Children’s Ministry and Culture

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!

One of the most important shifts in our thinking as children’s ministry practicioners is moving from a deficit-based to a strength-based model of ministry. It’s not enough to teach our children to avoid using their lives for destructive purposes. We need to remind them that God loaded them with assets they they are to use to build community and established a god-shaped reality (I’m not advocating theocracy, but relationships established on love, mercy, and justice). If we don’t instill this positive vision in children we give them a sin-management model of spirituality (Erwin McManus speaks to this well).

Jenifer Fox, M. Ed. has written a new volume Your Child’s Strengths: Discover Them, Develop Them, Use Them. Thumbing through the book, I’m seeing that this volume can help supply children’s ministry practicioners one of the tools we need to help our children discover the strengths from which they can build their lives.

Jenifer opens the book casting the vision for a strength-based approach to relating to children and then presents a useful workbook, with an assessment test, that provides a practical tool to identify the strengths of a child.

We’ve got five copies of this book to give away to Children’s Ministry and Culture readers. Here’s how earn a chance to win. Visit http://blog.strengthsmovement.com/ and read through Jenifer’s blog. Interact with her blog and leave a comment. Then copy that comment here, in this post, for a chance to win. I’ll pick five random readers as winners. This contest runs through May 28.

That’s a remarkable uptick from the 6 - 8 million just 10 years ago. I got my start at Indian Hills Bible Camp (lowly service staff in 9th grade to Program Director as a freshman in college) then at Hume Lake Christian Camp (Program Director of the camp that made Hume famous, Wagon Train Camp, in the early 80s and it was there I met my wife of 24 years). Camping is an amazing way to engage children relationally in a setting void of distractions…Moses did it for 40 years with the Israelites, for goodness sakes!

Now it is a $20 billion annual business, with about 12,000 overnight and day camps in the United States, according to estimates from the American Camping Association. The number of day camps alone has risen by nearly 90 percent in the past 20 years, according to the ACA.

“Kids today are experiencing some unique opportunities that a generation ago didn’t exist,” said Jeff Solomon, executive director of the National Camp Association. “They may do a community service camp that works in a rain forest in Costa Rica or a Native American reservation in the Southwest.”

Great article in the San Diego Union on how parents are driving the details and the variety of offerings!

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20080405-9999-1n5camps.html

Kids everywhere have played Simon Says for generations without the slightest inkling that such games may be preparing them for success in the classroom and the work world. … Improving working memory also could aid self-control, said Philip David Zelazo, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development. So reports the Chicago Tribune (Here) which looks at research by Adele Diamond (she is one of the world’s leading researchers on the development of the cognitive functions: self-regulation, cognitive control).

I love the tests researchers used with preschoolers to test if play HELPED their self-control responses. In one test, children were given a piece of paper with a heart or flower on one side, and they were told to press on the side that does not have an image. Because a natural tendency is to point at the image, having children go against that instinct is considered a good test of their ability to inhibit their first impulse.

The children who received the special play curriculum performed significantly better on such tests than children on an ordinary preschool curriculum, the researchers found.

Parents can help children develop many such executive function skills at home, Diamond said. She suggested reading to children without showing them the pictures, a technique that can make kids use working memory to follow along with the story rather than use the pictures as a crutch.

Games such as Simon Says and Red Light, Green Light also can go a long way toward helping children learn to be guided by their choices rather than their instincts, she said.

“Those are great games that kids used to play a lot more than they do now,” Diamond said. “And they played them for a very good reason.”

I just LOVE Ben Stein, ever since Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986, finishing my first MA as a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Communication at University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA)! If you’ve not heard the buzz about this really thought provoking movie detailing the divide among darwinism and intelligent design or creationism, check out the trailer at http://www.expelledthemovie.com/playground.php

I’ve been in California for the past 10 days (CPC, Bay Area Sunday School Convention, Children’s Ministry Magazine “Live” in Solvang and VBS Training in Orange County) and noted on a long drive this past weekend a new ruling by an appelate court (California’s Second District Court of Appeal, in Los Angeles) that involved Philip and Mary Long, of Lynwood, Calif.

California parents can’t educate their children at home unless they have teaching credentials, according to a state appeals-court decision that could have repercussions for home-schooling families nationwide. Read the article here (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120510590354923095.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace)

The couple has educated all eight of their children at home under the auspices of the private Sunland Christian School, in Sylmar, Calif. The case began with an allegation of abuse and the courts decision won’t be implemented pending appeals (next the California Supreme Court, though it could also be appealed in Federal courts should it go further).

The eminently readable Elizabeth Weil of the New York Times has a fantastic article, “Teaching Boys And Girls Separately” in today’s New York Times Magazine (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/magazine/02sex3-t.html?em&ex=1204606800&en=087b8a0f538d2c2b&ei=5087%0A) and I would encourage you to sit down and read this lengthy piece on an important topic.

I have written earlier on the “feminization” of the classroom and on how often boys have been found to be less adept at what passes for success in a classroom. Weir takes this a step further and highlights a growing trend in Public education (it’s been long a hallmark of many private schools) where boys and girls are taught in separate forms.

Many children’s ministers hold finance classes for parents and encourage saving for college. But that presumes that money saved will be money well invested. That might be wrong now that Stanford is waiving tuition for people who earn less than $100,000 (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-aid12feb21,0,5278372.story).

So do this, take the money you’d save for college and invest in a child’s tutor! The grades they get will more than prepare them for a future FREE college!!! And if they don’t get into Stanford, or Yale or Harvard, they at least would get a free ride elsewhere!!! Think about it!

The New York Times Magazine has a must-read article touching on the high-points of why play is crucial in a child’s life. Robin Marantz Henig (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/magazine/17play.html?hp) does a masterful job in writing about what Larry and I have been in deep agreement about: play is a vital way children learn to work, solve problems and fill their imagination. As children’s ministers we would do well to relax and play more with the children who are in our care! Great article! Slog through the thinking about evolution and you arrive at something that will help you develop an understanding of the role of an adult in mediating the harm that can arrive at play!

I love the book “The Ambiguity of Play” because that hits it on the head…it’s a tradeoff! The author of the article states, “What if all the things we hope children derive from free play — cognitive flexibility, social competence, creative problem-solving, mastery of their own bodies and their own environments — can be learned just as well by teaching these skills directly?” What do you think?

There is an excellent essay in today’s Wall Street Journal (Friday, Febuary 15, 2008, p. W11) by Tony Woodlief who blogs about family and faith at www.tonywoodlief.com that offers up an opinion on the much perloined theory of Multiple Intelligence (MI Theory) by Dr. Howard Gardner. I say “much perloined” simply because we’ve all used it in Children’s Ministry to our benefit since it applies wonderfully the passage in scripture that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” in ways that make all of us intelligent

Read the essay here (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120304710927870965.html?mod=todays_us_weekend_journal) but I have one comment and a suggestion. Dr. Howard Gardner would not LIKE the fact that we in Children’s Ministry use his theory. “They were not,” Mr. Gardner later wrote, “divining what I had really meant.”

Think about this, “contrary to popular misperception,” Mr. Gardner explained, “MI theory doesn’t mean that every child is outstanding at something. Some children can be below average at everything.” Here is a great observation from Mr. Woodlief:

MI theory encourages us to look for signs of innate precociousness and then to develop them. What you don’t want is to spend all your precious educational energy trying to improve on a dimension you just weren’t meant to be great at. If everyone understood this, of course, the “American Idol” auditions would be less entertaining.

Great comment and a good review of Frames of Mind to not apply his precepts too broadly in the positive. It will always take hard work to get better at knowing how to do something than simply to know what something is or isn’t!