Children’s Ministry and Culture

Just in time for Mother’s Day, a cool study finds that if a stay-at-home mom could be compensated in dollars rather than personal satisfaction and unconditional love, she’d rake in a nifty sum of nearly $117,000 a year.

That’s according to a pre-Mother’s Day study released Thursday by Salary.com, a Waltham, Mass.-based firm that studies workplace compensation.  See the complete story here http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20080508-1424-momssalary.html

Just returned from an overnight staff retreat (Yes, just a few days after returning from the Children’s Retreat). Oh Lord, Kumbaya. (Emphasize any word you’d like in the sentence to the immediate left.) I work with an amazing team. Thirteen of us went to a Christian resort in NY and spent twenty four hours listening to God, goal setting, worshipping, and playing together. Some of my take aways:

1) We discussed the importance of inviting Millenials into key leadership (not just volunteer positions, but volunteer leadership positions). We need to stay young. (I feel like we had just gotten young 10+ years ago when they hired two punk twenty-something kids, Derek and I, to run the youth and children’s ministries, respectively. (I turn forty in July)). I looked around the room at the retreat and realised that we had late Xers and Millenials on the staff– lots of them. I spoke about the opportunity to recruit Millenials at Willowcreek and some of their characteristics. I had a first hand reminder at the retreat as to what that looks like.

2) We opened the retreat by being given three questions to ask God, a Bible, and 1.5 hours. During that time I was confronted by 2 Corinthians 6:11-13. Paul confronts the Corinthians that their lives feel constricted because of where they invest their affections. They felt like they had small lives because they had small love.

3) I blogged a while back about finding opportunities to embody Jesus while going to bars listening to my wife sing in her trio. I haven’t done that in a while do to this crazy month of speaking, retreats, and launching our family ministry. It’s time to get back to that.

4) Chris Yount Jones told us about an exercise her team to sharpen their vision. It was good, so we stole it. We had to write a six word memoir about where we came from and then where we are going.

Here’s my group’s results:

Our Past: External focus makes Grace vital again.

Our Future: Cross-shaped lives will transform Erie.

5) A prediction: The words “mentoring” and “missional” are going to transform our culture.  

Parents can play a key role in determining how their children react to trauma, U.S. researchers say.

The review, published in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy (http://www.jmft.net/), suggests the quality of parenting practices following trauma mediates the relationship between the traumatic event and the child’s subsequent adjustment.

Study leaded Abigail Gewirtz of the University of Minnesota reviewed the existing literature to inspect the ways in which parents can affect children’s recovery in the aftermath of trauma. Gewirtz says certain parenting behaviors have the potential to significantly improve children’s outcomes.

The review finds that parenting practices that provide structure, security, emotional warmth and an environment that addresses the traumatic event serve to surround children with a protective environment.

“By providing an overview of the evidence to-date, and a proposed prevention research framework, it is our hope that others will see and respond to the need to advance this field,” the study authors said in a statement.

In a very challenging case for school officials, a 9 year old child (and of course the very accomodating parents) is asking to start dressing like a girl. The school decided to let the other 100 Third Grade families know about the “transition” in a meeting.

About one in 5,000 people is transgender, said Walter O. Bockting, a psychologist and coordinator for transgender health services at the University of Minnesota. Bockting said he sees about 10 children a year who are 9 or younger.

“It’s a little early, but occasionally that happens,” he said.

Not all transgender people have sex-reassignment surgery in adulthood, and such surgeries are not typically performed on children, said Sharon Garcia, president of TransYouth Family Allies, a non-profit group that helped the Chatham Park student and school officials devise a way to explain the situation to parents.

So far, 49 families have contacted TransYouth Family Allies asking for help with a transgender child, Garcia said. Most of the children are between 6 and 10.

See the complete article at http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/pa/chester/20080503_School_challenge__Transgender_student_is_age_9.html where the writer seems to avoid the tabloid topics and has done some pretty thoughtful research. For Children’s Ministries there is an opportunity to share how in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, Male nor Female, while at the same time demonstrating a love that transcends our gut response. We had the same polarizing discussions when AIDS/HIV was discovered among children (should we allow them to be in the same class, let’s have a well-child-policy) and now we are all pretty informed so we can be calm!

What do you think?

See Henry Zonio’s excellent blog post about criticisms about some questionable pictures of Miley Cyrus that will appear in a future Vanity Fair. The child singer is obviously positioning herself for a singing career as an adult. That strategy has included dropping the Hannah Montana character when not performing for pre-teens.

I was surprised, when at my church’s children’s retreat this weekend, that the fifth grade girls were aware of the upcoming photo shoot. I’m saddened that so many child singers feel the need to emphasize their sexuality to reach an adult audience.

Much is made about Millenials and Futuristics being natural multi-talksers. I walked into the front-room and witnessed my son playing the piano (well, I might add) while listening to podcast through his Ipod.

Call me old school, but I put my foot down.

I’ve been oddly fascinated by the recent spate of 20/20 News pieces on a spying camera showing what passers-by would do when a visibly drunk person tries to drive, when kids are berating an overweight woman, or when a child is visibly lost (http://abcnews.go.com/2020/WhatWouldYouDo/story?id=4709538&page=1). These all try to assess the level of cultural readiness to intervene. They ask good questions and seek pretty routinely to reward those who DO intervene.

Now I have to say that my life experience is divided on this. In Minnesota, we are ALWAYS prone to intervene in public because there is a shared sense of values. Growing up in California there was NOT a shared sense of values and in fact a heightened sense of that independent spirit that rewards creativity and a sense of differentness. Intervene? We build fences around our homes in California. Are the neighbors are a little creepy? Well we’ll just move to a gated community and MAKE them clean up their yard.

So you can imagine how interesting it is for me to see these 20/20 segments and cheer when our culture is now applauding the Minnesota norm rather than the California trend.

In one of our counties, Ramsey, we have an amazing community service approach called the Wakanheza Project (http://www.co.ramsey.mn.us/ph/hb/wakanheza.htm). It is “a community-wide effort that provides tools and strategies to help us effectively respond in these every-day situations and prevent them from happening in the first place, by creating welcoming environments for our children, young people and families.” What are “these every-day situations”? Have you ever been in a public place like a grocery store, a library, or a mall and seen a parent struggling with their children, trying to keep them in line and well behaved? Have you watched that situation escalate? Did you wonder then, and are you still wondering, what you could have done? Have you ever BEEN that parent?

This is really remarkable! We are seeing a trend that promotes LESS privacy and isolation and is encouraging MORE involvement! I’ve been in California for the past three days and have had many conversations with ministers who have seen LESS parental connections outside their church and a rise in gang behavior, anti-social anger and other community killing behaviors. What they need is to join the rest of the nation to get MORE involved, not to circle the wagons and wail and moan in our fortress churches!

A profusion of online programs that can track a student’s daily progress, including class attendance, missed assignments and grades on homework, quizzes and tests, is changing the nature of communication between parents and children, families and teachers. With names like Edline, ParentConnect, Pinnacle Internet Viewer and PowerSchool, the software is used by thousands of schools, kindergarten through 12th grade. PowerSchool alone is used by 10,100 schools in 49 states.

Read the very interesting article in today’s New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/fashion/04edline.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1209880996-WARzW93J0o5AkKGzqKXq+w)

I was driving from LAX today listening to NPR and was rivited as I listened to Pamela Paul being interviewed by Steve Inskeep (Morning Edition, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89333925 to listen) sharing the immense variety of products for babies and their parents.

In a separate story today, and one that was confirmed in the interview, there is a rise in babies being breastfed vs. formula fed (reported by Bloomsburg and seen here at the Dallas Morning News http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/050108dnnatbreastfeed.2d136b5.html).  About 77 percent of babies born in 2005 and 2006 were breastfed at least some of the time, up from 60 percent in 1993 and 1994, according to a report today by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But I digress, back to the Paul interview…

From wipie warmers (heaven forbid a baby get shocked with a cold one) to pottie training targets for boys (they float in the toilet…though I hardly think a boy NEEDS help in this area) the variety of baby products has significantly increased. Baby Einstein puts a child on autopilot in the same way Sesame Street babysat kids in the 70s and 80s! I like how Paul says, “parents have to assess their motivation when it comes to the things they purchase for their children” to which I respond ABSOLUTELY. An ENGAGED parent will always trump toys or technology!

I was on the treadmill last Sunday night watching (ok, reading the closed caption) of the speech that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright gave to the NAACP Detroit chapter. He hit on a variety of subjects that are important to what we do with children in churches; learning styles, right-brain, left-brain learning, etc. But I found his sermon/term-paper full of the kind of conclusions that did nothing to “Advance” the NAACP cause. In fact it was demeaning and subtly bigoted by presuming that African American children cannot compete with European American education structures (his term)! Even his pseudo-logic statement (Chaim Perlman’s a great source for the kind of rhetoric Wright delivered) “Different is not Deficient” was a deeply flawed contrast. It created a straw man Rev. Wright trounced when it came to the kind of brain that belongs to an African American. He offered no solution and in fact created the kind of bombast that made me wonder why he was straying from his area of expertise…pastoral ministry. For a transcript of the speech, click here http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/04/28/wright.transcript/index.html

Well, today, Barak Obama gave a press conference where he stated, “[Rev. Wright] was never my, quote/quote, “spiritual advisor.” He was never my spiritual mentor. He was my pastor.” WOW, did you hear what he said? Someone can “pastor’ while not advising nor mentoring! Would you want to hear those words from your lay people or children? Unbelievable!

I think that when a pastor strays from the source of their authority (scripture) they run the risk of neither mentoring nor guiding but becoming a charade and make our churches deeply misguided!