Life2gether

Alan Nelson on how to identify and develop leaders before the age of 14:

After half a century of attending church and half of that leading, I’ve concluded that the most important and overlooked ministry is the identification and development of leaders before the age of 14. God has strategically placed people who work with children and middle schoolers as catalysts for changing history. The problem is that we’re consumed with broader tasks and have little vision or training for this specific opportunity. A major reason for this is that our culture perceives leading as an adult activity. We thereby miss a critical window for leadership training.

Read the rest.

Recently I had the opportunity to teach a group of preschoolers.  The whole experience opened my eyes to how much pastors would benefit from teaching a preschool class.

7 Reasons Why All Pastors Should Teach a Preschool Class

1. Preparation – You better be well-prepared when you teach little ones.  Every moment counts.  Knowing ahead of time where you’re going (your aim) and how you transition from one thing to another makes all the difference.  It’s true in sermon-planning as well.

2. Introduction – You must connect with little kids right away or you’ll lose them.  The same holds true for adults.  Our introduction should make our people say, “Hey, I need to hear this.”

3. Repetition – When teaching preschoolers, you must repeat, repeat, repeat one main point.  It’s even better when you can connect an action to your main point (e.g. God is powerful — have everyone flex their muscles!).  As pastors we too must strive to preach with one main point and repeat it throughout the sermon.

4. Illustration – In order to capture the minds of young children, you must engage their senses by using vivid pictures and stories.  Once again, adults are no different.  Think about Spurgeon.  He preached images that made the truth tangible for his people.  So should we.

5. Interaction – Good teachers get their students involved in the learning process.  Even though the classroom is a different setting than ”the pulpit” we pastors would do well to interact with the text and with our people in a way that draws them into the Scriptures and into each other’s lives. 

6. Retention – Preschoolers have short attention spans and can only retain so much.  Similarly, our people can only take in so much in one sitting.  Consequently, we pastors don’t have to say it all in one sermon.  Thus, we need to leave out the irrelevant and remember that less is usually more.

7. Condescension – Like Christ, we must come down and meet little children (and adults) where they are at.  Spurgeon once said, “Blessed is he who can so speak as to be understood by a child!”  How true.

Jared Kennedy lists some traps that keep us from a real biblical vision for our kids.

As a pastor for children and families, sometimes it’s hard to see if you’re really making a difference.  But once in awhile God gives you a little glimpse.

On Tuesday I met with an 8 year old boy in my office.  He had been eager to set up a time to talk with me.  I always enjoy talking with kids and their parents and leaving them with a prayer and a piece of candy from Pastor Doug.  But little did I know that on this particular day, I would be the one who was handed the greater gift.

After a few minutes, his mom finally coaxed him to say what he had come to talk to me about.  So sitting there with a big smile on his face, this little boy looked right at me and said, “I want to be a Children’s Pastor when I grow up!”  I smiled big.  In fact, I’m sure it was bigger than the smile on his face.  Then I asked him WHY he wanted to be a Children’s Pastor.  And his simple answer was basically this: “I love God.  I like kids.  And I want to teach them.”  Cool.  How great is that, huh?!  Needless to say I was happy.  But thankfully God showed me this was also a golden opportunity. 

Instead of thinking so much about his future dreams (sounds funny to say it that way!) that obviously could change, I’m focusing on the present.  So, with his mom and dad’s blessing, we’ve decided to set up a discipleship time twice a month to get together and talk about how to grow in our understanding of the gospel.  I look forward to these conversations and the HOMEwork assignments that follow.  And I thank God for this little glimpse of the gospel at work in children.

Hide and Seek from Doug Wolter on Vimeo.

A little game of hide and seek with my son Luke reminded me of these verses that I recently read from the gospel of Luke.  Jesus said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will” (Luke 10:21).

The little children in these verses are not referring to actual children but rather to those who know they are helpless like little children and admit they cannot know God unless he reveals Himself to them.  Thus, they come humbly to Jesus utterly dependent on him to open the door to wisdom and salvation.  Along these lines, Spurgeon once wrote:

[Jesus taught] that we are to be nothing, and that the less we are and the weaker we are, the better; for the less we have of self, the more room there is for His divine grace. Do you think you will come to Jesus up the ladder of knowledge? Come down. You will meet Him at the base … He asks nothing of you but that you will be nothing, and that he may be all in all to you.

This little anecdote by John Piper is a powerful reminder to make God supreme in all your child’s learning no matter if you homeschool or send your kids to a Christian school or public school.

I remember the day when my non-academic, dyslexic son said to me, “Why should I care about spelling the way everybody else spells?” I countered, “Well, you won’t be able to communicate as well if you don’t learn how to spell the way everybody else spells.” “I don’t care about communicating well,” he replied. “Why should I care about communicating well?”

The blasphemous, standard, 20th century answer to this question is, “If you don’t learn how to spell and communicate, you won’t succeed in business and make as much money.  And above all, you won’t have a high self-esteem.”  What a Godless answer.

Here’s another answer; the one I gave my son. “Ben, you should care about communicating and learning how to spell because you were created in the image of God. And God’s a great communicator. You should want to communicate because you’ve got something infinitely important to communicate. You’ve got God to communicate. You’ve got salvation to communicate. You’ve got Jesus to communicate. You can’t be indifferent, Ben, to communication. God is love, and we scorn his love when we are indifferent about communicating good news to our neighbors, when they desperately need to hear these things. You need to care about communicating because language was God’s idea from the beginning. `In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God.’ It was God’s idea. He is not a God of chaos and confusion. He’s a God of beauty and order. He’s not a God of anarchy, even spelling anarchy.”

• Read the entire sermon by Piper entitled, “The Supremacy of God in Preaching”
• Listen to the interview with Preaching Today on this same topic
• Buy his classic work with the same title

I know of no other book that helps children understand one of the most difficult concepts of Christianity – how we are made right with God through Christ’s righteousness, than R.C. Sproul’s book, The Priest With Dirty Clothes.  Here’s a brief description of the book:

Dr. R.C. Sproul tells of a young priest who falls from his horse. The mud ruins his garments, dashing his hopes of appearing before the king. But the great prince offers his own beautiful clothes, echoing the timeless message of the Lord Jesus Christ atoning for our sin and clothing us with the robe of His perfect righteousness, without which no one can see God.

I’m so thankful for theologians like R.C. Sproul who have taken the time to invest in the next generation by putting profound truths into simple language for kids.  What a gift!

• Listen to Sproul read the book in its entirety here 
• Read John Piper’s post on Teaching Doctrine to a Six-Year-Old

Here’s a little sermon illustration for children (and adults):

There are some things you never forget.  I’ll never forget the time when my brother and I held the Winter Olympics in our basement.  We were 6 years old and we had been watching the Winter Olympics on TV.  We got so excited as we looked at the people going on the bobsled rides zooming down really fast.  And we loved watching those guys go off the huge ski jump.  So we decided that we were going to hold the Winter Olympics right there in our basement.  Now we had some steps going down to our basement.  So what we did for the ski jump was to simply take a running start off the top of the stairs and see how long we could jump down below.  It was kinda dangerous but thankfully we didn’t get hurt.  For the bobsled, we had the idea of taking my mom’s laundry basket and both of us sitting in it and sliding down the stairs as fast as we could.  I must admit, we wiped out a few times! 

Now, were we really in the Olympics?  Were we really Olympic athletes?  No, we were pretending to be something that we were not. Do you know that many people in this world and many people who go to church are pretending to be Christians but they are really not.  They say all the right things, but their lives are no different than those who are not Christians.  Their words don’t match their actions.

Jesus told us that this is really serious.  In the Bible, he spoke to his disciples one day and told them three pictures of what it means to be a true Christian.  Mt. 7:13-14 (Two Ways), Mt. 7:15-20 (Two Trees), Mt. 7:24-27 (Two Houses).

Charles Spurgeon with some challenging thoughts on children and salvation from his book, Spiritual Parenting:

As soon as a child is capable of being lost, it is capable of being saved.  As soon as a child can sin, that child can, if God’s grace assists it, believe and receive the Word of God.

The opinion that children cannot receive the whole truth of the gospel is a great mistake, for their child’s condition is a help rather than a hindrance.

Click on image to enlarge.  Scroll down to read my last post on Why Kids Lie?