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Baker Publishing Group - J. Keeley Robert

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64 pages

English

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Children have serious faith questions that require serious answers, answers that adults often find themselves under-prepared to give. But the Christian community has a responsibility to help its children develop a three-dimensional faith--a faith that affects their heads, their hearts, and their spirits.Helping Our Children Grow in Faith is designed for children's ministry and worship leaders, Sunday school teachers, and pastors--as well as parents--who want to nurture the spiritual development of the children in their lives. It shows how to integrate children into congregational worship, how to teach them the Bible but leave room for the mystery of God, and how to distinguish the difference between faith development and moral development.

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Philosophie et théologie

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 janvier 2008
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441233509
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0432€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Helping Our Children Grow in Faith offers a thoughtful, accessible, and practical introduction to the basic building blocks of effective ministries with children. Robert J. Keeley takes seriously children and their spiritual development, challenging congregations to move beyond simplistic approaches that don t fully engage children. In the process, he invites leaders to transform congregations to become communities where children are included, loved, valued, and nurtured by a whole community of caring Christians.
-Eugene C. Roehlkepartain, co-director, Center for Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence Search Institute, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Drawing on his rich experience as a Children s Ministry Director, Dr. Keeley offers practical suggestions for welcoming children into the faith community as authentic participants. He envisions church as a child-friendly culture, an environment healthy for the spiritual growth of children. And he points the way to forming such a community.
-Cathy Stonehouse, dean, School of Practical Theology and Orlean Bullard Beeson Professor of Christian Discipleship, Asbury Theological Seminary
I loved this book! Robert Keeley points us in the right direction for building a ministry strategy with children. It is a delight to find someone with a clear vision of how the entire life of the church needs to be developed if we want our children to have a healthy, growing faith in Jesus Christ. This is a must read for every children s pastor and lay leader who cares about the spiritual nurture of children.
-Dr. Kevin E. Lawson, director, PhD and EdD programs in Educational Studies, Talbot School of Theology; editor, Christian Education Journal
Biblical, practical, and scholarly is one way to describe Robert J. Keeley s book. Warm, gentle, and encouraging are another set of descriptors. Helping Our Children Grow in Faith weaves personal experience with scholarly research and biblical perspectives in offering pastors, parents, and church educators practical wisdom while gently challenging them to consider new ways to offer children a rich, vibrant faith.
-George Brown, Jr., Haworth Professor of Christian Education; associate dean, Western Theological Seminary
Helping Our Children Grow in Faith is an engaging look at the opportunities and challenges of nurturing children s faith. Professor Keeley s clear explanation of faith nurture and thoughtful examination of the role of parents and congregations in the process is a refreshing invitation for the church to reprioritize its children s ministry.
-Darwin Glassford, associate professor of church education; director of MA Programs, Calvin Theological Seminary
Helping Our Children Grow in Faith is an excellent resource for shoring up children s growth in faith. It also is an entry point for exploring the burgeoning field of resources available that address the faith and spiritual life of children.
-Scottie May, professor, Department of Christian Formation and Ministry, Wheaton College
Keeley has done us all a great service and made very insightful material available. I ve always wanted our children to grow in faith, and I ve worked hard at it. But now I understand better how it happens, what it takes, and how one stage is different from another. Growing their faith won t happen without growing a church in which they can grow. This book will take you inside the church by taking you inside the process of forming a child s faith!
-Howard Vanderwell, resource development specialist, Calvin Institute of Christian Worship
Robert Keeley combines biblical grounding, educational research, and much experience to create this down-to-earth guide. Readers will find here not only practical advice but also a wise proposal about changing our congregational cultures in ways that benefit young and old.
-Debra Rienstra, associate professor of English, Calvin College
Though this book includes lots of specific we could do that ideas, it is mainly a sweeping vision book. I d buy it for a parent or committee member who is new to children s ministry or for one who has done it all and needs to remember what it s all about.
-Carolyn Brown, children s ministry consultant and author
Robert Keeley masterfully describes some of the best current ideas for nurturing children s spiritual development-intentional intergenerationality, the significance of story, the role of wonder-and illustrates them with colorful family stories and incisive vignettes from a variety of church settings.
-Holly Allen, associate professor of Christian Ministries; director, Children and Family Ministries, John Brown University
HeLPING OuR CHiLDReN GROW IN FAITH
How the Church Can Nurture the Spiritual Development of Kids
ROBERT J. KEELEY
2008 by Robert J. Keeley
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 2011
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 978-1-4412-3350-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Scripture is taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version . NIV . Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Three-Dimensional Faith
2. The Church as Community
3. Jesus Values Children
4. Dwelling in the Mysteries
5. The Power of Story
6. Obedience and Faith
7. Worship
8. Creating a Child-Friendly Culture
Appendix A Traveling with Paul: Bringing the First Missionary Journey to Life
Appendix B Picture Books
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to many people for their support and help as I wrote this book. I am grateful to my colleagues at Calvin College, specifically to the faculty and staff of the Education Department. They have supported my work, and I appreciate them as colleagues and friends. Thanks also to Gloria Stronks, a former colleague, who read an early draft of the manuscript and made a number of helpful comments.
The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and its director John Witvliet have encouraged me to continue to work out the ideas presented in this book and have given me a number of opportunities to talk with people in the field and to present these ideas. Kristen VerHulst, Kathy Smith, and Joyce Borger were helpful in making comments on an early draft of this manuscript. Summer 2005 Seminar in Christian Scholarship group led by John Witvliet also read and discussed this work, making valuable comments.
My friends Ron and Debra Rienstra were encouraging throughout the process of writing this book. The discussions that Laura and I had with them about these topics were illuminating and fun. Ron was often my go-to guy on matters of theology, and he was always helpful and patient with me as I tried out new ideas.
I have been greatly blessed through the churches that I have been a member of throughout my life. Most recently Pastor Marv Hofman and the congregation at Fourteenth Street Christian Reformed Church, where Laura and I serve as Children s Ministry Directors, have been helpful in giving us many positive examples of what it means to welcome children into the full fellowship of the church. The children we have been blessed to work with there have ministered to me as much as I have to them.
My parents, John and Ratie Keeley, and my in-laws, Gerald and Marjorie VanderKooy, have given me concrete examples of how to raise children who know and love the Lord.
This book would not have happened had I not been a partner in life and in ministry with my wife, Laura. She has been my best friend and my most ardent fan and critic for over thirty years. We talk about ministry to children together almost daily. Aside from collaborating in ministry and in writing, we also have four children: Bethany, Meredith, Bryan, and Lynnae. I m richly blessed to be their father.
Thanks be to God.
Robert Keeley
1 Three-Dimensional Faith
A few years ago my eighty-three-year-old father-in-law fell and broke his hip. He had been slipping a bit mentally over the previous year or so, and we were starting to be concerned about him. After the surgery to repair his hip, he went to a nursing home so he could get the care he needed. Soon after he arrived there, we noticed a sharp decrease in his mental abilities. There were a number of things he seemed unable to understand. He would try to get up and walk, for example, forgetting that he wasn t yet able to do that. And there were times when he did not recognize us. Also he didn t seem to grasp why he had to stay at the nursing home. He wanted to go home and asked anyone and everyone to help him get out of that place.
As my wife and I were discussing this at the dinner table one evening, Lynnae, our twelve-year-old daughter, asked a question: What if Grandpa forgets about God? Lynnae was grappling with a pretty good theological question. At a fairly young age she was concerned about one of the very core issues of faith.
In this case, I had an answer to Lynnae s question: Even if Grandpa forgets about God, God won t forget about Grandpa.
My point is not that I know all of the answers to life s questions, because I don t-despite my occasional attempts to convince my children that I do. The point is that Lynnae, as well as many children, thinks deeply about spiritual issues.
It isn t just children who grow up in the church who have questions about God. A few years ago, Tricia, a seven-year-old, who was a neighbor of one of our church families, hung around their house so much that they would often have to shoo her away when the famil