Formational Children's Ministry (emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith) , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - Ivy Beckwith

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

64 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Much ministry to children looks more like mere entertainment than authentic spiritual formation. But what if children's ministries were rooted in a mind set whereby we taught children, with our words and actions, how the story of God, the story of church history, the story of the local community, and the story of the child intersect and speak to one another? What if children's ministry was less about downloading information into kids' heads and more about leading them into these powerful, compelling stories? Beckwith aims to help ministers and parents create a ministry that captures children's imaginations not just to keep them occupied, but to live as citizens of the kingdom of God. In addition to providing theological reasons for formational children's ministry, the book offers examples of how Ivy and other practitioners are implementing a formational model.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Informations

Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 janvier 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441207357
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0461€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

© 2010 by Ivy Beckwith
Published by Baker Books a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516–6287 www.bakerbooks.com
E-book edition created 2010
Ebook corrections 07.25.2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-0735-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
To the children and parents of the Congregational Church of New Canaan, who lovingly offered me a space to think and create through their gifts and generosity.
contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Emergent Village resources for communities of faith
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Shepherding Children into a Life with God
1. The Search for a New Model
2. The Child and God’s Story
3. The Child and the Story of God’s Church
4. The Child and the Story of the Faith Community
5. The Child and the Story of Faith
6. The Transformative Power of Ritual
7. Children in the Worshiping Community
8. Facilitating Spiritual Formation through Spiritual Disciplines
9. Soul Care through Family Relationships
10. Facilitating Spiritual Formation through Community Relationships
11. Facilitating Spiritual Formation through Peer-to-Peer Relationships
Afterword
Notes
About the Author
Series Editors
Emergent Village resources for communities of faith
is a partnership between Baker Books and Emergent Village, a growing, generative friendship among missional Christians seeking to love our world in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. The line is intended for professional and lay leaders like you who are meeting the challenges of a changing culture with vision and hope for the future. These books will encourage you and your community to live into God’s kingdom here and now.
The book in your hands is a gift to the church. Ivy Beckwith writes like a friend with treasure to share. Formational Children’s Ministry sneaks in the bad news up front: our churches’ ways of interacting with children are not working and need some serious overhaul. But the good news is encouraging and comes quickly: our misunderstanding and misuse of story, ritual, worship, spiritual disciplines, family relationships, peer relationships, and community life can be redeemed, and young people can be integrated into the lives of our churches and communities in ways we’ve not yet imagined.
Writing from her years of experience and out of her expertise in educational theory and human development, Ivy will show you a better way and motivate you to put these ideas into practice. Her suggestions are practical, her hope is infectious, and she writes honestly, directly, personally, and warmly. We’re pleased to add this book to the emersion line, and to welcome these very important people children! into a mutually beneficial engagement with church.
acknowledgments
Many thanks to Sarah Hover from Trinity Church in Greenwich, Connecticut, and to Mimi Keel from Jacob’s Well Church in Kansas City, Missouri, for sharing their shepherding stories with me.
introduction shepherding children into a life with God
The first time I presented the material that eventually became Postmodern Children’s Ministry was at a children’s pastors’ conference in Nashville, Tennessee. I was amazed to see the meeting room packed with people. In the interest of full disclosure, this wasn’t the largest of hotel seminar rooms, but it was packed nonetheless. After the workshop I was surprised at the positive response I heard from the participants. I thought what I was presenting might be a little controversial for this audience. A little while after I gave the workshop, I was walking into the exhibit area when I was stopped by a young man. He thanked me for the workshop and told me I had described him when I described the postmodern worldview and ethos and how this might relate to how we do children’s ministry. He said he finally understood why he thought differently than his other children’s ministry colleagues.
Fast forward several years to New Haven, Connecticut. The setting is a seminar room at Yale Divinity School. I was facilitating a discussion on intergenerational community and spiritual formation. I’d expected about ten to twelve people for a quiet, stimulating time of sharing ideas and thoughts. This notion was quickly shattered as the room filled rapidly. Soon people were standing lining the walls, sitting on window sills, and crowding the doorway. I had to quickly readjust my plans and figure out how to have this meaningful discussion with fifty people with fifty different sets of expectations. What followed was a stimulating, free-form discussion about spiritual formation and how our churches were or weren’t meeting this need with all generations. I walked away amazed at the stories I heard and the interest in the topic.
Then just a few months ago I was at a large children’s ministry conference in the Midwest. Over three thousand children’s pastors were in attendance. One day I stood on the balcony overlooking the large hall where lunch was being served. As I watched hundreds and hundreds of people devoted to children’s ministry stream into that room, I wondered to myself, With so many people in this country pouring their lives and hearts into the spiritual formation of children, why are we not seeing miraculous results, and why are we not capturing the imaginations of our children for the kingdom of God? I had no good answers except to go back to something I’d said in the introduction to Postmodern Children’s Ministry : the way we do children’s ministry in many of our North American churches is broken.
A few years ago I read a book called Soul Searching . This book chronicled a research study done with three thousand North American teenagers about their understanding of their personal faith and the researchers’ analysis of their findings. The good news was that most of the teens interviewed had faith. The bad news was that those who claimed Christian faith described a faith very different from orthodox Christian faith. The researchers call the faith of these teenagers “Moral Therapeutic Deism,” and it consists of five tenets:
1. God exists, created the world, and watches over the earth.
2. God wants people to be good and nice to others.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy.
4. The only time God needs to be personally involved in one’s life is when one has a problem needing to be resolved.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.
As I read this book, I realized this was the outcome of all these hours these teens had spent in their church’s children’s ministries in the heyday of church children’s ministry. After years of hearing Bible stories, memorizing Bible verses, and singing songs about Jesus’s love for them, their understanding of faith, of God, and of God’s plans and purposes was simplistic, individualistic, and almost secular. Yes, children’s ministry in our churches is, indeed, broken.
And I tell these three stories to illustrate how deep and widespread this dissatisfaction with current trends is. When Postmodern Children’s Ministry was released I was overwhelmed with the positive response. I had expected criticism of my ideas, but I’d never expected to find so many people who resonated with my concern that we needed to reframe and fix the way we think about children’s ministry in our churches. The seminar room at Yale included people from mainline Christianity and from the most conservative evangelical denominations all voicing the same concerns. But as I talked with people who resonated with my ideas, and as I spoke in various venues around the country about my ideas, I discovered that while people sensed that things needed to change, they had no idea how to do it. When I spoke about developing a formational model of children’s ministry over and against the schooling model now in place in most of our churches, the question was always, “What do you mean by that?” or “What does that look like?” I realized there were few models out there to study. I realized that while I had a vague concept in my head as to what this might look like in local church ministry, I really had not put any muscle and skin on these skeletal ideas.
I’ve spent the years since the release of Postmodern Children’s Ministry reading, talking with people, and running my own pilot programs in a local church in order to figure out what this formational model might look like. What you will find in the following pages are the results of this work and the work of other practitioners as they explore this issue. There are churches that are seriously looking for new ways to connect their children and families to the transcendent God and to that God’s kingdom. You will find some of their experiences in the following pages as well.
Oddly enough, one of the books that has influenced my thinking about the spiritual formation of children since the publication of Postmodern Children’s Ministry has nothing at all to do with children: Colossians Remixed by Brian J. Walsh and Sylvia C. Keesmaat. 1 This is a commentary on the book of Colossians written within the context of a postmodern world-view. One of the points the authors make in the book is that Paul was telling the church at Colossae that they had an immense lack of imagination when it came to understanding what it meant to live as people who follow Jesus in the overpowering and ubiquitous shadow of the Roman Empire. They point out that today’s North American church has the same problem while enmeshed in the popular culture of of the United States. Any time we say we can’t do something that Jesus commanded and would be good for the souls of our children because . . . (cite any cultu