A Dad in Family Worship

Being one of the pastors at Artisan, I have a philosophy and theory on Children's Ministry, but, as my wife pointed out recently, I really haven't ever sat with the children and experienced what CM is like personally. That all changed this past Sunday.

Partially as a desire to experience the new set up we are endeavoring to create at Artisan, but also because it was my wife's first opportunity to play flute in the band, I chose to remove myself from most of the pastoral duties and just be "Daddy" to our two children (3 and 9 mo.). Here are a few of my reactions and thoughts for future improvements of Artisan CM.

Positives - It was absolutely wonderful to be with my children. I usually don't get this opportunity, so it was a treat for me. Some might comment that I should try it week after week, then describe how much I love it. To such a comment I'd say, yes, it was different. Yes, a lot of my attention was split between singing, prayer, and the kids. And, yes, I even felt a little stressed when one child was spitting up while the other was "coloring" with the glue stick. But I wouldn't trade it for the world. These are my children, they are my God-given responsibility and I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would expect me to abdicate that responsibility simply because I walk in the doors of a church.

I got to sing and dance with my children. OK, so the three year old wasn’t crazy about the dancing and singing, but my baby loved it. Our message was on the Artisan value of “rootedness” and I could explain to my son the parts of a plant and how the plant gets its minerals and water from the roots, kinda like how he eats. We drew and colored a flower and then glued a very simple plant puzzle together (thus the “coloring” with the glue stick incident). During this time I was able to talk with him about roots.

Negatives - As I said earlier, I definitely wasn’t able to give my whole attention to the worship gathering. We are still working out ways to minister to families with multiple children or single parents, or children of parents heavily involved in the worship. I think we need to make it a semi-hard rule (realizing things are definitely fluid at this point) that a child is either in or out of the Family Worship Area. A couple of the older (3 and 4 years old) children were hopping back and forth over the divider, which caused the other children to want to do the same. Unfortunately these were also the children of parents who were very involved in the service and could not be present at all times. So, we need to talk further about how we deal with this situation and whose responsibility it is to make sure children in this situation have appropriate supervision (and more than that, guidance, encouragement, loving attention and instruction).

In closing, I want to reiterate that it was a wonderful experience. I know this is shifting some paradigms and challenging some of what North American Evangelicalism has seen as foundational to the future of the church. But I fully support what Pastor Jason said at our CM meeting Wednesday. The status quo is what has gotten us to the point that we are at currently. Namely disconnected youth who want nothing at all to do with the church. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results. I don’t know if this change will improve upon the current situation. I believe it will. I am confident it won’t do any more harm than the way most churches do CM.