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Children's volunteers bring faith to the future

by: Scott Franks

As I dropped my two-year-old off at the nursery, I realized that I had seen Holly there twice that Sunday, during both Sunday morning and evening services. Holly explained that, once again, the adult class responsible for providing volunteers for the nursery had not come through. Now it was just her and her husband scrambling to keep up with 10 toddlers.

We have a system in which each adult class is responsible for providing nursery volunteers for one month of the year. This usually works very well. With our numbers, in theory, we are only asking each couple in our church to spend one hour in the nursery a year.

Yet the class responsible for this month had shown up sporadically at best. This class is one of our largest, full of active grandparents. We had the same underwhelming response from them during a recent teacher recruiting drive. The responses we heard were predictable:

• "We’ve done our time. The parents need to take care of their own kids, like we did."
• "We’re tired and just can’t keep up anymore."
• "We’re gone again (to the lake house, in the RV, etc.) this weekend."
• "We can’t relate to these kids anymore."

Without question there is truth in each of those excuses, but they also have an undercurrent that scares me because they echo a theme from Judges.

Judges describes the tragedy of religious amnesia. The Israelites, in the space of one generation, forgot who they were. They forgot God. Without those cornerstones, their only points of reference for defining morality were limited to personal experience and messages from the popular culture around them. That’s the situation described in the very last line of Judges, "In those days there was no king in Israel, every man did what was right in his own eyes."

The first step on Israel’s slippery slope was this: They became comfortable. They didn’t see any threat from scattered pockets of Canaanites left here and there, and felt quite safe and comfortable with having these pagans and their idols nearby. But that mistake turned fatal when being comfortable led to being timid.

Judges 1:34 reads, "The Amorites confined the Danites to the hill country, not allowing them to come down into the plain." (NIV)

The Danites became conservative in the worst sense of the word. They decided that past performance could not guarantee future results. They had heard about God making armies fall before their ancestors, but what if he didn’t this time?

So after marching and fighting for years to reach their inheritance in the Promised Land, they slunk off to the hills, where they became less and less willing to risk failure.

Taking a risk

I spent a summer as a college recruiter in the Northwest, and I remember walking along the water at Point Defiance Park in Tacoma. There was a romantic walkway on the edge of the shore about five feet above the water of Puget Sound. I noticed that young couples would walk on the edge very near the water and even play like they were about to bump each other over the edge. All the older couples, though, stayed a safe distance away from the water. I watched that and wondered at what age it stopped being fun to walk along the edge.

Most of us tend to grow more averse to risk the older we get. For many of the older members of our church, the hallway leading to our children’s classes is very dangerous territory. It is undoubtedly intimidating for a grandmother to walk into a class of 6-year-olds when she hasn’t taught kids in 20 years and no longer knows the songs they sing. When older Christians say they can’t relate to kids anymore, that is a sincere concern. And some older people are simply too frail to function amid rambunctious toddlers.

But if a church’s main priority is to make its members comfortable, it is lost. Israel’s failure in the time of Judges was not that they lost battles, but that they lost their children. After Joshua, the Israelites failed to mentor the younger generation. Their children were left with a disconnected history and the accoutrements of a religion, but no way to form all these pieces into a relevant, sustainable faith. The possibility of that happening today is just as real.

Despite their self-sufficient, self-indulgent aura, our kids still need the older generations to remind them of who they are and what God can do. A grandparent’s very presence in a children’s classroom is a powerful message; they are the living proof that a faith in Christ can and must last. In the tradition of Moses or Joshua, we need our senior members to stay in the fight until the very end, to keep that warrior mentality, to take risks and not retire from the church.

But how do we do that? At our church we are equipping our senior members in two ways to meaningfully contribute to our children’s ministry.

We are developing a training class called Kidology 101. This quarter-long class was the brainchild of our preschool director. She compiled data from George Barna, Thom Rainer and secular researchers, as a framework for understanding the Millennials, the current generation of children growing up in our post-modern world.

In Kidology 101 we introduce participants to the various learning styles, because sitting quietly in hard wooden chairs is no longer the norm. We talk about handling special-needs kids. We introduce our parents and grandparents to what is available to their children on the Internet, and offer practical ways for maximizing the good while eliminating the bad. Finally, we place participants in our children’s classes as observers and aides so they can see the how and why of our programming.

Hopefully, Kidology 101 will eliminate many of the obstacles we currently face in recruiting our senior members. By utilizing church members who are professional educators or outstanding Sunday school volunteers to teach this class, we want to create a multi-generational dialogue, while setting a standard of excellence in our children’s programs. A different version of Kidology 101 will also be offered to our teens who want to help with our children’s ministry.

It is true that many of our senior members are physically incapable of teaching a children’s class, but they can still help behind the scenes by preparing manipulatives, crafts and other essentials for children’s classes. We hope to bring our senior members together on Monday nights and, fueled by dessert, coffee and great conversation, give them all the materials and instruction they need to prepare crafts, bulletin boards or other projects for our classes and children’s events.

These are the things that often consume the Saturday nights of our teachers. By farming out this work, our teachers can concentrate on what they do best, and our senior members can still contribute in a meaningful way to the future of our children.

According to recent research by Barna, most of us form our spiritual beliefs by the age of 13, and those beliefs are rarely changed thereafter. We have just a brief window to win over our kids for Christ. If we as a church family fail that, if our older generation just wants to be comfortable and in timid silence leaves the younger generations to their own devices, we will lose those kids, and they will be destined to repeat the same sad story of Judges again.

Scott Franks is the Education Minister for the Memorial Road Church of Christ in Edmond, Oklahoma. He has previously served as the Involvement Minister for the Bammel Church of Christ in Houston, TX and the Dean of Students at Oklahoma Christian University. He has written several adult Bible study series, some of which are available as free downloads on www.mrcc.org. Scott is an associate in New Avenues Career Ministry, which brings practical job search seminars to local churches as community outreach events. Scott is also a licensed church consultant through Thom Rainer’s training program with Church Central. He can be reached at sfranks@mrcc.org