Children in Worship

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Children remaining in the sanctuary. I have long respected, even preferred, that way of involving children in worship.

Once upon the 1980s, I was one of those church babies passed around between churchgoers. I'm told infant-me spent many a hymn entertained by shiny keys.

As I grew in everything but attention span, I brought crayons and dolls and figurines and God knows what else to play with in the pews. I knelt there on the floor and poked my head up to sing and, only with time and curiosity did I learn, prayer by prayer, sermon by sermon, what else people "do" at church.

For children's sermons, all the kids were called up to the front where we learned that the answer was almost always "Jesus" except when it definitely wasn't. As I recall, we didn't leave the sanctuary. We returned to our families in the pews, to dolls and figurines, to crayons and markers that were not modern-magical and could have made marks on non-paper surfaces like nineteenth century wood.

How did you learn church? That's how I learned church.

I marveled at the operatic voice of the woman who sat in the pew in front of us. I grew to have a favorite hymn to request when requests were requested (even though the deciding powers ruled that Go Tell It on the Mountain was not a hymn meant for summer, which is true but dumb).

I learned to say prayers I didn't write and to say prayers no one else would ever know but God. I came to enjoy the fellowship of the people around me without the company of miniature figurines and homemade paper dolls.

Having said all that, this is not the style I've adopted in leadership. I've found something that works for me and the community I've been serving as a lay staff member as of August.

My approach is what First Pres has done before my time here, adapted slightly to suit my current understanding of children's ministry. We have what we (they) call Children in Worship -- yep, a designated gathering of a child horde. So here's how it goes.

No children's sermon in the sanctuary. Just a mid-service invitation (read: exuberant parade) for kids to come together in the next room, where we can still hear the murmur of laughter and music but also each other's quietest voices, a place where we have direct access to the outdoors if we want fresh air and sunlight as well as a wide-open warmth inside if that's all we need.

One of the co-pastors (a husband and wife team who alternate their preaching and other responsibilities) joins us to get to know the kids better and share the gospel. Sometimes we hear the same illustrations that the adults are hearing at that very moment, just in a different way, like that one Sunday that multigenerational families went home and discovered they'd all heard a biblical application of Finding Nemo.

Here in our own little un-pewed space, the adult worshippers are not spectating, so the kids have just as much time as the adults' sermon experience to ask as many questions as their hearts desire (without a roomful of grownups' unabashed giggling, because hey, some kids do fully intend to be funny, but some of them just want to know, you know?). They voice their own prayers, sharing joys and concerns that range from announcements to profound expressions of sorrow and excitement. We listen to as many as we can.

We pray with our mouths and our bodies. We invite bowed heads and clasped hands and raised heads and hands open to receiving and meditative poses and peeking eyes and closed eyes and lying on our backs with our eyes focused on origami birds. We say the Lord's Prayer by rote, letting the rhythm of the words soak into our bones, but even this same prayer looks different in each body's language.

And we stretch our bodies often to remind us that it's good and right to move around, that there is a time to "be still and know" and there's a time for dancing and wiggling, and they're both sacred.

On Communion Sundays, the kids teach each other about Communion (!) -- what it means, what it looks like, and how we'll celebrate it when we return to the sanctuary.

Then we help the kids to develop something to share with the congregation during a later worship service, encouraging them to be inter-generational teachers. The children experience the sanctuary as a place where they not only sing and listen but also lead on a regular basis.

I have, at this stage in my ministry, no use for in-sanctuary children's sermons where the adult speaks to the children and the rest of the adults spectate or participate peripherally. If adult parishioners "get more out of" the in-sanctuary children's sermons (as some universal parishioners say, fairly enough), maybe the adult sermons aren't doing quite what they're supposed to do.

If the messages aren't just for the children, why are the children so often the only ones called up front and quizzed (yes, okay, even in a friendly sort of way)? Why not let everyone stay where they are and let the leader say something so interesting and clear that it makes little heads pop up from the pews or wander forward on their own to get a better look? And if the messages are just for the children, why isn't there nearly enough time to let them ask questions and share more insights and responses than those that are prompted directly?

I've known some excellent pastors who speak beautifully with the children, who manage their limited resource of time with both wisdom and grace. But I've also seen a lot of shy kids who'd rather fall through a hole in the floor than be put on the spot in front of strangers and friends, a lot of good questions shut down too soon, a lot of potentially serious answers drawing ripples of laughter from mentors and role models, a lot of lost opportunities for meaningful conversations that were right there within reach.

No, I like this sacred space, away from grown spectators. I like this sacred time when a worship agenda doesn't get priority over curiosity and necessary time for processing and application. I like worshipping God in the spontaneous, childlike movements of the Holy Spirit.

And, when they feel good and ready, after they've had some time to ponder and practice, I like to hear the children speaking in the sanctuary, teaching their elders like the little boy Jesus in the temple.

If they are truly respected as people, not trained like circus animals or even just constantly called on for answers like grade school students, I think many children will grow -- in knowledge, in confidence, and in faith -- more from teaching others and being heard and known than they ever will from being talked at.

Even if we're good at it.

Breaking Ground

I had a realization of my own after the goodbye-themed inter-generational Bible study I led at church the other night.

In a time of lifting up loved ones who have passed on or moved away, I named my grandfather (my eulogy for him is posted here), and I explained that I called him Grandsprout because he called me Sprout.

What I've realized since Sunday night is that no one else in the world calls me Sprout and what that means. When my grandfather's dementia deepened to the point of no longer recognizing his loved ones, we ourselves struggled to hold on to who we were to him. When he died, the me who was Sprout died, too.

It was not only the loss of a beloved person but also the end of a relationship, of all the relationships he had with his family and friends.

And at the heart of our relationship, his and mine, was growth. A love of greenery and soil and earthy things. A wisdom of seasons and perseverance and devoted care. My grandfather watched me grow up, and I watched my grandfather grow his garden. These were the joys we basked in together.

So it's only fitting that, when I finally found the language to heal myself almost two years later, it came to me in the form of plant life. Specifically, it came to me in an image that my professor, Angella Son, included in her new book, Spirituality of Joy. Although it took on a different meaning for me than it did for her, the image of the moso bamboo tree inspired me to compose a song.

The lyrics are a conversation between a soul and God, throughout the sort of experience that is often known in spiritual circles as the dark night of the soul. But in this case, the process is likened to the growth pattern of the moso bamboo tree, which grows roots for five years before it even breaks ground (and then it hits some kind of plant puberty and grows about 90 feet in six months, but who's counting?). To the unsuspecting gardener, those first five years look to be a failure, like nothing good is happening and any hope of vegetation is gone.

But the God I've come to know through my grief is a God with dirty fingernails and all the time in the world. A God who knows the strength of roots and the goodness of brokenness when a seed is breaking open, breaking ground.

It's through writing this song that I began to live again, and it's only now that I realize that the person I came to be, in some way, is still and always will be my Grandsprout's Sprout.

Growing Underground
Music and lyrics by Kimberley Fais, 2013

You plant. You feed. You water. I sleep.
Then I stretch, and I breathe, and take root in the deep.
Even though I can't see, You promise me
I'm not going under. I'm just growing underground.
I'm not going under. I'm just growing underground.
And I will grow out before I grow up.
It's a long way out.

You've got time in Your hands and dirt in Your nails.
You see what succeeds when everything fails.
It's hard to believe what You promised me.
I'm not going under. I'm just growing underground.
I'm not going under. I'm just growing underground.
And I will grow out before I grow up.
It's a long way up.

Deep and dark down here, where I weep with joy,
I'm not drowning out Your still small voice.
Little do I know I'm right where I should be.
I'm where You're tending me.

You planted. You fed. You watered. I woke.
Then I stretched, and I breathed, and through the ground I broke.
And I rose, and I grew. You said: "I promised you--
You were never going under. You were just growing underground.
You were never going under. You were just growing underground.
And I watched you grow the roots that would let you grow up.
Look at you now. . . ."

The Last Day Lament

I led this prayer on the last day of our worship course (the day that we sang all the hymns that the students had written, hence the thematic transition at the end).

Source

A Seminary Psalm: The Last Day Lament

O God of Time, infinitely and intimately ours,
We are students and faculty facing the end of another semester;
Some of us the end of our journey at Drew.

We are buried beneath literal and digital stacks of paperwork,
Crunching out reports, and recuperating from computer crashes.
We are following guidelines and looking toward deadlines
And yet, despite so many straightforward lines,
We lose ourselves in a whirlwind of expectations.

O God of Grace, whose Book of Life has no column for grades,
We are students and faculty facing constant measurement:
Our mistakes and retakes, our credits and diplomas.
Our publish-or-perish publications, our tenure and evaluations.
We see A's and B's and C's and I's, NR's, and Z's,
And we wonder what they say about us;
About our learning and about our teaching.
We absorb letters on transcripts
As though they spell who we are and what we do.
But our identity is in You, O God:
You call us Beloved.
And our purpose is in You, O God:
You call us to Live, to Learn, and to Love.

Deliver us, O God!
Deliver us from the finality of our finals,
The pressure of our presentations,
The stress of our tests,
And the insidious voice inside us
Insisting that we've come to Drew
For any other reward or reason
Than the one for which You've led us here.

And thank You, God of Song,
That in the midst of our reading and writing,
We can claim this sacred time and space
To give You glory and praise.
Let all that we are and do be a song to You!

Amen.