Yesterday I read the article in the latest Children's Ministry magazine about edutainment. Over all I thought the article presented a fairly balanced view of the topic. But there were a few things in the article I need to take issue with. First, I'm not sure I would equate the use of good teaching learning methodology with "edutainment." While there is a sense that good teaching is entertaining I like to think of it more as something that engages students rather than entertains them. Not all engagement can necessarily be called entertaining. Second, (and this is one of the real problems I have with entertainment, attractional based children's ministries)I am usually appalled at the amount of money spent on creating and maintaining these entertaining environments. When I think of the needs around the world and I see churches spending all this money in this way I just think something about our priorities is out of whack. Third, one of the children's pastors interviewed said something about how all of this was OK because they weren't selling anything. Of course, they're selling something. They're selling God and Jesus to these kids in a way that hardly reflects (at leastin my opinion) the values Jesus reflects in the Gospels. Which brings me to my harshest criticism of this trend - what the medium (because the medium is the message and often speaks louder than the content)teaches these kids about what it means to love God and follow Jesus.
I think we do a diservice to the kids who come through the doors of our church when we teach them that being a person of faith, a follower of Jesus is all about noise, technology, glitz, hype, fun, craziness, prizes, and games.

I've been recovering from a trip to Boston where I got stranded for an extra night becuase of "air traffic" in Chicago. It was a good trip to a great city but I not getting home when I planned sort of thew off my whole week. And I should not be complaining about my little inconveniences in the light of this weekend's events in both the UK and Egypt.


But what I really want to do is ask you a question. I'm doing a workshop in September on current trends in Children's Ministry. Now I have my own ideas about this but I thought it would be better not to just present what I think. I'd like to hear what you think. What are the current trends in Children's Ministry you see?
Let me know.

The latest issue of The Christian Century (7/12) includes a quote from worship consultant Sally Morgenthaler where she said that in the past 30 years worship in American churches has shifted from an emphasis on an encounter with the divine to didactics. If this is the case (and my sense is that it is) this would account for the expulsion of children from most American churches' worship services. It is difficult to make something cognitive and didactic intergenerational while an encounter with God is simply by its nature intergenerational.

I attended a lovely wedding over the past weekend. The bride was the daughter of some good friends -- some of the most outstanding people I know who raised two amazing daughters. These women are not outstanding just because they are very successful professionally, they are outstanding because they are fine people -- compassionate, caring, thoughtful and faithful. Over the years I've looked at this family as a model for what the "christian" family should look like. This is a family where values were lived not just talked about, a family where the parents were definitely in charge but the girls were given freedom to become themselves. Yet, it has not been a family without heartbreak, either. So you can see why I often point to them as a model for spiritually nurturing families. But whenever I do that I always have this nagging sense in the back of my mind that there are probably other families out there who parented in much the same way my friends did whose children didn't turn out to be as spiritually and emotionally healthy as my friends' daughters. And we all know families where the parenting has not been the best it could be and the kids still turn out to be fine human beings. So what was the difference? Is it just that parents do the very best they can and hope for the best? And where does God and the Holy Spirit figure into all of this? Does parenting really matter? (I think it does - but it is an intriguing question when one looks at the anedotal evidence). Often we look at the dysfunctional to see what functional really is. Perhaps it's time to look at functional families to find out significant correlations to spiritual and emotional maturity.

A couple of days ago I had a conversation with a Formation pastor from a church in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. We were discussing the schooling model of religious education vs. what might be called a formation model. I commented that schooling models were helpful for teaching skills like how to find passages, stories, etc. in the Bible but not as helpful when we wanted to assist God's spirit in creating people who love God and follow Jesus. While we agreed on this the pastor lamented the lack of Bible knowledge found in children today. (Obviously our schooling model has failed to teach Bible facts -- something a schooling model ought to be good at.) This concern prompted within myself a debate I've had over the years about this. How important is it that our children know Bible facts? How, exactly, does knowing the details of a Bible story or character contribute to a child's spiritual formation? Or is it more important for a child to understand the "big picture" of God's story, how it all fits together and our place in it (which, of course, would entail knowing some of the stories the Bible gives us). Or has our failure to teach Bible facts through a schooling model told us that maybe we've failed in telling God's story in a way that is truly meaningful to our children? I have some ideas and opinions about this but no definitive answer. What do you think?

I'll postpone until tomorrow what I was going to write about today because I couldn't let the morning go by without commenting on the awful events of the day in London. Today's news is a stark reminder of the evil pervading our world and makes it hard to continue to talk about the coming of God's kingdom. Today the kingdom of God seems smaller than the mustard seed Jesus alluded to. But it is here among us and as people who follow Jesus we need to remember that our hope is not in anti-terror task forces, G-8 leaders, ill-conceived wars, or the might of ecomomic wealth. Our hope is in God and God's plans for the righting, the unbending of creation. And we need to help our children understand this and embrace this -- help them to see themselves, first, as citizens of God's kingdom.

My prayers are with the people of London, today.