I’m allergic to political commentators. It doesn’t matter if they’re conservative or liberal, I break out in a rash and begin to go into analpylactic shock with my airway closing up. So, I had no idea who this Glenn Beck person was whom Larry was talking about, and I didn’t bother checking. Over the next few hours, my Bloglines became populated with posts about Glenn Beck. When I read the posts, I got that itchy feeling and couldn’t breathe well…

In all seriousness, if you don’t know who Glenn Beck is, here is the Wikipedia page on him. In short, he’s a conservative political commentator with a show on Fox News.

You can listen to what he said on his radio show. Here is a transcript of what he said that is causing all the fuss:

“I’m begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words ’social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!”

You can see similar comments where he links social justice to Communism and Nazis in the video below. (Apparently, Beck doesn’t care or know about Godwin’s Law.)

I don’t have anything else to add to what has already been said by people like Scot McKnight, Eugene Cho and Bob Robinson. What I wanted to do here on Elemental Children’s Ministry was throw out Beck’s comments and get your reactions. You have to admit that helping children love God and love others by reaching out to the under resourced, marginalized and outcast has gained momentum, which I think is a good thing. Do you agree? Disagree? What do you have to say about Beck’s comments? Don’t be shy!

If you would like a chance to win this copy, you need to do one of two things:

1. Follow me (twitter.com/henryjz) on Twitter and tweet “@henryjz is giving away a free copy of Ivy Beckwith’s new book Formational Children’s Ministry on his blog http://tr.im/RdEe #kidmin”
2. Leave a comment below sharing one reason you should win the book.

I will randomly choose someone at the end of the week and send them a copy of the book.

If you want another chance to win the book, Amy Dolan is giving away a free copy over on her blog!

I’ve been privileged to be able to work with the Minister’s Labelto get the word out about the book. I even got to write one of the reviews for the book’s page on Amazon! Here’s what I wrote:

From the wisdom of Michael Chanley and the Group of 34, you will read from a variety of different vantage points ranging from the gamut of practical programming to connect parents and church to principles surrounding an ethos of parental engagement and empowerment to insights on what it takes to be a leader who can help family and church come together for the sake of passing on lasting life transforming faith to children. This book truly is a collaboration. Each chapter is unique because each author is unique. As with any type of collaboration, you will find yourself agreeing and resonating with some of the authors and scratching your head when reading others. I think that is the beauty of this book. There is no one right way to approach family ministry. We are all located in different cultures and different contexts. Collaborate has tried to gather voices from some of those places and put them into one package. Whether you think you’ve figure out how to best reach families or you are new to the journey of what it means to truly engage the entire family, you need this book. It needs to be on the shelf of every person who works with children of all ages and their families in church!

Stop what you are doing right now, and pre-order Collaborate for everyone in leadership at your church! Seriously! Go do it now!

How many times have we heard this version? :)

As I mentioned in my previous post, my senior pastor sent me a couple of articles that sparked the series on Passing on Faith. The first article is from The National Post, written by Brendan T.N. Caldwell who is a CEO of an investment management company.

Click here to read the article.

I thought the parallel of passing on a financial inheritance with the passing on of faith to be a really good picture. Caldwell talks about going from “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” In other words, the first generation works hard to earn financial stability, the second generation enjoys and lives off of that, and the inheritance is gone by the third generation who needs to roll up their sleeves and start over.

“When it comes to faith, our nation is somewhere between the second and third generation. We still enjoy the benefits of a society whose ethics are rooted in faith, but we have forgotten how we got here and we may soon need to rebuild again.”

I think the above quote hits the nail on the head. Now, we can look at that assessment and become discouraged by it, or we can look at that and head into the challenge of “starting over.” While this may not be what we want to do, it is what is put before us.

“In a society that has largely forgotten God, how do parents pass along a spiritual inheritance to their children?”

I think Caldwell states something that is key to answering the question he poses. He reminds parents that our children first and foremost belong to God. He wants to be their father as well as ours, and it is our job as parents to introduce our children to him. We do that by sharing our God stories with them. We need to connect our children with community beyond us who hold the same beliefs and values we do. We also need to stay faithful ourselves be an example of a follower of Christ that our children see from day-to-day.

NOTE: I will also be posting this series on Elemental Parenting.

Beckwith asks this key question at the beginning of the book:

“So what must it take to capture our children’s imaginations, and then souls, through the hope and magnificent love of God’s kingdom?”

Lest we fall back to our current paradigm of passing on Biblical information and values in hopes that life transformation follows the absorption of knowledge, Beckwith offers an answer that outlines what she tackles in the ensuing chapters.

“It takes people–moms, dads, Sunday school teachers, pastors, children’s directors, and youth ministers who themselves have had their imaginations captured by the kingdom of God. It takes being intentional with story, ritual, and relationships at home, in the faith community, and in worship with children. And it takes understanding the power of these elements to inspire and form children in to adults who not only desire to live in the way of Jesus but who daily make choices to live that way.”

Beckwith begins with the importance of story in spiritual formation. I agree with her that, too many times, we tend to dismiss the Bible as story because we mistakenly assume that the word story implies something is not true, namely the Bible. By distilling the Bible down to a bunch of historical facts, propositional truths and moral platitudes, we strip it of it’s ability to speak on it’s own to children. We also make it harder for children and families to find themselves in the story of the Bible. In addition to viewing the Bible as story, Beckwith also points out that spiritual formation occurs as we are able to articulate our own faith stories (personal and corporate). As we find words and images to talk about our daily walk with God, those stories make our faith more personal and real. The key with story as a mode of spiritual formation is that we need to allow the Holy Spirit to speak through the story itself; we shouldn’t be too quick to interpret or moralize the stories in the Bible.

Another aspect of spiritual formation that Beckwith points out is ritual. She states:

“Ritual shapes and transforms human personality and identifies individuals with the group involved in the ritual. Ritual binds people to communities through the group experience and binds people to the values of that community… And when that action is done with others who are doing the same thing, the action finds meaning that can lead to transformation.”

Beckwith makes the case that rituals are a way of physically grounding our faith as well as drawing a family and faith community closer together. Rituals connect our faith to the concrete by connecting abstract belief to physical actions. Children and families experience transformation as these rituals create space for them to connect with God apart from the busyness of life around them.

Lastly, Beckwith emphasizes the importance of relationships in spiritual formation. She begins with the need to help families carve out time to be together. This isn’t an easy thing since culture puts pressure on parents to involve their children in multiple activities in order to be “good parents.” Beckwith also reinforces her conviction that intergenerational relationships need to be fostered, and part of that is making room for children to be involved in corporate worship with the larger church community. In no way does Beckwith pretend that involving all the generations in coroporate worship is easy or even a hard and fast rule for successful spiritual formation. What Beckwith does emphasize, though, is that for spiritual formation to take place, both adults and children need to learn from each other what it means to worship together as a faith community. The final component in relationships as part of spiritual formation that Beckwith higlights is peer-to-peer realtionships. It is important for children to form relationships with other children who share their faith in order to be encouraged and grow together.

If you haven’t already guessed by now, I highly recommend this book to anyone who plays a part in the spiritual formation of children whether directly or indirectly. Ivy Beckwith sets forth an ethos that challenges how children’s ministry is done in most of North American churches. Formational Children’s Ministry is a call to reform how we view the passing on of faith to children.

The temptation with a book like this is to either jump in with both feet and begin changing things left and right or to dismiss the book as impractical and pipe dreams. I’d like to offer a third approach. Allow the philosophy of what it means to approach children’s ministry from a formational mindset begin to change how you look at what you already do. What changes can you make to take a step or two in the direction of making formation a priority over the scope and sequence of disseminating Biblical knowledge? What are you already doing to make space for the Holy Spirit to do what only he can do–life transformation–in the lives of children and families? Just like any kind of reformation, this kind of paradigm shift from information to formation is going to take time. I look forward to seeing the ripples this book will make in the world of children’s ministry.

NOTE: This book was provided to me by the generosity of Baker Books for the express purpose of being a part of the book blog tour for Formational Children’s Ministry. This, in no way, has biased my review either positively or negatively.

A while back, I hear Erwin McManus talk about a time he was speaking at a leadership conference. The speaker before him mentioned that a good leadership strategy was to be one step behind early adopters. The speaker compared it to discovering edible mushrooms. The mushroom tester dies when eating a poisonous mushroom, while the person who comes behind learns from the mushroom tester’s mistakes and improves on them. McManus tells the story that he walked on stage following that speaker and stated he wanted to be the mushroom tester because that’s where the edge of innovation and creativity is. I agree!

A month or so ago I posted this about being “innovative” in children’s ministry. That post was followed by a series on being dynamic, which started with this post. Recently, I ran across this article from the Harvard Business Review (one of the people I follow on Twitter mentioned it… unfortunately, I don’t remember who). It states that many times innovation can be killed by asking too many questions, especially questions precipitated by the phrase, “What about…”

The premise is that most of the time if we want to be innovative, we simply have to jump in and experiment and change as we go. We can get so caught up in analyzing possible scenarios that we never do anything. We don’t want something to fail, but we fail to do anything.

What’s keeping you from taking that next step in ministry to children? What questions do you need to simply put to rest and leap? Yes, there is something to be said about being strategic, but you never find out if something works unless you try it. What are you waiting for? Someone else to do it? Go ahead… eat the mushroom. What’s the worst that can happen? Death? Is that so bad? :)

So, what are your thoughts?

We look at the stats of people dropping out of church as they graduate high school and are quick to point to all the externals: postmodern pluralism and relativism, lack of teaching a “Biblical worldview,” over secularization of media and society, etc. What if the problem is inside? What if the problem isn’t what we aren’t teaching? What if the problem is what WE ARE teaching?