to be done, he was done. There was nothing sentimental or magic to him about reaching the 40-year plateau.
I'm not one who happens to believe that we can fairly evaluate ourselves: who we think we are and who others perceive us to be are usually quite different, and the truth is usually closer to what others see (I find that we tend to be too harsh or too charitable towards ourselves). So as to how much of my dad I carry in me, you'd have to ask someone else. I can, however, readily recognize his influence on my sisters.
All three of us siblings are pretty pragmatic. That comes straight from Dad. If it didn't work, he'd try to fix it, and if he couldn't fix it, well, you'd have to live without it. "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission" was his motto, and it was rare that he couldn't get one or the other. His tastes are simple (so are each of ours) and he never displayed an appetite for wealth. He fought for the underdog. Wrestling sometimes attracted kids who were rough around the edges, and he welcomed the chance to give them something constructive to do - "Maybe this will change them," he'd say. When we played softball with the neighborhood kids, he developed a rotation system that constantly circulated players from batting to fielding and as a result there were no teams and no losers and no score - just fun, which was all anyone wanted. As the head of the teacher's union he advocated for fair pay, and in later years, when he himself was near the top of the salary scale, he pushed for pay increases to go to starting teachers rather than veterans, saying, "They need it more than we do." He felt strongly about that. My sisters have carried that seed of justice into their own lives. As the only boy in the family, I was the only one to wrestle for him (girls didn't wrestle, not in his world; he felt especially strongly about that!). While Mom ran the day-to-day operations of our house - the meals, the school shopping, the scheduling - and also much of the discipline, when Dad spoke up to discipline, you knew it was serious and that was it.
Men, especially great men, are driven by vision. They imagine what could be and set out to achieve or establish it. Sometimes the task takes precedence over the people involved, and the product is a damaging ambition. But it's also that doggedness in men that suits them to be good dads. Men - and dads - dream big. They're wired to lead and conquer. The effect of such vision on kids can be powerful. For my dad and I, this played out in the realm of academic science competitions, another passion of his that started 23 years ago and continues to this day. Spurred by what we saw at the national level, our creations got each year better and ever-more complex, and we did in fact win national awards for them. What I learned from this was to set my sights high, to seek out the best and then better it.
What would happen if every man pursued the future and the health and the reputation of his kids as doggedly as he pursued achievement in his own life? What if dads turned the power of their vision onto the direction of their sons and daughters? Some of us fear the answer, based on our experience with dads who vicariously lived through their kids, pushing them in directions and at speeds they didn't want to go. But what if, at the same time a dad was training his vision on the future of his kids, he was equipped with the qualities of empathy and compassion and tenderness - in a word, his humanity - so that he developed a keen sense of when to push and when to hold back? The answer is, you'd have a really great dad; but not only that, you'd have a really great kid.
We need more dads like that, and the church has a role in calling men to that level of responsibility. Honestly, we can imagine and build great cities, industrial plants, robotic technology, and space travel; can we not also cast a vision for kids that lifts them above despair, boredom, self-debasement, and a future as pawns in this consumerist melee?
Info, articles, and thoughts for parents of kids at North Coast Calvary Chapel.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Why We'll Walk
Can a couple of hours in a parking lot gain kids empathy, a feeling of belonging, and provide some relief for the homeless in our area? We're betting on it.
During our work on Kids Games this summer, it came to our attention that homeless people spend a lot of time simply walking. They walk from one service provider to another, from wherever they happen to be camping out to less isolated places, and they walk because people don't want them hanging around, and so call the police in order to get them to move on. With that much walking, and having no place to launder clothes, a homeless man or woman can quickly wear through a pair of socks or shoes.
Part of the work of Oceanside's Bread of Life and Brother Benno's is to distribute clean, soft cotton socks. Socks are cheap, but an important commodity for people who spend most of the day walking outside. That's where the idea for our walk-a-thon was born.
Kids who take the challenge will agree to walk for two hours on Saturday morning, October 3. The walk will be held in our church parking lot, and kids will raise sponsorship money, which will then be used to buy new socks which Bread of Life and Benno's will distribute.
Here are three tangible reasons you should encourage your child's involvement:
1. ...because they walk. In 1995, Robert Wuthnow identified some factors of community service that either did or did not increase empathy in teenagers who were performing the service (his book was titled, "Learning to Care". What is important, Wuthnow said, is that kids personally identify with those who are suffering. It's not enough to care about them in the abstract. The best vehicle for growing compassion is direct contact with the recipient of your care. This is why so many families in our congregation believe in the power of having their kids serve with them during a meal at Bread of Life. Seeing the problem is very powerful. If they can also hear what's going on in the lives of homeless people, even better.
So what can we do with a walk-a-thon to create empathy? Granted, safety dictates that our environment be pretty artificial. College students and reporters have immersed themselves in the homeless experience by actually living as a homeless person for days or weeks, and their accounts make for moving reading. But we can give kids a small sense of how long (and maybe, how boring) it is to walk for two hours straight, and then extrapolate that out to what it must feel like to walk for hours a day, and for weeks at a time. Will this short time window transfer into long-term empathy? We'll see.
2. ...to make connections within our ministry. Pre-teens are entering a developmental time when they are crowd-conscious and increasingly aware of their place in crowds. "Who am I?" is less a question that is answered in terms of observable, personal characteristics, and more in relation to "how others see me" and "where I fit" among peers. Events like these, which are less formally structured than a Sunday morning program, help break down walls and give kids the shared experiences that they can refer back to as they carve out a sense of "us" at church. You want that. Camps, sleepovers, bowling outings, small groups - all of these are venues for a kid to loosen up and fit in.
3. ...because service is a habit that promotes spiritual growth. A recent study that appeared in The Journal of Youth Ministry examined whether performing acts of service led to greater participation in what the study called, "Christian faith practices", or whether kids who were already serious about their faith tended to be the ones who performed acts of service. The findings are promising: those who were involved in ministry to their communities did, in fact, tend to have more robust spiritual lives - they prayed, read the Bible, attended services, talked about what they believed, worked for justice, and so on. We tend to program with those practices in view, that if we can get kids to "do Christian things" it will propel them to tangible expressions of their faith. The National Study of Youth and Religion in 2003 found that 50% of churched teenagers had gone on a youth convention or retreat, but only 30% had engaged in church-sponsored missions or service work. It could be, though, that the effect of properly-structured service opportunities awakens something in teenagers (and all of us) that stokes spiritual development.
I hope you'll encourage your child to gather pledges and come out and walk with us on October 3. It's about helping the homeless, yes, but it's also about helping them.
During our work on Kids Games this summer, it came to our attention that homeless people spend a lot of time simply walking. They walk from one service provider to another, from wherever they happen to be camping out to less isolated places, and they walk because people don't want them hanging around, and so call the police in order to get them to move on. With that much walking, and having no place to launder clothes, a homeless man or woman can quickly wear through a pair of socks or shoes.
Part of the work of Oceanside's Bread of Life and Brother Benno's is to distribute clean, soft cotton socks. Socks are cheap, but an important commodity for people who spend most of the day walking outside. That's where the idea for our walk-a-thon was born.
Kids who take the challenge will agree to walk for two hours on Saturday morning, October 3. The walk will be held in our church parking lot, and kids will raise sponsorship money, which will then be used to buy new socks which Bread of Life and Benno's will distribute.
Here are three tangible reasons you should encourage your child's involvement:
1. ...because they walk. In 1995, Robert Wuthnow identified some factors of community service that either did or did not increase empathy in teenagers who were performing the service (his book was titled, "Learning to Care". What is important, Wuthnow said, is that kids personally identify with those who are suffering. It's not enough to care about them in the abstract. The best vehicle for growing compassion is direct contact with the recipient of your care. This is why so many families in our congregation believe in the power of having their kids serve with them during a meal at Bread of Life. Seeing the problem is very powerful. If they can also hear what's going on in the lives of homeless people, even better.
So what can we do with a walk-a-thon to create empathy? Granted, safety dictates that our environment be pretty artificial. College students and reporters have immersed themselves in the homeless experience by actually living as a homeless person for days or weeks, and their accounts make for moving reading. But we can give kids a small sense of how long (and maybe, how boring) it is to walk for two hours straight, and then extrapolate that out to what it must feel like to walk for hours a day, and for weeks at a time. Will this short time window transfer into long-term empathy? We'll see.
2. ...to make connections within our ministry. Pre-teens are entering a developmental time when they are crowd-conscious and increasingly aware of their place in crowds. "Who am I?" is less a question that is answered in terms of observable, personal characteristics, and more in relation to "how others see me" and "where I fit" among peers. Events like these, which are less formally structured than a Sunday morning program, help break down walls and give kids the shared experiences that they can refer back to as they carve out a sense of "us" at church. You want that. Camps, sleepovers, bowling outings, small groups - all of these are venues for a kid to loosen up and fit in.
3. ...because service is a habit that promotes spiritual growth. A recent study that appeared in The Journal of Youth Ministry examined whether performing acts of service led to greater participation in what the study called, "Christian faith practices", or whether kids who were already serious about their faith tended to be the ones who performed acts of service. The findings are promising: those who were involved in ministry to their communities did, in fact, tend to have more robust spiritual lives - they prayed, read the Bible, attended services, talked about what they believed, worked for justice, and so on. We tend to program with those practices in view, that if we can get kids to "do Christian things" it will propel them to tangible expressions of their faith. The National Study of Youth and Religion in 2003 found that 50% of churched teenagers had gone on a youth convention or retreat, but only 30% had engaged in church-sponsored missions or service work. It could be, though, that the effect of properly-structured service opportunities awakens something in teenagers (and all of us) that stokes spiritual development.
I hope you'll encourage your child to gather pledges and come out and walk with us on October 3. It's about helping the homeless, yes, but it's also about helping them.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
How (and why) to Use the HomePage
In the past several weeks, kids in 4th-6th grade have learned how worries are like balloons, how holiness is and isn't like fruit hanging from a tree, and how salvation is like the adoption of an orphan. They learned how Esther was "in the right place at the right time", and how Paul showed that God uses unlikely people to fulfill his plan. But I deliberately misuse the word "learned" here. We teachers are fond of talking about "what we've learned" when they really are referring to "what was said". The learning depends on how the message is received and what's done with it after it's been spoken. And that is where the little half-sheet called the HomePage comes in.
We started distributing the HomePage almost three years ago. As stated at the top of each one, its mission is to give parents a jumping-off point for spiritual discussions with their pre-teen, and to serve as a communications link between the 4th-6th grade ministry and the families that we serve." Which is a fancy way of saying the page is one side announcements, one side discussion fodder. Here are some suggestions on why and how to use it.
Why discuss? Why not just tell on a Sunday morning and leave it at that? To understand that, we have to understand how teaching and learning intersect. Many people think that to teach effectively, the transmission of true information is sufficient. Transmitting ideas and information that are true is important, but it is not sufficient, not if you want to achieve the kind of alleigance and buy-in that transforms learners into thinkers and doers. Even on a rote level, kids will not remember most of what they've heard unless it is rehearsed. Of course, we can and should do better than rote. As religious educators we are constantly touching on themes like what it means to be human, to encounter the divine, to give our own lives away, to experience redemption. This demands far more of kids than having them mimic things or nod in assent - it must reach into their every day existence where contradictions between what is known to be true and what is actually lived as though it were true are exposed and reckoned with.
Every good Bible teacher knows this - you don't just teach the Bible for the sake of knowing the facts of the stories; you teach it because you believe the text still speaks today, that its message has some claim on the lives of the hearers, and you want to help them unearth it. Bound up in the idea of a "living and active" word of God is its ability to gnaw at us, to challenge us, to carry with us away from the setting where we received it. Spiritual truth transforms because it endures. We can try to escape the idea that humans are fallen, but we keep running into the reality. We can harbor fantasies of self-redemption, but those fantasies continually crumble.
So we must get learners to ponder, to re-visit, to digest and process ideas that are new if they are to internalize them. "Discussion" carries a threatening connotation to some people because they fear it's an invitation to relativism: if we "discuss" the idea that Jesus is the only way to God, we're opening the door for competing understandings and "that's your truth" kinds of sentiment. But that's not the kind of discussion I'm endorsing. Christian discussion starts with truth and grapples with it, resolving discrepancies, understanding implications, acknowledging difficulties, compensating for our own unbelief. That's healthy, and if done well, facilitates the process of integrating truth into our being. We want people - children included - to be about the work of reconciling the "official theology" with their own, personal, "vernacular" (that is, their "walking around") theology.
How to do it. With this purpose in mind, then, you should approach spiritual dialogue with your kids as a chance both to hear their heart and to share yours. I like the prescription that appeared in Children's Ministry Magazine just this month, urging parents to have spiritual discussions ALOT with their kids: "A" stands for "Ask how your child feels about the topic", "L" stands for "Listen without interrupting", "O" stands for "Open your heart (and your Bible if you need to)", and "T" stands for "Talk about your thoughts and feelings on the subject - and how they're shaped by God's Word." This simple acronym reminds you to let kids speak first and to share with - not lecture to - them.
Resist the urge to turn spiritual discussions into quiz sessions. Kids are keen to understanding when adults are hunting for "just right" answers, and they'll give them if they know it will get them out from under the microscope. For another thing, I don't think spiritual growth comes from regurgitating volumes of facts. To simply quiz a child about content is frustrating for you and for them and in any case does not invite them to engage in the kind of processing that connects head and heart. To this end, most of the questions on the HomePage are open-ended. A parent doesn't have to have been present for the message in order to participate in the dialogue. (Although if your kid is totally lost, an outline is available most weekends at http://surgenotes.blogspot.com/).
Express interest, both in what your child is learning and in what they're saying about it. Scan over the half-sheet before you begin so you're familiar with the main idea and the direction of the discussion. What are your own thoughts on the subject at hand? What do you wonder about? What do you wish you know, but didn't? Don't feel that you have to have all the answers, but give your child instead a sense that adults, too, grapple with applying Christian truth to life. If the topic of the week is why we should love our enemies, yes, it's good for kids to know that Jesus said it and that it comes from the Sermon on the Mount. But how much more powerful for them to hear their mom or dad talk through how they've struggled to love someone who's difficult, and what they did to persevere through it? You want, with spiritual discussion, to establish a climate not of spiritual perfectionism (because we're not) but of honesty and openness, where children and adults alike can narrate the process of living out their faith.
You'll get the best results if you spiritually dialogue with your kids regularly - that is, at the same time and in the same place, and do it every week. It may take time for your kids to trust that they really can say anything and that you're not just checking up on them to reward whether they were listening or not. Keep in mind that often when adults ask kids questions it's so that they can judge them: "Is your homework done?" "Did you clean your room?" "Have you practiced piano today?" "What's the capital of Delaware?" I'm convinced this is why most kids aren't comfortable conversing with adults, because they take what's meant to be a conversation starter (like, "What did you do today?") as the beginning of a line of interrogation. There may be times when you'll use questions in that way; but not during spiritual talks. You can "warm your kids up" to dialogue by making it an informal practice to ask them what they think about all kinds of things. This will pave the way for sharing of the stuff that really matters later on.
A caution: the older kids get, the more reticent they are to share spiritual insights? Why is this? Researchers David Hay and Rebecca Nye believe it may have to do with how adults react. Hay and Nye, in their work with school-aged children, found it difficult to get older kids to trust them enough to talk about spiritual things. Not only does "Right!" tend to curttail what kids will offer up (because it puts them in quiz mode), but adult responses that are overly gratuitous or that value the "cuteness" of what a child says rather than dignifying it tend in the long run to discourage kids from opening up. In other words, take kids and their contributions seriously. I so valued a camp conversation I once had with a boy who told me he'd looked up to the sky and seen a face that looked like Satan's scowling, and then another face that looked like God's, smiling. Our natural skepticism can easily dismiss or challenge his perception - from "Yeah, right" to "How does he know what Satan and God look like?" - but for me it was a window into his soul and a gateway to discussing spiritual reality that we wouldn't otherwise have had.
Kid learners aren't adult learners, and our goal shouldn't necessarily be to make them into that. With development will come the ability to sit still for longer periods, to think in highly abstract ways, to relate a speaker's experiences to our own, to expand their vocabulary. Our job is to work with what we've got, and at this age (every age, really), revisiting what was taught and inviting kids to reprocess is vital. We can, and should, put lots of effort into teaching. But we should never assume that a lesson well-organized, well-illustrated, and well-delivered will equal well-learned. To discern that, we must get inside kids' heads to see if what we meant to communicate made it through in the translation. And there's only one way to find out.
We started distributing the HomePage almost three years ago. As stated at the top of each one, its mission is to give parents a jumping-off point for spiritual discussions with their pre-teen, and to serve as a communications link between the 4th-6th grade ministry and the families that we serve." Which is a fancy way of saying the page is one side announcements, one side discussion fodder. Here are some suggestions on why and how to use it.
Why discuss? Why not just tell on a Sunday morning and leave it at that? To understand that, we have to understand how teaching and learning intersect. Many people think that to teach effectively, the transmission of true information is sufficient. Transmitting ideas and information that are true is important, but it is not sufficient, not if you want to achieve the kind of alleigance and buy-in that transforms learners into thinkers and doers. Even on a rote level, kids will not remember most of what they've heard unless it is rehearsed. Of course, we can and should do better than rote. As religious educators we are constantly touching on themes like what it means to be human, to encounter the divine, to give our own lives away, to experience redemption. This demands far more of kids than having them mimic things or nod in assent - it must reach into their every day existence where contradictions between what is known to be true and what is actually lived as though it were true are exposed and reckoned with.
Every good Bible teacher knows this - you don't just teach the Bible for the sake of knowing the facts of the stories; you teach it because you believe the text still speaks today, that its message has some claim on the lives of the hearers, and you want to help them unearth it. Bound up in the idea of a "living and active" word of God is its ability to gnaw at us, to challenge us, to carry with us away from the setting where we received it. Spiritual truth transforms because it endures. We can try to escape the idea that humans are fallen, but we keep running into the reality. We can harbor fantasies of self-redemption, but those fantasies continually crumble.
So we must get learners to ponder, to re-visit, to digest and process ideas that are new if they are to internalize them. "Discussion" carries a threatening connotation to some people because they fear it's an invitation to relativism: if we "discuss" the idea that Jesus is the only way to God, we're opening the door for competing understandings and "that's your truth" kinds of sentiment. But that's not the kind of discussion I'm endorsing. Christian discussion starts with truth and grapples with it, resolving discrepancies, understanding implications, acknowledging difficulties, compensating for our own unbelief. That's healthy, and if done well, facilitates the process of integrating truth into our being. We want people - children included - to be about the work of reconciling the "official theology" with their own, personal, "vernacular" (that is, their "walking around") theology.
How to do it. With this purpose in mind, then, you should approach spiritual dialogue with your kids as a chance both to hear their heart and to share yours. I like the prescription that appeared in Children's Ministry Magazine just this month, urging parents to have spiritual discussions ALOT with their kids: "A" stands for "Ask how your child feels about the topic", "L" stands for "Listen without interrupting", "O" stands for "Open your heart (and your Bible if you need to)", and "T" stands for "Talk about your thoughts and feelings on the subject - and how they're shaped by God's Word." This simple acronym reminds you to let kids speak first and to share with - not lecture to - them.
Resist the urge to turn spiritual discussions into quiz sessions. Kids are keen to understanding when adults are hunting for "just right" answers, and they'll give them if they know it will get them out from under the microscope. For another thing, I don't think spiritual growth comes from regurgitating volumes of facts. To simply quiz a child about content is frustrating for you and for them and in any case does not invite them to engage in the kind of processing that connects head and heart. To this end, most of the questions on the HomePage are open-ended. A parent doesn't have to have been present for the message in order to participate in the dialogue. (Although if your kid is totally lost, an outline is available most weekends at http://surgenotes.blogspot.com/).
Express interest, both in what your child is learning and in what they're saying about it. Scan over the half-sheet before you begin so you're familiar with the main idea and the direction of the discussion. What are your own thoughts on the subject at hand? What do you wonder about? What do you wish you know, but didn't? Don't feel that you have to have all the answers, but give your child instead a sense that adults, too, grapple with applying Christian truth to life. If the topic of the week is why we should love our enemies, yes, it's good for kids to know that Jesus said it and that it comes from the Sermon on the Mount. But how much more powerful for them to hear their mom or dad talk through how they've struggled to love someone who's difficult, and what they did to persevere through it? You want, with spiritual discussion, to establish a climate not of spiritual perfectionism (because we're not) but of honesty and openness, where children and adults alike can narrate the process of living out their faith.
You'll get the best results if you spiritually dialogue with your kids regularly - that is, at the same time and in the same place, and do it every week. It may take time for your kids to trust that they really can say anything and that you're not just checking up on them to reward whether they were listening or not. Keep in mind that often when adults ask kids questions it's so that they can judge them: "Is your homework done?" "Did you clean your room?" "Have you practiced piano today?" "What's the capital of Delaware?" I'm convinced this is why most kids aren't comfortable conversing with adults, because they take what's meant to be a conversation starter (like, "What did you do today?") as the beginning of a line of interrogation. There may be times when you'll use questions in that way; but not during spiritual talks. You can "warm your kids up" to dialogue by making it an informal practice to ask them what they think about all kinds of things. This will pave the way for sharing of the stuff that really matters later on.
A caution: the older kids get, the more reticent they are to share spiritual insights? Why is this? Researchers David Hay and Rebecca Nye believe it may have to do with how adults react. Hay and Nye, in their work with school-aged children, found it difficult to get older kids to trust them enough to talk about spiritual things. Not only does "Right!" tend to curttail what kids will offer up (because it puts them in quiz mode), but adult responses that are overly gratuitous or that value the "cuteness" of what a child says rather than dignifying it tend in the long run to discourage kids from opening up. In other words, take kids and their contributions seriously. I so valued a camp conversation I once had with a boy who told me he'd looked up to the sky and seen a face that looked like Satan's scowling, and then another face that looked like God's, smiling. Our natural skepticism can easily dismiss or challenge his perception - from "Yeah, right" to "How does he know what Satan and God look like?" - but for me it was a window into his soul and a gateway to discussing spiritual reality that we wouldn't otherwise have had.
Kid learners aren't adult learners, and our goal shouldn't necessarily be to make them into that. With development will come the ability to sit still for longer periods, to think in highly abstract ways, to relate a speaker's experiences to our own, to expand their vocabulary. Our job is to work with what we've got, and at this age (every age, really), revisiting what was taught and inviting kids to reprocess is vital. We can, and should, put lots of effort into teaching. But we should never assume that a lesson well-organized, well-illustrated, and well-delivered will equal well-learned. To discern that, we must get inside kids' heads to see if what we meant to communicate made it through in the translation. And there's only one way to find out.
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