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

Works Cited

Klumpenhower, J. (2014). Show Them Jesus: Teaching The Gospel to Kids. Greensboro: New Growth Press.

Welch, E. T. (1997). When People Are Big And God Is Small . Philipsburg: P&R Publishing.

June 26, 2014July 20, 2015 Peter Witkowski Discipleship, Parenting

Dealing With Disobedience: How Discipline Gets Kids To Jesus

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”

As an unregenerate kid with a reputation for fighting, I thought the best use of an oxymoron was my parents’ comment that they disciplined me out of “love.” Before I would head off to serve my next sentence, I nodded in disbelieving agreement to my parents’ statement. But I didn’t particularly find long timeouts, T.V. restrictions, or summer school to be all that loving. I much preferred ice cream, video games, and full summer baseball schedule.

All About Love

The Shema, or Deuteronomy 6:4-9, is perhaps one of the most well-known parenting passages in the Bible, popping up in almost every Christian book on parenting. And as you read the passage, you notice that it is all about love. Moses commands his listeners sitting the banks of the Jordan to love the Lord, their God. Moses states that one the truest expressions of a person’s love for God is to tell their offspring about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It would appear that on face value this passage is all about the positives. Love God and things will go well for you! The sentiment of “All I need is love” appears to be the key to Biblical parenting. Perhaps, my parents would have been better served to combat my sin with a trip to Baskin Robins centered on a brief talk about how much God loves me.

And it’s true; we and (our children) should find God attractive because he is a loving and good God whose character is where, “Steadfast love and faithfulness meet” (Ps 85:10a). Indeed those who dwell with the Lord are never disappointed and have everything they need. But for our children to appreciate the goodness of God, they must first understand how bad their sin is. If they have done nothing wrong, they don’t need a savior or to exclusively follow God.

Why Talk About Sin

Though all about the positives, Moses does reminds his listeners of their need for God. Before he tells them to love the Lord their God in chapter 6, he spends large portions of the first five chapters reminding the nation of Israel of its depravity, of God’s law, and of God’s judgment upon those who break his law. In Deuteronomy 1:26-32, Moses tells the people not to follow in the footsteps of their parents and grandparents. This older generation saw the fortified cities and the giants dotting the Promise Land and immediately doubted the integrity of God’s promises. They did not believe the word of the Lord. And God punished them with death. Some died when they attempted to fulfill God’s promises by launching an unauthorized attack into the Promise Land. The others died a slow death wandering around the wilderness (2:16). All those who disbelieved God died. And Moses warns that in the future, all those who try live without God, “will be utterly destroyed” (4:26b).

From Sin to Love

Friends, we and our families are just like the people of Israel. We need to be reminded of our sin and of our need to constantly trust Christ. When my parents disciplined me, it was an act of faithfulness. They helped me understand as Matt Chandler helpfully notes, “The bad news of the gospel still applies to everyone” (p. 25).The hours spent in summer school or in timeouts reinforced the truth that my life was separated from God. And, the constant drum of punishments also helped me to see that I could never be good on my own. I tried, I tried every so hard to be good. But like the Israelites, I always failed. As the apostle Paul says in I Timothy the law was given, “for the lawless and disobedient” so that they would believe (1:8-11).

The cure for kids who feel burdened by sin is not to ignore the topic (they feel the burden anyway, even if they aren’t talking about it) but to administer large doses of the good news so that their trust in Jesus grows (Klumpenhower, 2014, p. 39).

My parents’ discipline of me was not an oxymoron. They truly did love me! As Tedd Tripp writes,

The rod is an act of faithfulness toward a child. Recognizing that in discipline there is hope, and refusing to be a willing party to his child’s death, the parent undertakes this task (p. 105).

My parents punished my little unsaved soul because they hoped God would use the reality of the law to draw me to Christ. Let’s point our children to the love Christ by showing them they need a Redeemer.

Works Cited

Chandler, M., & Snetzer, M. (2014). Recovering Redemption: A Gospel-Saturated Perspective on How to Change. Nashville: B&H Publishing .

Klumpenhower, J. (2014). Show Them Jesus: Teaching The Gospel to Kids. Greensboro: New Growth Press.

Tripp, T. (2005). Shepherding A Child’s Heart. Wapwallopen : Shepard Press .

June 11, 2014August 2, 2014 Peter Witkowski Discipleship, Vacation Bible School

VBS Exit Interviews

Very soon, my church will be overrun with joyous little faces attached to bodies containing more energy that a nuclear power plant. For the next five nights these guys and gals will clap, scream, run and eat until even the hardiest of volunteers is ready for a soft bed surround by the beauty of silence. And when the lights are switched off and the doors are locked, what will these kids say about VBS? What will they take away from the hours of fun?

For years, I have been content to hear kids say that the best thing about VBS was the Samurai game or the colorful craft with the Styrofoam dolphins. As my ears buzzed with kids talking about how much fun they had at church, I would pat myself on the back for a job well done. We’d connected to the little people and could count on them coming back.

Recently, I realized how far short my standard fell from God’s standard. One of my favorite things in children’s ministry is exit interviews. During these informal encounters in hallways and super markets, I pepper kids with a short series of questions such as, “Do you think we should do the event again?” One day after getting past my preliminary questions with a child who had had great time at one of the church’s spring events, I asked him, “What was the best part of the day?” I was ready for a bunch of different answers ranging from the open access to junk food to the craziness of the games played. But I was not ready for his answer: “The best part was the lesson.”

A light bulb went off. In spite of my church’s heavy emphasis upon Christ, I still expected kids to leave our church impressed with our programming and smiling teachers. In some ways, my expectations were driven by a humble understand of salvation. I know that my teachers and I could not save (John 6:63). Consequently, I did not want to make baptisms our standard of success. I had no desire to start manipulating kids into false professions by offering to repent for them through formulaic repetitions of the sinner’s prayer. But in avoiding one extreme, I slid into the other of being of people pleaser, or more accurately a kid pleaser. I was content to let some activity about Jesus appear to be more attractive than Jesus. I had not been helping kids grasp that Christ is better than everything.

And while I want children to have a great time at this year’s VBS, my goal now goes beyond giving kids some summer fun to talk about. This year, I hope the kids leave talking about Jesus. Yes, my church will use upbeat songs, cool crafts, and exciting games to connect with the kids. And yes, I want every child to feel the welcoming love of Christ while they are at church. But these are not the goal of VBS or of our children’s ministry for that matter. They are tools Christians use to help kids fall in love with the all-powerful creator who sent his son to save sinners! The Lord Jesus is way cooler than any cheesy song, decorated Popsicle stick, or slimy game. Jesus offers real life and freedom from the despair of sin! Let’s make our boast in him! Some unbelieving kids may be bugged by our gospel centeredness. But whether it’s as a praise or as a complaint, I pray that every child leaves VBS talking about Jesus!

As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the Gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!” Romans 10:15b

If we hope to hear kids chatting about our awesome God, each of us must passionately love Jesus. I fear that kids think Jesus is boring because we portray him as a distant moralistic deity that we talk to every other weekend. When we fail to walk closely with our Savior, we cannot help our kids love Jesus. As Jack Klumpenhower reminds us:

Students sense the difference between a teacher with integrity and a fake. There’s nothing they demand more than integrity. Not hipness. Not entertainment. Not even solid Bible teaching. They want- and need – for us to be practicing believers in everyday life. (pp. 193-94)

To rekindle and grow in our love for Christ, we have to be daily communing with God by reading his Word (John 8:31-32). We should pray, thanking God for his good gifts to us and asking him to work in the universe (James 4:1-3). Then, we need to worship with our church family so that we will be encouraged to love and do good works (Hebrews 10:23-25). Lastly, we can start studying our lessons a day or two in advance, applying the scriptures to our hearts before we teach them to our kids. If we love Jesus with all our heart, soul and mind, kids will see that our God is amazing (Luke 10:27).

In days ahead, I’m sure I’ll have many opportunities to conduct VBS exit interviews in grocery stores and restaurants around my might little town. And when I get to my final question, I hope and pray that each little respondent says that the best thing about VBS was Jesus!