February 18, 2016February 19, 2016 Peter Witkowski Discipleship

WJD – Moving Past WWJD

What Would Jesus Do? It’s a fine question as long as we remember one thing: We aren’t Jesus. Ok, I know most people know this, but we often forget it. We often see life as a maze and Jesus as our guide. Our thinking goes like this:

“Should I turn down the street marked anger or go left and walk down forgiveness lane? I Know I’ll ask Jesus. We’ll Jesus would forgive. Forgiveness lane it is!”

The problem with this thinking is that we cannot be Jesus. We cannot in our own strengthen reason ourselves to obedience by looking at what Jesus did. And we aren’t supposed to. As Jack Klumpenhower writes,

What a tyrant Jesus would be if he lived a perfect life and then as his main message, told us to be like him. What a setup for failure.”

Why Jesus Came

Thankfully, Jesus did not come to expand the law. He did not come to guilt trip a bunch of bracelet kids into behaving well. “You got mad and threw your bat…Yeah, Jesus wouldn’t have done that. You stop that now.” No, Jesus came to live a perfect life for us. He came to do what we could not. He came to fulfill the law. He was baptized, he was tempted, and he perfectly obeyed God in all things so that he could become our substitute.

And here is the great news, the heart of the gospel, God the father is “well pleased” with his son. God accepts Jesus as our substitute. Everything Jesus has done honors, glorifies, and satisfies God the father, including Jesus’s death on the cross. By pleasing God, Jesus recues us from our sins. If we believe on him, Jesus gives us his righteousness and then takes our sin. He pays the full penalty for our sin. Because God is well pleased with Jesus, He is well pleased with every man woman, and child who repents of their sin and embrace Jesus.

How To Respond to Jesus’ Life

The point of Jesus’ life is not to guilt trip kids into cleaning up their rooms. The point of Jesus’ life is to call kids and everyone to repent on believe in Jesus. As our savior, Jesus is perfect. He is God. He is fully deserving of our trust. Let’s truth him!

Obviously the kid that trusts Jesus will want to follow and obey him. The child that loves his savior we want to be like him. He will, like the disciples, leave this world behind and seek after Jesus. He will stop lying, cheating, and fighting and start reading, praying, and serving. But there is a huge difference between the kid who obeys and the kid who loves. One is trying to impress from a heart of shame and guilt Jesus and feels oppressed. The other is seeking to follow Jesus from a heart of love and experiences joy.

So instead of challenging our kids to think about WWJD, let’s challenge them to think about WDJD (What Did Jesus Do). He live and then died to pay for our sins. When our kids struggle with lying, let’s direct them back to the cross. Instead of shaming them into being good, let’s call them to repent and trust the God who saves, the God who makes us all things new.

Are you ready to living by WJD?

February 3, 2015August 14, 2018 Peter Witkowski Discipleship

Sunday School is Broken?

Really? Who broke it? The simple but hard answer is, “We did!” Whenever we present a Bible story apart from the gospel, we break, undermine, and destroy the positive features of Sunday school. Now hopefully, you and I are not guilty of hiding God’s grace on a regular basis. But all across America the awesome message of repentance and forgiveness is being regularly missed by our church kids. If we hope to reach the next generation for Christ, we need to grapple with this stark reality by becoming even greater champions of the gospel. And here is why:

Earning F’s

A recent study of churchless Americans revealed that 60% of them have not progressed beyond their childhood faith (Barna & Kinnaman, pp. 61-62). In other words, most people who currently don’t go to church shaped their ideas about Jesus, society and the world (in part) while munching on crackers and looking at pictures of Jesus during Sunday school. And if most who avoid church like the plague thought that salvation was through Christ alone by faith alone, we would have done well. Unfortunately, this is not reality.

Learning the Wrong Things

Most unchurched people think salvation is a matter of works (p. 72). Do this and this, and avoid that movie, and you are ready for heaven. In short, bunches of kids are coming into our churches, flying around our children’s center, and then going out the door with the wrong gospel. Perhaps phenomenon explains why 90% of all 13-yr-old kids claim Christ but only 3% of our youth actually subscribe to a biblical worldview (Barna, pp. 39, 41). And when these kids grow up and want to get more serious about their faith, the largest group of them (31%) will try to obey the Ten Commandments more faithfully (Barna & Kinnaman, p. 134). They double down on their efforts to work themselves to heaven. There are no two ways about it; many of our church kids are getting the gospel.

Why Don’t Kids Learn?

There are three big reasons kids aren’t getting the message:

Some simply don’t listen. I had many excellent Sunday school teachers as a child (some of whom still pray for me). But as an unsaved kid, I found daydreaming about baseball and toy soldiers to be more interesting that children’s Bibles. Kids who tune out now will naturally struggle to recall the gospel when they are grown.
Every kid is born a sinner. Apart from the grace of God, no kid can understand the gospel or embrace any truth. All will either think the cross is foolish or objectionable (I Cor. 1:23). And to cope with their sin before salvation, kids often either consciously or unconsciously alter the glorious truths of the gospel to make their own sin more manageable. I.e. surely I can work my way to heaven and please God without transforming faith. Now to find an old lady to help across the street to make up for stealing that pack of gum.
Teachers are misrepresenting Christ. We could actually be teaching that the gospel consists of self-motivated obedience. Remember David? You need to be brave. Remember Paul? You need to be bold and sacrificial. We forget to mention that obedience can only be achieved through the power of Christ. And perhaps, we promote a works salvation because that’s what we actually believe.

Over 50% of church people self-identified more with the Pharisees than with Christ.

So, over 50% of us good church folk live as if God made us extra special holy people; we think ourselves inherently better than the unchurched (p. 179). As a result, some of us have undoubtedly stopped teaching that we are all (or were) wretched sinners daily opposing God and in need of unearned grace. And we forget that God alone saves and equips us to do good works. It’s quite possible many of our kids aren’t getting the gospel because we have taught salvation by works alone. As one lifelong Sunday school teacher recently said,

If kids are leaving the church, it’s because we’ve failed to give them a view of Jesus and his cross that’s compelling enough to satisfy their spiritual hunger and give them the zeal they crave” (Klumpenhower, p. 52)

Keep the Gospel in Church

Admittedly, we cannot keep every child from wandering off from classroom into the sea of churchlessness. Only those kids who have encountered the risen savior will embrace local congregations when grown. We are not responsible for what people hear and believe. God’s got that under control.

But God will hold us accountable for what we say. We can and should faithfully teach the gospel. The preached word (and not our gimmicks or bands) is the hope of the next generation and of today’s churchless. Even around 23% of the unchurched get this truth and long for better Bible teaching (Barna & Kinnaman, p. 99). The gospel of God is the complete and only good news we have to offer. If we want to fix our Sunday schools or keep them humming well, we must faithful teach the gospel yesterday, today, and always.

Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers. – I Timothy 4:16

Works Cited

Barna, G. (2003). Transforming Children Into Spiritual Champions: Why Children Should Be Your Church’s #1 Priority . Ventura : Regal .
Barna, G., & Kinnaman, D. (2014). Churchless: Understanding Today’s Unchurched and How to Connect with Them. Austin: Tyndale House.
Klumpenhower, J. (2014). Show Them Jesus: Teaching The Gospel to Kids. Greensboro: New Growth Press.

July 31, 2014June 15, 2015 Peter Witkowski Children's Ministry

Don’t Be Kid Focused

Jesus Focused

Although it sounds ironic, kids should not be the focus of our kids’ ministry. Now before you write me off as a kid hater or as a fuddy duddy who thinks singing along to cassette tapes makes a great Sunday school lesson, let’s consider John 3:30. Just as Jesus’ ministry had started flourishing, John the Baptist’s disciples come to John frustrated that all the focus has switched to the Jesus. Notice what John says, “He must increase but I must decrease.” This should be the heart of every biblical ministry, kids or otherwise. We are to be making a big to-do about Jesus. A biblical kids’ ministry will always be focused upon our Savior. Instead of seeking to satisfy our kids’ longing for fun with hi-tech, adventurous activities, our kids’ programs should be designed to introduce our kids to the awesome Savior of the world. We (including our kids) must decrease. Christ must increase.

Kid Focused And Failed

If we don’t decrease, weird things start happening. Recently, several kids from my church and I attended a Centrikid camp put on by Lifeway. My church kids had a blast and my adults were impressed with the camp’s gospel focus. Before we scrambled back on the bus to go home, I heard another church leader say, “Our kids have all been complaining that this camp is too much like church. We really miss all the games during the worship times.” Although I do not know everything about this church’s kid’s ministry, I do know that they think “church” is a negative thing to be avoided.

Think about this for a second, a church’s children’s ministry is calling the Word of God and the body of Christ boring, unattractive, and expendable. The only way for a kid’s ministry to conclude that Jesus is boring or an obstacle to happiness is to think that ministry is all about you and your kids. Equipped with this mindset, people come to church to have fun, make friends, and feel loved. Each kids prominence and desires is increasing. But this mindset contradicts the purpose point of church and fails its followers. As counselor Ed Welch notes:

God has given us gifts to serve rather than needs to be served. Any other perspective is less than biblical and will ultimately lead us toward misery rather than joy – p. 167

If we truly want our kids to be happy, we will have ministries that cause us all to decrease.

Jesus Focused And Approved

Immediately, someone will object that kids learn differently. They don’t belong in church. They can’t be expected to survive waves of the adult world.

Yes, kids do learn differently. I fully support having children’s programs that use music with motions and visual object lessons to introduce children to Jesus. I am constantly looking for ways to better connect the gospel to the kids of FBCE. But the goal of children’s ministry is always to link kids into the church by making much of our awesome God. Just as the children in my church enjoy hanging around my wife, the kids in hte “Fun Zone” or the “Happy Village” of our churches should leave Sunday with a growing love for Jesus and his bride, the church. As longtime Sunday school teacher, Jack Klumperhower, writes, “We shouldn’t let fun become a tool to keep kids interested so we can feed them good news on the side. Jesus isn’t a side dish…[he’s] the selling point” (p. 155). Jesus must increase!

Now many fear that we will lose kids by going all gospels on them. Perhaps, some kids will check out. Or some may bug their parents until they convince the family to find a church that is more “fun.” But friends, a majority of the kids in our ministry are not Christians. Naturally, they are going to find the gospel offense because by they are: “lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God” ( 2 Tim 3:1-4).Unredeemed kids reject the gospel because the are blind sinners.

The Defining Question

Today, we all face the following question: how should we respond to kids who find the gospel and the people of God offensive? How we answer this question will radically shape our children’s ministries and our kids’ view of Jesus and the church. We have two options.

First, we can appeal to our kids’self-love as many mainstream churches have begun to do. We attempt to compete with Nickelodeon, Disney, and PS4’s by offering slimy games, cheesy videos, and kidcentric Bible lesson’s- Jesus loves you; he wants you to be happy.

Second, we can challenge our kids with the hope of the gospel like the Centrikid camp staff did. We can preach Christ crucified abandoning gimmicks and manipulative story telling. Moreover, we trust that:

The Holy Spirit is working, and once [kids] get a taste of Christ, they will be irreversibly captured for his kingdom. Rather than pander to kids…[we] offer life to kids who are thirsting for something more – 156

Go Gospel

If we hope to reach kids for Christ, we must choose the way of the gospel. If we go with the cool appeal, we will ultimately lose. The church can never outpace the world’s indulgence of self-love. One day, our kids will discover that the pursuit of wealth, alcohol, sex, and a host of other things is more fun than Sunday school worship bands; they’ll leave the church. But if we give them Jesus who outshines all this world has to offer, many will believe on the Lord Jesus Christ! They will stay, grow, and begin introducing others to Christ. Jesus must increase, we must decrease.

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. – I John 3:15-17