This morning's paper contained an article that said that FEMA is mulling over the possibility of re-imbursing churches for their care of the victims from Hurricane Katrina. The article said that some churches are already tallying up the bills for electricity and worn carpet.

What bothers me about this is not the separation of church and state issues but that any church would consider being reimbursed by the government for simply doing what it is that people who follow Jesus are supposed to do -- love one's neighbor. It would seem to me that the mission of the church is to do exactly this -- take in those who have lost their homes and loved ones, the stranger, the widow, the slave, and the child without regard for the cost of the electrical bill or the strain on the carpeting. This is a place for the community of faith the rise up and demonstrate the lavish and costly generosity of the kingdom of God. And if a church in one community is put in severe financial straits because of these actions -- then that's where other churches, communities of faith, in their town should come to their aid -- sharing resources with them.

If we want to raise children of extravagant generosity and hesed (that loving kindness of God that always does what is right) then our communities of faith need to be corporate examples of faith to them. Not places that worry about a damaged carpet.

I just finished reading Colossians Remixed, a post modern reading of the epistle to the Colossians by Brian Walsh and his wife (who is a person in her own right but I don't have the book in front of me so I don't recall her name). And it absolutely blew me away.

One theme that captured me was how the Roman Empire had captured the imagination of its citizens and how God's story was meant to over throw that by capturing people's imagination with the much greater story of God's desire to redeem all of the creation. Paul's epistle was all about freeing the human imagination to imagine God's way and God's future.

As I've thought more about this concept I keep going back to the idea that churches and families have not done a very good job of capturing our children's imaginations with God's story -- what does it mean to do this? and how do we go about doing this?

Any thoughts or ideas??

The 9/6 issue of The Christian Century has 2 interesting articles on what teens believe. The first is a review of a study entitled Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Smith and Denton). The good news from this study is that American teens are not overwhelming secular. They do believe, they do have faith in God. The bad news is the shape that faith takes. Smith and Denton describe it as Moral Therapeutic Deism whose creed is as follows:
1)God exists and watches over the world & human life
2)God wants people to be good and nice to and fair to each other. This is taught in the Bible
3)The central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about oneself
4)God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to solve a problem.
5)Good people go to heaven when they die.

In a related article a youth pastor attributes part of the cause of this to the pressure churches put on youth people to make church "fun."
He writes: "We often fail to help teens think carefully about their faith and about the details of scripture, worship and Christian practices. Getting kids to like church is itself an accomplishment, and parents want ministers to succeed at that. Not surprisingly, Smith and Denton describe youth ministers as under great pressure to keep kids entertained. One common strategy inovolves front loading youth programs with fun activities, hoping to sneak a little Bible teaching in at the end. The point not to do anything too weighty that would turn kids off. Keep it light; keep it fun."

He could, also, be describing the state of Children's Ministry in today's church where we are raising fervent and articulate moral therapeutic deists.

I'm finding myself overwhelmed by the human devestation brought by Hurricane Katrina and am experiencing feelings akin to those experienced after 9/11/01. And I want to help but know that the most I can do is pray (which I have and which I hope God is hearing) and contribute to some disaster relief (which I haven't yet but intend to). I just can't imagine the horrors those people in Louisiana and Mississippi are going through.

But in saying all that there is something about all this that disturbs me. This is something that disturbs me when ever tragedy strikes Americans anywhere. We seem to live in a culture where it is not "OK" to have bad things happen (sometimes for no explicit reason) or where it is not "OK" to endure any kind of suffering. There always has to be someone to blame - someone who's fault it is for the suffering and the pain. A quick perusal of the cable TV channels last night and a brief period of watching C-Span this morning showed me this perspective is alive and well in the midst of this tragedy. It's the mayor's fault; It's FEMA's fault; It's the weather forcasters fault; It's the Republicans (or insert Democrat's fault) - somebody has to be blamed because we should be able to prevent horror and suffering in this country -- afterall, this is America. But the truth is that horror and suffering are a part of living on this planet, a part of living in the bent world we live in. But because those of us who live in the affluent western world are fortunate to escape much of the suffering and horror of the rest of the world we think something is wrong, someone is to blame when we do find ourselves experiencing it.

Now you may be asking - "What does this rant have to do with Children's Ministry." Well, I think this idea that experiencing suffering, sadness, difficutly is bad gets taught to our children in churches when we equate following Jesus and living in the kingdom of God with life in a giant Disneyland -- when all we tell children is that following Jesus is fun and that's why you should do it. "Your life will better if you follow Jesus (often interpreted as we'll have the American Dream life if we follow Jesus)" is what we tell children. But, you know what, sometimes life isn't better when we follow Jesus - sometimes following Jesus is (as a woman told me once from her hospital bed) "damn hard." I don't think God became human and then died a humilating, painful death simply so we could have fun and never have anything bad happen to us. But I think sometimes our actions and how we teach our children reflect that very bad theology.