Some Goals for Your 4th, 5th, or 6th grader

Last week I wrote about the Big Goal, helping kids draw near to God to love him now and for the rest of their lives. This closeness is especially important during times of important life decision making, which the next 10-15 years surely will be for them. And, I laid out some minor goals that we are striving for "in-room". But the fact remains that our "in-room" reach is so limited. We might have 20-30 hours of contact with the average kid in a year. What can be done in that kind of time?

The answer, fortunately, is not "nothing", but the extent of what a ministry program can do is often limited by the foundation a child brings to us. I can understand what Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 3, where he speaks of someone else building on the foundation that he laid. Churches are finish carpenters, not framers, and if the foundation is off or nonexistent, it's tough to do much finishing that will last, or matter.

So, I offer these things you can work to build in your child, that the "finishing" work of a church ministry might be maximized.

If your son or daughter is in 4th grade, you need to train them in how to make decisions. Lives are the products of millions of decisions. We reap what we sow. Everything from major life decisions - marriage, career, education, raising kids, buying a house - to mundane, everyday decisions end up shaping who we are and where we're going. Why is this spiritually significant? A teenage boy once told me, "I think becoming a Christian is one decision for Jesus, but living the Christian life is like a million decisions for Jesus." Good stuff. We are wanting kids to make a huge decision that will affect the course of their whole lives - a decision to follow Christ. How can they if they otherwise control nothing about their own lives because they never make a decision for themselves?

Here are some things I think a 4th grader can be reasonably trained and expected to do. A 4th grader should be able to keep their room clean and perform a regular set of home chores. A 4th grader should be able to order for themselves at a restaurant, including speaking to the waiter or waitress. They should be able, unless there are special circumstances, to complete their own homework (unless the work is genuinely too difficult, in which case the school should be asked to justify the assignment). They should be able to make basic spending decisions (with prudent guidelines that teach them to save for the future and give; a simple formula like save 10%, give 10%, and spend 80% is a good habit to ingrain). They should participate in the planning of their birthday party (not just selecting the theme and leaving all the work to you!). They should be able to engage with an adult in a conversation, something some kids don't learn to do because their parents have a habit of answering for them. And please, please, please - your child (well before 4th grade) should know their full address and phone number. I understand that no one writes letters anymore, but for safety's sake if nothing else, your child needs to know where they come from and where home is.

They should, at this age, be learning to work in groups. Group work, in which same-age peers plan a project, divide the work, and see it through to completion without adult management, is so valuable in teaching them how to communicate, how to manage their own feelings, and how to get along. If your child's school is not giving kids opportunities to do group projects, ask why not. The bottom line: kids learn to make good decisions by being trusted to make decisions.

If your son or daughter is in 5th grade, this is the year you need to open up a dialogue about sex, puberty, and dating. Swallow hard if you must. Notice that I didn't tell you to have "The Talk". I think that as pervasive as pre-marital and extra-marital sex is in our culture today, one talk will never be enough if you want to ensure that your child has both correct information and develops healthy values here. Some parents fret about the "right" time to address it, but if you're committed to opening a dialogue, having impeccable timing about "The Talk" isn't so important. What's more important to know is that kids up to a certain age are vaguely aware of sex, and after a certain age - and for some reason this seems to be during 5th grade - most are curious about it and ready to have those conversations.

Fortunately, I can suggest some resources. I've heard good things about the "God's Design for Sex" series, which is four books intended to be used starting when your child is a preschooler. Book 2 is recommended for ages 5-8 while Book 3, "What's the Big Deal, Why God Cares About Sex" is targeted at pre-teens. Then the 4th book, "Facing the Facts: The Truth About Sex and You" is designed for young teenagers. You might blush when you look at some of the chapter headings in Book 4, but the whole point is that if you've used the series up until then, you will have created a climate where there is no shame and embarrassment for either you or your child when it comes to the most intense subjects.

Another friend in preteen ministry recommends "The Care and Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls", part of the "American Girl" series, for use with girls. And for boys, you can pick up the "Every Man" contribution, which is "Preparing Your Son for Every Man's Battle." The thing I like about that book is that it is written as a series of simulated conversations, so the person who "doesn't know what to say" can see exactly what they might say. All of these titles can be ordered from our church bookstore.

And if your son or daughter is in 6th grade, this is the year you need to help them build a network of Christian friends. Sixth graders are already socially conscious and this will intensify through 7th, 8th, and 9th grades, until they've found their niche in high school and some of the identity crisis subsides, when "Who Am I?" can be answered "I am just like all of my friends, and they're..." A preteen, when invited to one of our events, will want to know "What are we going to do there?" A junior high kid wants to know, "Who else is going to be there?" You want your child to leave 6th grade and move into the junior high ministry with a solid group of friends and acquaintences at church so that their continued participation in Junior High and High School ministry is a given.

How do you do this? By exposing them to as many church peers as often as possible. When we get large turnout for an event, I rejoice. Why? Because it made the effort worth it? OK, yes, I'd be lying if I said that wasn't part of it. But I also know that when large numbers of kids are brought together, the chances are good that everyone who came was able to find at least one "buddy" to share the night with. There's a lot of mileage in laughter and shared experience that can be re-lived the next Sunday at church, and that makes kids look forward to the next event. Paintball welts hurt, but when boys are eager to come to church to show them off to each other, that's worth it. Girls may be grumpy the day after an all-nighter, but that trip to the karaoke machine or game of Apples to Apples may be just enough to break the ice between her and a new best friend. I don't believe kids should only have Christian friends. Not at all! But there are too many kids who have no Christian friends. That's a problem, and if not addressed, three to four years later you're going to face resistance on the issue of going to church. Trust me, even if your child now goes willingly, the day is coming when Who Else Is There will be consideration #1. So the best thing you can do is involve them now, deeply, when that's easy to do.

And one more thing: let me clarify what I mean by "Christian friends". By "friend" I mean someone your child would actually call and associate with outside of church - sleepovers, birthday parties, days at the beach, etc. Friendships at this age, especially for boys, center around shared experiences, so while you (an adult) may have friends from church that you share a meaningful connection with even though your only encounters are church-related, kid friendships don't work that way. That is something we hope they will grow towards with each other, but first there needs to be lots of time together. Secondly, by "Christian" I mean really that they have parents who are working toward the same goal you are. Normally I wouldn't use the word in that way, but the truth is, the label a child chooses for him or herself is less important than the orientation being assumed for them by their parents. All of this points to the need to bring parents of same-age kids in the church together, and we're working at that, but a simple measure might be whether you can name four other families from our church whose kids attend the same school your kids do. If you can, great - connect with those families. If not, time to start inviting, and time to focus on helping your kid get to know those who are here. Ask them who they know and who they like being with at church. And bring them, bring them, bring them, because being known is important in a large church.

I have lots of ideas about how we can build what I call, "the Greater Christian Community" in North County among kids and families, some of which involve networking with other churches. But all the organization in the world won't matter until parents are committed to the idea that their child needs Christian friends.

The Measure of Our Success

A new school year begins in August. The new fiscal year starts January 1. But the new ministry year, with the promotion of 6th graders to junior high and the welcoming of a new 4th grade class this weekend, has just begun.

If you're new to this site or the newsletter that links to it, what you're reading is an important part of our effort to bridge the common, and frankly inexcusable, gap that exists between parents and the church. Parents and churches have a relationship based on trust, but it's curious because often neither one knows what it is being trusted to do. For instance, take the common refrain, "Parents are the primary disciplers of their children." That's ok as a philosophy, but it doesn't tell me anything about how you feel about it. Do you relish it? Feel under-equipped? Overwhelmed and under-motivated? Find it interesting? Rewarding? Dull? Maybe you feel as if you don't have enough of a foundation yourself to pass on to your kids, especially if you weren't raised in a Christian home. Maybe you just don't think about it at all.

And from our side, too, the assumptions don't always match the reality. You may wonder: what exactly do they do in there? Are my kids learning? Are they behaving? Who is working with them? If we invest our time in this, will it be worth it?

This blog started in January 2007 along with its companion, the half-sheet HomePage which gets handed to kids on their way out the door each week, in order to establish a line of communication between our ministry and the parents of the kids we minister to. For my part, I wanted parents to know what kids were learning, and see if couldn't provide a little fodder for discussion in the hopes that each kid could have another go at thinking and verbalizing about the subject of that weekend. I was also tired of hearing, "We would have come to that - if we had known" - which confirmed my suspicion that most of the paper handed out in class never gets into the hands of the people who really need to see it. And, finally, I wanted to communicate to you as parents that we think seriously about issues regarding spiritual development of children and teenagers.

But the measure of our success does not lie in establishing mechanisms like these. Blogs and e-mails are only a tool, and even if they were read and heeded fully and regularly, we still could not claim "success" because ministry is about more than turning kids out for events or bringing them back Sunday after Sunday.

So what is success, and how do I try to orient the 4th-5th-6th grade ministry towards it? For starters, I am driven by the compelling statistic that 70% of kids raised in the church walk away from their faith as young adults. That is simply not good enough. And so, obviously, the ultimate measure of our success has to be how many kids are in love with God and remain in love with him all of their lives. I have never been comfortable with a conception of children's ministry as a place where "foundation" is laid, where knowledge is merely "banked" for later access. I believe the argument that "hopefully someday it will make sense to them" is a cop-out. I believe kids and pre-teens and teenagers can have a vibrant, life-giving relationship with the Lord right now, and that in fact, if they don't have that there will be a real price to pay.

What this means, of course, is that "success" with a kid is a slippery thing to measure. You may succeed over one school year, but five years later, that kid has drifted away. A kid may be super-cooperative and participatory on a given week, and be a pill the next six weeks. A young girl may be sweet and pleasant, but there are circumstances in her life that are hardening her heart - look out, because the crash is coming.

What I am saying is that we - as churches and parents of pre-teens - must assume a very long-term perspective because these are, after all, human beings who will live long lives and be influenced in countless ways and hopefully also be influencers for good. They are not just the project of the moment. We should capitalize on the period of direct impact we have on them but also realize our responsibility is life-long. So, I'm not only interested in the answers they give today but also the answers they'll give when they're 16. Who they say Jesus is today matters some, but who they say he is when they're 20 matters much more. If I ask them to articulate what they value and God makes the top five, that's great, but I'm also concerned about where he ranks over the next ten years.

Much of this, I know, depends on these kids staying "in the process", and so, the more 6th graders who move up to Junior High and stay involved, the better. And then in two more years, I'll have my eye on the number who successfully transition into high school. Beyond graduation, they'll need to find their own fellowship and growth environment, something we in churches have done a poor job preparing them to do. Of course, a huge factor in their future spiritual vitality hinges on who they choose to date and ultimately marry. 4th-6th grade is too young for them to get that, so I have to hope that it gets taught and internalized when the time is right.

Whether a kid walks with Christ and continues that walk is ultimately the only thing that matters. Badges and star charts do not. Screams and shrieks of excitement fade. Laughter is good, but humor doesn't transform. Everything we do must point kids in the direction of a relationship with Christ, or we are spinning our wheels.

In service of that long-term goal, here are some short-term ones:

• Can kids work with others, cooperate toward a common goal, persevere together, resolve conflicts among themselves, and share credit while refraining from blaming or alibis?
• Do the kids exhibit a progressively deeper curiosity and sense of awe about spiritual things? Kids are naturally curious - what are we doing to help answer the questions they're already asking, and to stimulate new ones?
• Do the kids display genuine respect and affection towards their leaders? I know when a leader is making an impact when kids ask where they are on weeks that they're gone.
• Are the kids excited about being together? Do they have a group of peers at church who are becoming friends?
• Do kids' answers to questions evidence a growing sophistication of thought (something we definitely notice in the spring of the year, when everybody in our room is the "oldest" they'll be before promotion)? Can they go beyond one-word or pat responses to express spiritual truths or their personal beliefs?

Finally, here are some things we as a pre-teen ministry believe:

• That ministry approaches must be age-appropriate and relevant to be effective.
• That learning is an active, constructive process. I cannot transplant my own understanding into their brain, but I can walk alongside as they gain understanding, to help shape it.
• That pre-teens are understudied, under-resourced, little understood and as a result, often inappropriately ministered to.
• That parents are eager for practical help in parenting kids in this age group.
• That the spiritual life is nurtured primarily through the home, and that church ministry can be a supplement, but not a substitute.

Long-term perspective in so very important in ministry to kids. Rome wasn't built in a day, and your kid won't reach spiritual maturity just by knowing a bunch of right answers. So, settle in for the long haul. Get your kid to church every week, enroll him or her in as many outside activities as you can, help them build a network of Christian friends (now), and let's do ministry together.

Kids Say the Right-est Things

A young child declares to you that "Jesus died on the cross to pay the price for our sins." Now the ball is in your court: what do you say in response?

I'm convinced the key to great discipleship lies in the answer. This weekend and every weekend millions of questions were thrown out in Sunday school classrooms around the globe. I wonder how many of them created exchanges that led to real spiritual understanding?

I don't normally get the chance to dialogue with preschoolers (on anything, much less religion) as they're about six years younger than my age group. But on my recent vacation, I had ample time with this age set, including a little "exploring" session with my nephew, who is five. The occasion was my parents' 40th wedding anniversary and family reunion, and the setting was a restored farmstead redeveloped to accommodate groups like ours. On the grounds was a relocated one-room schoolhouse and a country church - which of course made for irresistible exploring territory.

Inside the church we spotted a banner with a giant heart shape covering the front of a cross. Wanting to gauge his perceptiveness after a year of Christian pre-school, I innocently asked, "Why is there a cross on it?" To which he responded, in a nearly exasperated tone, "Because Jesus died on da cross…to pay da price for our sins." He didn't say it, but his tone said, "dummy." Which I deserved, for underestimating him.

His response left me with a number of options. I could have left it alone - he had, after all, answered the question. I could have slathered him with praise: "R-i-g-h-t! You're such a good listener in school!" I could have asked him to tell me where he learned that, to see if I could ply any more details about the setting and context from him. I could have asked him if he knew any songs or stories about the cross. Or, I could have played dumb and asked more follow-up questions.

I opted for a last approach, which was to ask, "What are 'sins'?" in a way as if I'd never heard the word before - one of my favorite techniques because it makes kids feel important when they believe they're telling a grown-up something they don't know. As it turns out, my question only elicited, "Umm…they're bad things," before his five-year-old brain shifted to other things. But the point isn't that I chose the perfect follow-up. The point is that we ought to follow up more often when kids deliver right responses, and we ought to give real attention and deliberate effort to the way in which we follow up, rather than meeting those answers with either silence or praise.

The trouble with letting an answer be (ignoring the response or moving on and changing the subject) is that it communicates to the kid that what they've said really wasn't terribly interesting or worth further comment. Adults sometimes accept "right answers" as affirmation that teaching is "getting through" (as in, whew, they're getting it). But a correctly-phrased response doesn't necessarily indicate that at all. Kids are often asked to say words that mean a great deal to adults but little to them. The only way to know for sure that there is understanding behind the words they've spoken is to probe deeper. You want to get kids to flesh out their own understanding by attaching words to the ideas they hold. Just as writing a book or an essay (or this blog) forces an author to organize and hone their thinking, so can conversation do that, in a less formal way.

The second common, but perhaps even more flawed, response by adults when kids give "right answers" is to pour on the praise: Good job! Wow! Right on! Yes! You're so smart! and on and on. Now what on earth could be wrong with praising a child, you ask? Well, bear with me. The instinct to want to praise kids when they've performed well is well-founded. We want kids to feel good about their accomplishments, and we want them to be positively reinforced so they'll be likely to run/jump/write/answer/act/try/or whatever in an exemplary way the next time. The problem comes when praise acts like a straightjacket. Authors Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish identified this in their book, How to Talk So Kids Can Learn at Home and at School, where they point out that labels, both negative and positive, force kids into playing roles. One becomes "the funny one", another is "lazy", another is "shy", another is "really responsible". Faber and Mazlish advise against hanging labels on kids, even positive ones, because there is an implied "always" quality about them that shapes kids' behavior long after we pronounced it to be so. Thus, it's ok to point out particular instances of responsibility or kindness or maturity, as long as it's not generalized: "When you set the table without being asked, that really helped me," instead of, "You're so responsible and grown up. I can always count on you." The distinction may seem slight. But one identifies and casts value on particular actions; the other makes kids out to be the product of their actions, and in so doing, pronounces value on the child.

I would suggest that the kind of praise we commonly dish out in Sunday schools has the same effect as a label in that it creates a category of responses that are acceptable and that will either a. earn a reward or b. get me out of having to answer any more questions. Savvy Sunday school goers figure this out: say "God" or "Jesus" in answer to a question and you're bound to be right 80% of the time, while "We should obey God" and "We should be nice to others" are reliable standbys for answering any personal application question. Of course, we should obey God and we should be nice to others, but even a preschooler is not to young to be asked how they might do that. And it may take them considerable time to formulate a real-life example, and they may answer wrongly, and sometimes they genuinely may not know how it is that a five-year-old (much less a ten-year-old) is supposed to obey God, in which case we'll need to map it out with them. But isn't that what we want - for them to connect some abstract, nice-sounding idea to the way they live? Isn't that why they're there? Or is it to earn some star or point or prize or make a grown-up gush?

The alternative to praising answers is not criticism or dismissal ("You're just a kid, you don't even know what you're talking about"), but engagement. Coming back to a child and asking them to clarify ("What did you mean when you said…"), substantiate ("Can you give me an example of where you think that's true?"), elaborate ("Say more about that…"), or defend something they've just said is very validating to them. When you answer their answer with a question, you've dignified their statement. You've opened a dialogue. Discipleship happens here.

When kids express themselves, we should never regard those expressions as final - for good or for bad. Consider two kids: one declaring that Jesus was the Son of God, and another saying Jesus might not be the only way to heaven. Both are giving us insights into their present understanding. We would surely use the second kid's assertion as a teachable moment, to dialogue about the means of salvation, rather than shutting him down with "you're wrong". So why are we so quick to shut down the first child with "Right!"?

The more kids are willing to talk, the more malleable they remain. I have a better chance of influencing a teenager who is willing to tell me he's tempted to have sex with his girlfriend than one who feels he cannot admit being tempted because he's taken a high-profile pledge for purity. A similar factor was at work in Jesus' parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18). The tax collector, with little to lose, confessed all and cried to God for mercy and was justified; the Pharisee, with a public face to save, could only boast of his own righteousness and pray deceptively. May we never box kids into that corner because we've praised them onto a pedestal.

The bottom line is that we need to learn to dialogue with kids. And that's hard because kids and adults are locked into well-defined roles that govern our communication. Most of the time when an adult asks a child a question, it is to judge them: Did you clean your room? Have you finished your homework? What is the capital of Oregon? A more collaborative style of communication, where adults are alongside kids helping them figure out problems, mysteries, and projects rather than quizzing them, lends itself to the sorts of questions that will help grow our kids' faith, in a way that stickers and trinkets never will.

What do we do when kids are saying all the right things? How do we respond in a way that encourages their curiosity, that they will continue to question and wonder and speculate? In short, how do we get them to think? Then they might regard God as intriguing and fascinating and worthy of their attention, a bigness not easily fathomed or readily reduced to easy formulations. They might just want to know him.

Surrender is Not a Strategy

From the day your child is born, you dream big dreams and hope the best for them. You desire to give them a better upbringing than you had and you fret about how you're going to provide it. You hope they won't make the same mistakes you did and you agonize when they do. You go the distance to get them a great education, to live in a safe neighborhood, to enrich them with social and cultural experiences, and to develop their athletic and artistic potential.

Great. Now what about their character?

It's surprising how many parents will instinctively respond to the question, "What do you want for your child?" by saying, "I just want them to be happy" without fully realizing the trade-off that could entail. Would you be satisfied if your kids grew up to be wealthy, well-educated, well-traveled, and even happy, but lacked the qualities of integrity, morality, honesty, trustworthiness, and empathy that constitute what we know as character?

It all begs the question: where is "good enough" when it comes to raising kids? Somehow we've devalued character and morality (if we ever truly did value them) to the point that if you just have the outward appearance of success or affluence or niceness, then inner qualities don't matter. Forgive me, but that is so California. And it is so bankrupt. I'm not saying that perfect character is or ought to be the goal, only that we've ceded far too much in the area of character development, so much so that young people could be excused for believing that there are no standards, and that in any case, it would be impolite and wrong to judge.

What set me thinking about all of this is news that the City of Mission Viejo is considering passing a "social host" ordinance which would hold parents liable when teens consume alcohol at their homes. The proposed law came about because teenage weekend house parties are rampant there (it's the O.C., after all) and other jurisdictions have had success in fining the owner of the property when alcohol is illegally consumed there. (I've since learned that in San Diego County, only Carlsbad and Del Mar do not have such an ordinance on the books.)

Want to discover someone's attitude about what a parent can and ought to do when it comes to communicating values and expectations and providing moral guidance? Start a discussion on the issue of whether parents should be held ultimately accountable for the behavior of their kids. The ordinance came up on talk radio recently, and a man who said he was the dad of two teenage boys weighed in with this:

"I have two teenagers myself and I've had a couple of parties for them myself...I take their keys, I monitor the party, and if someone's getting out of control, they're done...Just a small, closed group of friends over here, havin' a good time, they like to play 'Beer Pong' - what they call it - you know, and - if a parent is going to have a party, they have to be responsible about it."

From the outset, this dad betrays his own ignorance. For those of you who don't know, let me enlighten you about "Beer Pong". You set up cups of beer, usually in a triangle shape (think bowling pins), at opposite ends of a table and take turns bouncing or tossing a ping pong ball at the other team's cups. Ball in a cup = opposing team has to drink that cup. Once all of the cups have been drained, the losing side customarily has to drink whatever beer remains on the winning side. The goal is to get the other team to drink a lot of beer, fast. In other words, if you were - as this dad is apparently claiming - trying to teach kids how to responsibly enjoy alcohol, "Beer Pong" would be a poor method to use.

Moreover, as the dad continued it became evident he really had no idea how much the kids were consuming, nor did he care to know, because nobody was going to be leaving: "They all spend the night. I usually have about 7 or 8 couples, you know, that's about it, no more than 20 at the most." (You read that right - "couples". To which the host asked, "How do you know they're not groping each other?" and the father responded, "Well I don't know that, but they're teenagers, you know, it's gonna happen anywhere.")

Then the dad said, "But I don't let the kids get, you know, crazy drunk." (Drunk is apparently ok, just not "crazy drunk".) "Just like a bartender should...if they're getting to a point where they're way too drunk or they're - before that, you gotta stop 'em."

They say if you give someone enough rope, they'll hang themselves, and sure enough, the man's real rationale came through as he prattled on:

"Well, I've got - my boys are pretty good, you know? They've got a great group of friends, they all get good grades, they're all in sports, you know, they all do the right thing. They're not troublemakers." Then he hastened to add, "I don't tolerate any drugs. No drugs at all. You know, if I see that, they're gone."

At this point, allow me to translate:

"My boys and I have a bargain. I am their dad, and they know the thing I care about most is image, keeping up with the Joneses, but also being a cool dad. Really, I just want them to be happy. I like their friends, and their friends like me, and we've pretty much worked it out so that as long as no one makes waves (no drugs, no "crazy drunk" stuff), everything's chill. As long as they keep getting good grades and don't embarrass me, like by dropping out of sports and dressing all in black or something, I'll appease them by providing alcohol and hosting co-ed sleepovers at our house."

Well. A full consideration of this matter wouldn't be complete if I didn't also share with you the thoughts of another caller to the same show, this one from the opposite end of the age spectrum. The girl, who said she was 23, chimed in, "What better way to teach kids healthy drinking habits other than in their own home, I mean, kids are going to get drunk anyways, whether or not you fine their parents, but why not keep them at home and keep them safe?" Monitoring parties, "is harm reduction, you know? We can't prevent it, that's been proven: kids die every day in drunk-driving accidents, but why not keep it at the home and show them how to drink?" (She didn't say whether Beer Pong would be part of that curriculum.)

The point - in part - is that kids are not interested in being taught how to drink. Illicitness and overdoing it is part of the appeal of underage drinking to those who are underage. They get drunk because "you never know what might happen" as opposed to light social drinking that accompanies some other event. Here's a newsflash: Teenagers don't have parties so they can get together and catch up on old times. At teenage house parties, drinking is the event.

But the point is also bigger than underage drinking alone. The point is that no one seriously believes that parents have no authority or that there ought to be no standard, whether it's "no drugs" or "no getting crazy drunk" or "no drinking and driving". Everyone implicitly recognizes that parents have a right to, well, be parents, to put their foot down and draw a line and say, "Here is where I stand, and as my son or daughter, this is the standard that you will be held to." The question isn't as simple as whether the drinking age should be lowered or abolished (as some would have you believe) because even then, a parent would have to set limits - "Mom, why can't I go to the bar on Mondays?" The question is where will you stake out those boundaries of character development?

Underage drinking is an issue of character because of the often-ignored fact that it is illegal and as long as it remains illegal it will involve deception. Kids have to lie about where they're going and where they've been, they have to lie about their age or pay someone who will lie if questioned about why they're buying the booze, they have to lie about whether so-and-so's parents will be home, and they have to clean up beer stains and get rid of the trash so they aren't found out - and I have never known a busted teenager to be honest about how much they actually drank and not claim to have been surprised that alcohol was there ("It just sort of showed up").

Or, it need not involve (much) deception if they're friends of that Orange County dad, who presumes to decide for himself that that law need not be followed. Which in turn brings us back to the female caller, who opined: "Adults have a lot of influence. I grew up here and I went to a lot of parties and I watched a lot of my friends die in drunk driving accidents and it's unfortunate, but they never told us what to do if we got in trouble. It was always, 'Say no, say no, don't drink'; never 'don't drink and drive' or 'eat before you drink', there was never any of that."

Catch the doublespeak? "Adults have a lot of influence" - yet she chose to ignore the messages they were giving: "Say no...don't drink." I don't know why those messages didn't penetrate (but she did hear them, didn't she?), but her prescription is horrible. Enabling kids is not guiding them. Surrender is not a strategy. Responsible parenting is not advising kids to drink on a full stomach. That's not the point. The point is to do the right thing. Do it over and over. As caregivers of children, you have the right and responsibility to stake out the moral boundaries of those living under your care. (And yes, kids will develop and define their own moral boundaries, and one day they'll get to test them, and to see if they're practical and wise. But not while they live under your roof.) As I've written before, you absolutely have the right to hold kids to a higher standard than you yourself may have met. Without this idealism, our collective morality races to the bottom.

Ultimately, a social host ordinance can slap fines on overly accommodating parents, it can deter teenage drinking in homes, it can cause parents who've foolishly trusted their kids to mind the house for the weekend to be smarter; but it cannot give parents the fortitude to stop caving into the culture. Only the culture itself, or a force within the culture, can stem that tide. Parental idealism is one of those forces. It has pushed our kids to higher and higher levels of academic, athletic, and creative achievement. So why can't that idealism be brought to bear on our kids' character, too?

Where did Lucy go?

Some time in the next two weeks, take your kids and go see Prince Caspian. It really is that good. They might not grasp all of the spiritual parallels, but they'll like the story anyhow, and the movie might cause them to pick up the book series. For your part, if you watch Caspian closely enough, you just might spot yourself.

As much as I liked Narnia, I loved Caspian. Not only did they produce a two-and-a-half hour movie that held my interest, but they adapted a book which uses lots of dialogue to bring readers up to speed on what happened in Narnia between the Pevensie's first visit and their return. While much of the first movie focuses on the kids (and the viewers) discovering Narnia, Caspian opens with the kids missing Narnia intensely; stuck in the world for a time, but eagerly awaiting another transcendent experience that will re-place them where their hearts had been all along.

It's the same "already-not yet" tension that we believers live in every day, and the movie captures this longing beautifully. Yet, none of the kids seems to know fully what to do with Narnia once they've arrived. Could this be the clue as to why we don't inherit the eternal kingdom at the moment of our salvation? The three oldest children sense that there is a battle at hand, but are still growing into their roles. But it is in Lucy that we see the picture of a girl with single-minded devotion to the one who enthralls her, her King, Aslan.

I think everyone who discovers Jesus goes through a Lucy period in their lives, when God is new and fresh and thrilling and it's enough just to be with him, demanding nothing. I can relate to that. But I can also surely relate to Edmund - carnal and tempted and wanting to enjoy pleasure too much for his own good; and to Susan - older, wiser, but too level-headed at times to appreciate the immaterial or too impatient to tolerate the intangible; and to Peter - serious about kingdom work to a fault (as an ambitious, battle-ready Peter exclaims in the movie, "We've waited for Aslan long enough!").

It seems no one can stay Lucy forever. New believers are confronted with the reality that others couldn't give two cents about what they believe. They meet the colder reality that even fellow believers don't share their zeal. They come to realize that the Church is filled with still-fallible humans - forgiven, yes, but still toting the baggage of the "old man" with them. Anyone who has grown into a ministry leadership position comes to terms quickly with the fact that laws of economics and politics don't check themselves at the front door of the church. We are forced to temper our idealism with a certain amount of practicality, even cunning. As we "grow up" in our faith, we lose our sense of awe. Bible stories that were once vivid become familiar and then passe; songs that once moved us become background noise; rituals that were meaningful become rote. Once we were enthralled; we become hardened. Once we were on fire; we cool to a steady burn. And before we know it, the baby skin is gone: Where did Lucy go?

The question matters to parents and others who work with children because if we are to guide them to a mature faith and a faith that outlasts Sunday school programming, enduring into young adulthood and anchoring them as they raise families of their own, we must understand how the character of religious faith changes as kids develop, and why. Or to put it another way, why can't Edmund, Susan, and Peter believe the way Lucy does?

To begin with, spiritual development is thought to be shaped by cognitive development. It is generally accepted that you do not speak to a preschooler about spiritual things in the same way you would speak to an adult: preschoolers lack the facility with language to make sense of immaterial concepts. Thus, in a preschooler's mind God is a kindly old man who lives in heaven (which is actually, physically, in the clouds) and people who go to heaven become angels (because the wings allow them to stay in flight). In one sense, the job of teaching adults is to reshape those perceptions formed as children which weren't quite right, but were necessary because a child couldn't understand it any other way (ever try to explain a "soul" to a five-year-old?). The degree to which cognitive development limits spiritual development is disputed by those who study child spirituality: Can a young child be as spiritually deep as a grown adult? is a matter of disagreement, and I can't settle the question here. But, nearly everyone would concede that a child's ability to communicate spiritual understanding is developmentally determined, and for purposes of measuring and evaluating, only what can be articulated is useful.

What happens as kids grow is that they begin to use language in ever-more sophisticated ways, and their holistic grasp of how the world works improves. Thus, a young child has no problem believing in Santa Claus, who is able to personally deliver presents to every girl and boy on Christmas Eve. Young children are given to magical thinking, and the existence of a loving God is no stretch. Lots of children's curricula have moved away from asking children to "ask Jesus to be their Lord and Savior" because such terms hold little meaning to a four-year-old. Instead, kids are invited to "ask Jesus to be their forever friend" - understandable and certainly more developmentally appropriate, but not fully adequate as a substitute for "Savior": I can be your friend (even your "forever friend") without being your savior.

What is needed, then, is for us to be vigilant and diligent in following up with kids as they grow and as their capacity for grasping spiritual concepts changes. If we are perceptive, we will catch when they are ready for a more nuanced understanding. One way to do this is to intentionally dialogue with your child about spiritual things, and to listen. Too many people have the idea that unless we (adults) are doing most of the talking, kids can't be learning. Quite to the contrary, I believe the best learning happens when kids themselves are talking because they are being forced to put ideas into words - to think about what they think, if you will - and it's that very process that makes them more receptive to the answers adults have.

A second way to help kids keep their faith as they mature is to be developmentally sensitive and appropriate. In general, churches (and more specifically, the companies that write church curriculum) have done a good job adjusting down: preschool and early elementary Sunday school classes have the same look and feel as academic school classrooms do, and proven effective methods of communication and instruction have been adapted into a religious education context. The same cannot be said for what's out there for older elementary students. Some of the programs packaged for 3rd-5th graders are truly awful. They are, in a word, facile. They do not challenge kids to think and as such they do not teach anything; instead, they re-tell the same Bible stories kids have heard since they were three (leading to the widespread, documented perception among junior high-aged students that they pretty much know everything in the Bible and don't believe it has anything left to teach them). They are fraught with moralizing and allegorizing (the point of the David and Goliath story is not that God gave the Israelites victory, it's that we should be unafraid when facing the giants in our own lives), and focus mainly on developing character qualities, as if the reason Christ died was to motivate us to be better people.

A third imperative is to change the way we use the Bible. Most kids are unaware of the Bible's Big Story, or that it even has a Big Story, and tend to hold the "B.I.B.L.E." (Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth) mindset or the "Yellow Pages" mindset, wherein the Bible is believed to be a collection of passages on topical issues (Today: anger. Tomorrow: lust.). Kids are rarely taught that there is a continuity to the story, but grasping that continuity is the key to understanding why the Bible is consistent and why it retains relevance thousands of years after it was written! One way to do this is to teach two Bible stories side by side and ask kids to draw out the parallels: how did God act? What was common in the peoples' responses? How might God act in a similar way today? This method will be part of the Kids Games program this summer.

A fourth way to help kids accommodate their faith as they grow is to have someone else who knows your child spiritually who is not their parent walking alongside. The only way this happens is organically, as your child is continually exposed to older Christians in their church. Across the children's ministry at our church, we have made a deliberate attempt to match students with consistent small group leaders, but we are limited by ratios that don't lend themselves to familiarity (it's much harder to get to know 12 kids and their families than it is to know six) and inconsistency of attendance. When kids only come once or twice a month, the chances of bonding with an adult leader are much less.

As kids grow up, they'll naturally move beyond a Lucy stage. The job is not to hold them there, but to promote and cheer their development, to assure them that God is bigger than their doubts, to encourage their questions, to help them discern their role to play in God's kingdom, and to ready them for that. After all, the older children didn't love Aslan any less, but they did love him differently.

Whatever Happened to Modesty?

I wasn't going to write about Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana. Really, I wasn't. I try not to exaggerate the effect pop culture has on kids. Movies (The Da Vinci Code, The Golden Compass), "Harry Potter" (and the is-J.K. Rowling-a-Christian-or-isn't-she? fuss), teenage television shows (The O.C., Dawson's Creek, and MTV's appalling My Super Sweet 16), and Bad Boy & Bad Girl actors (Brittney & Jamie Lynn Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton) - all come and go. You (a parent) remain the most consistent, persistent, and willing influence in your child's life as long as they live under your roof.

I don't fixate on those things because I don't care about them much. Maybe I should care more. Yes, they create culture to a degree. But what makes them frightening - and does make me take notice - is when they actually reflect the culture, when I look at them and see us.

Such is the case now with Miley/Hannah. First she posed for some suggestive photos in Vanity Fair magazine, then it was disclosed that she has posted her own revealing shots on her MySpace page. By "revealing" I mean typical of what one would find on MySpace, and the reason this is news is that it's Hannah Montana for goodness sake, the Queen of Wholesome and Disney and the hottest pre-teen concert ticket around. (Amusing sidenote: hottest ticket for girls, anyhow. Recently when we played a game at our midweek program that asked kids to name a singer, almost every girl immediately wrote down "Hannah Montana". The boys, stumped, finally came up with "Elvis".) We didn't want to believe Hannah/Miley was, you know, like that, which is to say a "normal" or "typical" teenager, which is also to say, "just like everyone else."

Which shines the spotlight uncomfortably back on us and begs the question: whatever happened to modesty?

In case you're feeling out of the loop at this point, a primer: Miley Cyrus is the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus whose fame has far eclipsed her father's, as the star of the Disney Channel show "Hannah Montana." She's a far cry from Lindsay Lohan, and in no way am I predicting this is the beginning of a long slide for her. But in this month's Vanity Fair magazine, she appears in a photo spread that, depending on your view of the pictures, you might choose to call "provocative" or "artistic" or "inappropriate".

From there, we've descended into a spiral of who's to blame? and just-how-bad-are-they? second-guessing, all the while missing the bigger picture. That bigger picture, apart from whether the photographer or her dad or the editors of Vanity Fair or Cyrus' agent bear responsibility for her appearing like that, is that she herself wasn't sufficiently bothered by the prospect of nationwide exposure (no pun intended). This fact was doubly evidenced by the revelation this week that her MySpace page features photos of her, for instance, stretched out across a boy's lap, in a bathtub (clothed) with two friends, and wearing far less than she'd ever get away with on Disney.

Cyrus said at first that the photographer was persuasive...then that she was embarrassed and sorry... Whatever. The point is (and the MySpace thing just backs this up) that her standards - our standards - are not very high, and they certainly don't include modesty. Kids, I think, are naturally modest when it comes to baring certain body parts, or seeing them bared on someone else. Somewhere, the "eww" factor always kicks in. But at some young age - and apparently 15 is not now too young - it becomes accepted and even expected to show much more. If maturity is the rush to throw off childish innocence, I would suggest that modesty has been wrongly discarded.

I'm not talking about shame, I don't think. Shame is unreasonable and it is imposed from the outside. Released from the spectre of shame, inhibitions are cast off. I'm talking about modesty as self-control, an internalized inhibition, a willful decision not to present myself in a way that shocks or draws attention or even flatters my own self.

Where did we get this idea that everyone is entitled to every private bit of ourselves - and even worse, that they desire that? So, this beautiful self-restraint might begin with physical appearance but it need not end there. A degree of modesty can be evidenced in the things I say, and in what I choose to talk about (namely, is my favorite topic of conversation me?); in what I own; in how I carry myself; in how I handle successes and setbacks. Immodesty is related to narcissism, self-love that is the fuel of boastfulness. We've all been around self-absorbed, boastful people - they're boorish. So why has our culture come to accept vane self-representations as any more welcome?

The problem is that somewhere along the line, modesty became prudish. Only very conservative religious types favored it, but for everyone else, sexualization and disclosure became the norm. "Being confident in yourself" and "having nothing to hide" got conflated with "letting it all hang out". As a result, we know far more about each other than we probably care to, or need to. Who needs scripted TV dramas when tell-all reality TV psychodramas are proving once and for all that truth really is stranger (and more engrossing) than fiction?

Which brings us back to Miley, in a way, because her MySpace photos are nothing if not representative of the flavor of the whole site: put yourself on display, hold nothing back, and make sure to add a little sizzle. The world is one big party, starring you. She's not leading the pack on anything here, she's reflecting the prevailing teenage social ethic. An ethic which is deeply self-obsessed, engrossed in drama, careless about sexuality, and pretty brazen about broadcasting all of it to the world. Teenagers, guarded and secretive as they are with grown ups, put it all on display on a MySpace page.

And it's all...a little much. And a little troubling. I'll not be modest about proclaiming that.

My Crazy Idea

I'm looking for a few good men. And women. And children. For a very simple experiment in promoting the spiritual lives of kids.

As one who works with children and families in a Christian context, I have an interest in promoting Bible literacy. I believe in the power of the Bible to shape people, and I wish more people would read it and I wish more people would understand it. To that end, we've offered a "Stumped by the Bible" class this spring (which is being re-tooled for rollout again in the Fall), taken time in our class to show off new Bible products, written about those products in this space, and searched high and low for the most appropriate translation we could find at a reasonable cost. (What we found was The Illustrated New Testament, a gem of a Bible, available from www.biblesplus.com.) We get kids to open the Bible every weekend, we teach from it, and we send home discussion pages with at least one question that is directly related to the meaning and application of a verse or passage.

I know firsthand how the Bible can spur spiritual growth. Yet as much as I believe in personal Bible study, I know most Christians don't read it - and that certainly goes for kids, too. It's too hard, too boring, takes too much time, or found to be not impactful. Some kids are reading from adult translations. Many just don't know where to read. And, their reading skills are still developing. They get grace for the fact that they can't readily interpret texts that are 2,000+ years old.

As I wrestled with, and continue to wrestle with, the question of how to make our kids Bible-literate, I happened to attend the seminar by Marcia Bunge at Bethel Seminary in San Diego, where she presented 10 best practices for promoting spiritual development in children. First on the list: Reading and discussing the Bible and interpretations of it with children.

Could it really be that simple? Can we really launch kids on a path of Bible understanding, Bible reverence, and Bible living just by taking the time to read it to them, out loud, regularly? Parents will sometimes ask for recommendations of devotional books to use, or that their pre-teen son or daughter might have for themselves. What if the answer is, simply, "The Bible", read out loud over and over again?

So I'm looking for a few good men, women, and children, to take a 30-day challenge. The assignment is to endeavor to read aloud from the Bible to your children every day for a month. I want to know if it's practical. If it's workable. If it's palatable to kids. And you have to discuss, as Bunge said, meanings and interpretations with kids. By "discuss" it means that you distinctly don't bring an outline or notes to the devotion time - that's a sermon. Discussion is collaborative. To discuss "interpretations" is to acknowledge that the Bible has a rich history of varying interpretations, and that fact doesn't cheapen God's word in any way, but only reflects the fact that people have thought seriously about it for a good long time and serious thinkers have raised questions without definitive answers. You need to get comfortable in that territory of what we don't know because it's exactly those things that make the Bible intriguing and worth thinking about. One of the tragedies of Sunday school is the way we answer every question so neatly and perfectly, oh-so-carefully tying up every loose end, so that the mystery of God is extinguished. God is not simple, but wonderfully complex. Whenever I hear a kid preface a question with, "There's something I don't get about God…" or "I've been thinking about that…" I know they're developing some depth of understanding. I love that.

What would you read? That's up to you. Obviously anyone who takes this on will want to complete the 30 days, so there will be some trial and error with which books and passages you choose. Proverbs is simple. So is James. Romans is harder. Gospels are great, and don't always lend themselves to common-sense interpretation. Or, try some OT history - Kings and Chronicles. But whatever you choose, the goal is to create an uninterrupted time that happens regularly. (The amount of time you read each day will vary based on the age of your kids, and other factors.)

The only other requirement is that you keep a journal, which we'll give you, that records what happened each day, and then that you write a summary reflecting on the experience at the end of the 30 days.

Now, an important, and necessary, distinction. My desire is to promote living in the Book, not by the Book. When we live in the Book, we recognize our own place in God's story. We see the Bible as history, yes, but also as a story that continues to this day - the story of God's interaction with mankind. We see there stories of faith and yes, virtue, but the Bible is not primarily a collection of moral tales. But there are plenty of characters we wouldn't want to emulate, and the story is richer for them, despite their moral lapses. The tendency is to use the Bible with children only as a tool of character formation, leading to kids' perceptions that it's a catalog of do's and don'ts. The old cannard that "Bible" stands for "Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth" is cute, but not helpful to kids. Living by the Book breeds legalism. Living in the Book reminds us why we're alive.

Let's see what this does. School's getting out soon, summer looms on the horizon, life is busy...which makes this a perfect time to try. Martin Luther once said of prayer that when he felt like he was too busy to spend an hour in devotion he immediately set aside what he had to do and spent two hours. Just the act of reading the Bible together could be as beneficial and transformative to your family as the content covered during that time.

Interested? Intrigued? Willing to try it? (Incidentally, it is impossible to fail at this, because even if you only manage to read 1 day out of 30, that will tell us something.) E-mail me and let me know you're on board, and I'll send you the journal. I'm looking for at least 10 families to try this, and evaluate after 30 days. You're invited to see what happens.

10 Tested Ways to Promote the Spiritual Lives of Kids

Marcia Bunge takes kids' spiritual lives seriously. A decade ago, few people could make that claim. There had been no systematic study of how the Church as a whole regarded children, no critical analysis of what we were teaching kids and why, and only a handful of studies to substantiate best practices for nurturing spiritual and moral development. Now, however, the field of research into children's spirituality is growing. The question is, are churches and families listening?

Because, for so many years, there was no cohesive theology of children in the Church, it was relatively useless to hone in on any best practices because if you don't know where you're going, the route you take or the way you travel doesn't matter much. Christian thinkers certainly had written about children, but their theologies (and therefore approaches) varied. Some saw children as bundles of wild impulses that needed to be trained; others saw them as pure, innocent, and unspoiled; while others held babies to be blameless, but saw the sin nature as something that took hold of the child as they grew. Some regarded childhood romantically, while others saw it as a stage to grow out of as quickly as possible.

Christian thinking today toward children bears the marks of all of those philosophies, especially insofar as they influenced the development of educational theories, all of which begin with an idea about the learner. If I believe, for instance, that the primary purpose of schooling is to teach kids to restrain their own impulses, and that content mastery is secondary, then I'll assign lots and lots of seatwork, much of it mindless, and impose harsh discipline on those who don't complete it. If I hold a positive view of a learner's potential, I might allow kids to choose their own project to research; but if I believe kids' minds are basically lazy and need to be trained in rigor, I would probably assign the subject myself, believing that the student isn't up to that task.

Bunge directs the Child in Religion and Ethics Project at Valparaiso University and is the editor of such works as The Child in Christian Thought (2000) and the forthcoming The Child in the Bible. She acknowledges that the study of children and work with children was and is marginalized, as if it's not territory for serious researchers, who should be studying adults. Next year she'll speak at a triennial conclave that draws together children's researchers who are in pursuit of a common goal. You can read about the work of the Children's Spirituality Conference here.

The field of child spirituality research has a ways to go in hammering out a definition of "what we want". After all, some studies have examined practices that produce a "spiritual" child. But that's not necessarily the same thing as a spiritually mature Christian. "Spiritual" people believe in the supernatural and in the individual's ability to connect with unseen powers; being spiritual is a start, but it is incomplete. Others measure "faith maturity", defined as meaningful engagement in the life of one's church. Does church involvement translate into spiritual vitality? Ideally yes, but that's an assumption that needs to be acknowledged and further explored.

The second task for researchers is to gain the attention of the practitioners - the churches and parents - for whom this research is intended. It is by no means a given that because an idea is research-based that it will be embraced by Christian educators or Christian parents. We all have biases towards what we "feel" is effective. We all look at our own experience as normative: "It worked for me; it should work for them." We're all, to a degree, nostalgic for our own childhood and fearful of abandoning traditional practices because they just feel right. This inertia should not be underestimated. People who work with children - parents and professionals - are busy, wary of quick fixes, and pragmatic. It isn't greatly helpful to tell people only what doesn't work without giving them a workable alternative.

With that said, here are ten best practices highlighted by Bunge at a recent appearance at Bethel Seminary's San Diego campus:

1. Reading and discussing the Bible and interpretations of it with children.
   
2. Worshipping with a community; and carrying out family rituals and traditions of worship and prayer.
   
3. Introducing children to good examples, mentors, and stories of service and compassion. Bunge rightly pointed out that our kids know the Bible characters, but how many could tell you anything about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, William Wilberforce, or John Wesley?
   
4. Participating in service projects with parents or other caring adults; teaching financial responsibility. The side-by-side aspect of service is key. It's not enough for parents to send their kids away to an afternoon at a homeless shelter or park clean-up. And as to finances, Bunge says it is one thing churches never talk about with kids (if they even talk about it with adults), mainly because so many parents are embarrassed by their own credit card debt and don't feel in a position to lay down any guidance. As a result, Christian kids grow up with the same worldly desires and worldly spending habits as everybody else - and accrue the same sort of debt soon after leaving college.
   
5. Singing together and exposing children to the spiritual gifts of music and the arts. (Blogger's note: Go see Prince Caspian with your kid.)
6. Appreciating the natural world and cultivating a reverence for creation; attending a "family camp". The fact that a camp takes place outside is huge; programming delivered at a resort or conference center or over eight weeks at the church doesn't have the same effect.
7. Educating children; and helping them discern their vocations. Bunge sees a problem when parents only focus on the education of "their" child without regard for the education of all children. After all, children will grow up into a culture populated by - surprise - other people, who were either well-prepared or ill-prepared for the future by their early education.
   
8. Fostering live-giving attitudes toward the body, sexuality, and marriage. This is the other topic that Bunge says is taboo in churches, and as a result, churched folk suffer through as many relationship difficulties as non-churched people. Rectifying this means talking about sex, yes, but also relationships in general: how to date wisely, how to choose a mate, how to resolve conflict. (Considering the degree to which money and sex shape California culture, we would all do well to take heed of #4 and #8.)
9. Listening to and learning from children. This includes having the humility to admit when we don't know and when we've been wrong, genuinely valuing kids' insights and opinions.
   
10. Taking up a Christ-centered approach to discipline, authority, and obedience; recognizing that in the Christian tradition, parental authority is always limited. Jewish tradition: we do not teach kids to obey parents, but to honor parents. We only obey God. Christians, she says, tend to obscure the line between "honor" and "obey", as if they were the same thing. In the Jewish tradition, parents are to be honored, but only God is to be obeyed, a mindset that has huge ramifications for discipline and parenting.

What's striking, but not surprising, is how many of these practices are rooted in the home, with the church playing a supporting role. Bunge calls these not only "practices" that promote moral and spiritual development, but "responsibilities" too. Such a view casts parenting as a calling, with a set of obligations toward society for the growing child they will someday turn loose on it. How are we doing at these? How are you doing? This list has really set the gears in motion in my own head, and given birth to one crazy idea - a bit of an experiment - that I'll share with you next week.

Is the Church Really the Family of God?

The other night I came across a journal that I kept my senior year in high school (which is now half my life ago!), a required assignment for English class that traced the ups and downs of life in my year before college. Some of the entries are funny and immature, some are surprisingly deep, and others are just surprising. One such entry recalls that and friend and I spent a particular Wednesday night Bible study picking on another girl in the group, "then went back to my house and played Atari and ate cheesecake."

The flippant tone of that entry now staggers me. I apparently saw no contradiction between the setting - a Bible study - and the company - other believers - with what we were doing to amuse ourselves, which was mean and divisive. My friends and I were "good" kids. We prided ourselves for staying on the straight and narrow, but when it came to our own obligations toward Christian community, we remained worldly. What we needed was for the light to be shined uncomfortably inward - not inside our own selves, but in towards our own group, to be challenged to consider how we treated one another. After all, other entries from that journal recount that I had jealousy and rivalry toward that same friend who was my comrade-in-arms at youth group. Wow, what hypocrisy.

Is the Church really the "family" of God? Or is that just a hope or a lofty word picture or a recognition our common ancestry? If churches are (individually and collectively) a family, why does it not feel that way much of the time? More importantly, what are we doing to socialize new believers, and kids especially, into that reality?

There are benefits to a church calling itself a family. It evokes warmth. It reinforces traditions. It lends an air of familiarity to the relationships there. It reassures people that they belong. It allows us to carve an identity grounded in practices: "In this family, we do things this way." But if there are benefits to calling yourself a family, there are also risks, the biggest being that when you say it, no one will believe you. Some churches don't resemble the type of family anyone would want to be a part of. Another risk is that a church or ministry unintentionally erects a barrier to entry: "We are a family…and you're not in it." And that same impulse to define the family by "the way we do things" can become an unreasonable obstacle to change.

The phrase "family of God", a common modern expression, appears only once in the Bible; but, other references to God's family (believers in Christ "are Abraham's seed" (Gal. 3:29), numerous references to the early Christians as "brothers" throughout Acts, we are all "sons of God through faith in Jesus Christ" (Gal. 3:26), etc.) substantiate the idea. We enter this family initially through the adopter, and subsequently we become related to the adopted. We don't "join" a church or group, we are joined to God, and as a result, we inherit a family, the fellow members of God's far-flung adopted brood. The job for us is to figure out that second relationship, how to become what we already are: the family of God. It's easy for a church or ministry to say it is a family, but quite another to transform itself into one.

The church is, after all, a family, but it is an adoptive one, not a natural one, and all of us bring to it the vestiges of our family of origin (our carnal, pre-salvation existence). So, long after appropriating the label, we continue to deal with one another's hurts, hang-ups, dysfunctions, and shortcomings - in a word, one another's sin. Sinful people who've been forgiven are still sinful. This is a rude shock to anyone who's been wounded in a church or by another believer - they aren't supposed to be like that! But the key to family living lies not in others' perfection but in our own God-given ability to offer superabundant grace to one another.

I thought about all of this as I heard about other pre-teen ministries at the conference I attended and how commitment-phobic we all are and how hard it is to forge deep, lasting relationships in a mobile and overscheduled and transient and individualistic culture. I don't think nostalgia is the answer, because the world has changed too much and none of us wants to wear a suit that fit ten years ago. But there is some value, I think, in intentionally cultivating the idea of family in every church and every ministry, large and small. For one thing, families are committed to one another and require commitment…looooong term commitment. Secondly, we learn to forgive one another in families because like it or not, we're stuck with each other. The easy, too-common alternative is to simply bail. Third, because we're committed to the long term and because we learn to forgive, we also learn how to overlook what really doesn't matter - in other words, we give grace. And by teaching kids commitment, forgiveness, and grace, what are we equipping them for? If you said "a successful marriage," pass GO and collect $200. On the other hand, when we fail to socialize kids into the family of God, or we propagate the myth that church family life is happy and ever conflict-free, we miss a teachable opportunity.

The world is big enough and choices abundant enough that we're really not bound to a church we're unhappy in. And that's ok. I'm not suggesting that one style of worship or church leadership structure or curriculum should be imposed across the board. But I am suggesting that the Christian world is a lot smaller than we think, that when we focus on the minutiae of what separates one church from another we're treading in territory that is hopelessly foreign to those who don't know Christ. Like it or not, those outside the Church see us as one body. We would do well to embrace that identity and be about the hard work of family life than to remain hyper-focused on what separates us from them within the Christian world.

What I Learned on the Mountain

There are oodles of ministry conferences: denominational gatherings, conferences on church growth, small groups, worship, youth ministry, children's ministry, family ministry. But there has been little for those who work with that emerging age group known as pre-teens - until now. Just this spring I've been invited to two such conferences, a recognition, I think, of the importance of this age group to the church and the wisdom of investing in kids prior to middle school.

Last week I was privileged to be part of Forest Home's first-ever conference for those who work with pre-teens. And what I learned up on the mountain, in my encounter with 21 others who are engaged in the same type of work I am, is that we don't have all the answers, but we're all asking the same questions.

It seems the decision to separate out pre-teens from children at most churches is based not only on a recognition that 9-to-12-year-olds are physically and cognitively different, but that many kids at that age are beginning to tire of traditional Sunday school. We deal with a lot of churched kids, who grew up hearing Bible stories and watching Veggie Tales and who aren't too jazzed about watching yet another puppet presentation on David & Goliath. As the conference progressed, one common theme emerged again and again: how do we go deeper with these kids, to give them something they will engage with and use? How do we get beyond the pat Sunday school answers these kids are programmed to give and teach to the things they're thinking and talking about?

Children's ministries are beginning to recognize that a bigger and better show isn't necessarily the answer for this age group. We will reach them with authenticity, not showmanship. At the same time these kids are wired for the BIG and EXCITING, there's a part of them that's able to see through hype, and in their hearts they can recognize whether they're being managed or ministered to.

Many of the folks I met are beginning to write their own curriculum. I applaud that. If great teaching is that which answers the questions kids are already asking, how close can you come to that if you're just executing something out of a box? To give kids what they need you have to know those kids, and listen to them, and take them seriously; otherwise your program becomes incentive-laden as you try to convince kids to do and say things they really aren't inclined to do or say.

To "be shepherds of God's flock", we who are in leadership over kids - staff and volunteers - must know the population we're working with. While books about development can give us general guidance, the family, school, and neighborhood a kid inhabits are what define them personally. So what's going on in each of those environments? We need to know. You don't have to watch "Hannah Montana" to work with this age group, but you do need to understand what's appealing about her. You don't have to be great at video games or even like them, but you do need to understand why they're a draw. To deny those things is to deny kids' experience at a time when their individual identity is being formed. Kids at this age have by and large moved beyond the "eager puppy dog" stage where they'll do anything to please an adult; pre-teens want to grow up and they want to know why: why are you asking me to play this game, or sing this song, or answer this question? I can bemoan that from now to eternity, but the fact is, that's the kids we're dealing with.

Better to meet them at the point of their curiosity: You want authenticity? We'll give you authenticity. And I got the sense that nearly everyone gathered at the conference was eager to do that. So there is one church that is pioneering dedicated nights of worship - with kids! Another challenging kids and parents to pursue service projects, locally, nationally, and globally. Another giving kids important work to do within the church, so they feel connected to the larger body.

And leading these varied efforts is a patchwork of big-hearted individuals who really want to get it right. Some of the leaders I met work full-time specifically with pre-teens, as I do. But many more were responsible for entire children's programs while some were dedicated volunteers, moms and dads, who'd agreed to take on the pre-teen challenge on top of the rest of life. For two days we got to visit and compare notes and share best practices. I was thankful that this wasn't the kind of conference where an expert stood up and expounded on "the way" to do pre-teen ministry. I think it's so new, there are no such experts yet. In another 10 years, there will no doubt be conferences like that, and that'll be a shame. Because the key to reaching kids during a life stage where they are forging their individuality is to remain small and agile enough to meet individual's needs.

Right now we have about 35 weekend volunteers. We could easily use 15 more immediately. When the new building opens, who knows? We try not to assign more than 8 kids to one leader at a time. Even at that ratio I fear there are weeks kids come through the room carrying substantial burdens and no one gets the chance to sincerely ask, "How are you?" As North Coast Calvary gets bigger, the challenge for us will be to get smaller!

And to this end, one of the reflections shared at the end of the conference has stuck with me, that a ministry is a family (a subject I'll write about next week), and that families, to thrive, need to engage deeply with one another. To put it another way, churches need to approach this age group as a ministry, not a classroom. Perhaps the strength of what's going on in pre-teen ministry right now lies in the fact that this isn't the first rodeo for most of its practitioners: ministry leaders either have years of experience in children's ministry or youth ministry, and that knowledge and skill set has accompanied them to where they are now. For many, it seems they didn't choose pre-teen ministry so much as pre-teen ministry chose them. And now it's gripping all of us in a mystery no one's solved yet. I'm grateful for the wrestling, because out of it I'm confident will come a model of ministry that's not glorified children's programming nor jr.-sized youth ministry. Pre-teen is a frontier, and it's rewarding to be traveling through that space.