a hundred degrees

What I Don't Want to Do

At some point early in our marraige, Lexie made it clear that the part of doing laundry she most despised was the sorting and washing. I made it equally clear that I was least enamoured of folding and putting away. So, naturally, she sorts and washes and I fold and put away.

We are one of the least doting pairs of parents you will find. Particularly at our church. We're vocal about being less than thrilled at spending every moment with these little people. Other parents are engrossed with their kids and keep them up late just to interact more with them. Half our motivation for going to church is to have an excuse for more grown-up time. Therefore, as a matter of course, we put ourselves forward to head up a children's church during the last thirty or forty minutes of service (music block, homily, invitation, money gathering, announcements, benediction).

The kids at our church break in to three groups that don't belong in the service: The infants, the toddlers (~18 mos - ~3yrs), and the bigger children. The infants and toddlers don't really need to be in service at all and can't get anything out of it. Those two groups need folks who can watch them for the entire service. The toddlers are probably the easiest group since they just play gently and mostly quietly. The infants occasionally require special care, but are often as easy as the toddlers. It's those big kids that are hard. They have too much energy for a little room with toddlers and no structure, and not enough self-control for the whole service with the adults. They need some time in the service so that they can learn how we do church. Sitting and standing, singing and being quiet are not lessons that they are likely to learn elsewhere. But they also don't need to be confined to adult-oriented structure for an hour. By keeping the kids in the service for the first twenty minutes or so (opening song, visitor welcome, scripture reading, responsive reading, hymn, congregational prayers), they get some practice doing big church.

The pastor has been in contact with the religious bookstore about finding us some children's church materials which follow the same liturgical calendar that he preaches from. This way we might be able to talk to the kids about the same scripture that he's interpreting for the adults. We plan to have some songs (some kid oriented and some of the ones we sing in the service), a story, and some activity like a game or craft to fill the time.

The difficulty is manpower. We certainly don't have fifteen different parents to each get their own week with one of the three groups each month. We hope to be able to recruit some non-parent members for the easier duties with the toddlers and infants. This still makes for a stretch with the children's church. There are five primary kids of this age. One child's parents are separately head of the younger kids' sessions and serving on the music team / youth pastor. One child's parents are separately serving on the music team, and able to relate to children as well as I relate to wrestling fans (to his credit, he's been paying the teenagers to cover his week). One child is there every other Sunday and his parent has two older children to watch in the service. This leaves us and the parents who are expecting a newborn in a few months. If we dig down into the toddlers we find the parents who already teach the toddler Sunday school, the ones with the separation-anxiety poster child, and us again. And our only regular resident of the nursery is a younger sibling of a child already mentioned.

We talked about doing children's church first and third Sundays and continuing our post on fourth Sunday with the toddlers. We do have two kids and are willing to shoulder extra duties. Perhaps my wife and I could sub in to the music team for the two parents who do regular time there to separately lead services on second and fourth Sundays. Surely someone else could show them a video or something four times a year for fifth Sundays.

Then again, perhaps what the kids need is consistency. We'll be the permanent children's pastors and let the preacher email us mp3's of his sermons. Maybe we could rig a light someone in the service could trigger when they're singing the invitation so we could bring the kids back for the less solemn bits of the service (money, announcements, benediction). That way we wouldn't really miss anything.

Posted to Church Life at March 28, 2005 10:21 PM