About Sam Donoghue

When last we spoke we were discussing what we should be doing in response to the survery of children who attend our churches that we carried out as part of the planning for Capital Vision 2020. When we asked children what was good and bad about church two words came up again and again; in the positive column ‘biscuits’ won the day but the most used negative word was ‘boring’. In fact, boring was used more than any other word in the whole survey!

An easy response to this is to think that children need to be protected from the dullness of church and whisked away into their own groups to be entertained and educated in age appropriate ways. However I’m not convinced that’s the answer so in this half of the piece we look at what the opposite to this boredom in church might be. [Read more...]

Easter somehow seems like a good time to face this, and it’s something that most of us who work with children are already aware of but still let’s say it and name our issue; most children who go to our churches think it’s boring. In fact when we carried out a survey looking for the views of children who go to churches in our Diocese boring was the word that was used the most, just for the record biscuits came second and was the most used positive word!

So am I about to write a blog where I advance a theory as to how many biscuits a child must consume to in order to compensate them for how boring church is? Could we imagine that two biscuits would compensate for a botched all-age talk whereas a bucket of chocolate biscuits would be required for continued readings from the book of Lamentations? This of course assumes that any amount of biscuits could compensate us for having to listen to Lamentations. However, the opposite of being bored is not eating biscuits and the problem of bored children won’t go away with if that’s our solution.

So what is the opposite to boring? This week I’m going to suggest some things that it isn’t and next time we’ll look at what it is.

The opposite to boring isn’t entertainment.

One of my great bug-bears in the world of children’s ministry is how the initiatives that are seen as ‘flagship’ programs are trying to solve the boredom problem with entertainment and fun. However, by doing that they are generating a group of young Christians who are passive consumers of church and who are expect everything to fit to their needs.

The opposite of boring isn’t separate services.

Children need to be part of a wider worshiping community where they get to worship and share life with adults. They need to be surrounded by role models who can show them what faith looks like by their actions and to see what it means to be an adult Christian. They need to share in the rituals of this community and find their own sense of belonging to this wider group. Running an entirely separate program may hide children from the boring bits of church but it also teaches them that church is something that is boring and not for them.

The opposite of boring isn’t pace.

Bored children will misbehave and so one solution to this is to ensure that our programs rattle along without a gap for any potential problems to occur, problem solved. Well yes but; where is the space for a child to think, pray, reflect, find God in stillness or just take a break from the busyness of life?

I was very challenged by something that I heard the other day when I was at a meeting discussing how we could assess a child’s spiritual development. I thinks it’s suffice to say that there wasn’t much agreement in the room. The main spilt was between those who basically said that spirituality is un-measurable as it’s an internal process of ‘meaning making’ and therefore it would be impossible to externally asses and those who felt that spiritual development was linked to a developing Christian maturity and therefore any spiritual development would be revealed in more ‘Christian behaviour’.

My suspicion is that one of the reasons the conversation got so tricky was that what most of us were saying is that we thought that both of these statements were true and all we were really debating was the finer points of nuance between the two positions! I’ve not made this meeting sound amazing have I? [Read more...]

One of the mistakes we make with children is that we think they have a simple faith compared to our mature adult one. This of course is not true; it’s very likely that the children in your group will have a profound and deep faith; it’s just different to yours. A child’s understanding of some issues will be more simplistic and if we talk to them in metaphor then they will take it literally but that doesn’t mean that they can’t deal with difficult questions and think deeply about what the answers to them might be.

Often when children ask questions we make the mistake of thinking that what they need from us an answer that is simple, straight forward and easy for them to understand. However, when you try and do this you will end up being trite, and risk leaving them with a false impression of God that they will have to adjust when they are older. Sometimes the child doesn’t really want an answer at all but needs you to support them in the struggle and uncertainty that they are feeling. [Read more...]

Sometimes you read something and it stays with you. It might be the general argument of a book or sometimes it might just be a particular phrase or statement. I recently read a quote from Brian McLaren which struck me as important for those of us who work with children. When talking about what we spend on children’s ministry he said that our budgets should be considered a moral document as they reflect our true values.

Have a think about that for a moment, in his opinion nothing better reflects what we value than what where we spend our money. I’m afraid that we really do have churches that have a larger budget for flowers than for children’s ministry and I’m well aware of meeting children’s workers who primarily fund the Sunday School out of their own money.

It’s hard to persuade a child that they are really important to the church if they meet in a tired looking room and have to use pens that don’t work. I can still remember the bag of crayons that we had when I was in Sunday School. It was amazing; full of seemingly hundreds of broken crayons that appeared to all be the same colour as the result of years of rubbing against each other. The only way to get the colour you desired was to scribble on some scrap paper until you had exposed the actual crayon but even then yellow was fraught with risk as you would get streaks of the dust across your sun and you would have to try and hide them by adding sunglasses to it.

I’m sure you can think things that you still use that are not really fit for purpose anymore. Let me encourage you to think about starting the new school year with an upgrade: some new pens, cups, chairs or toys. They will speak so loudly to the children about how important they are to the church.

Of course once you’ve got them you’ve got to make sure that they are valued and looked after in the long term. I always count all the felt tips out and then count them back in to ensure we don’t lose any. This ensures that the children then take responsibility for looking after the resources the church provides and understand their value because the leaders care about getting them all back.

So here’s the challenge, do you know what your churches budget is for children’s work? If you do then make sure you spend it! But if there isn’t one then see if you can raise it at the right place for you to get one and then spend that.

Here are some thoughts sent to me from a children’s worker in the Diocese about how to pray for schools. I hope they inspire you to think of what you could do for next term.

A recent survey* reported that nearly half of all adults in the UK pray (20 million), with London claiming the highest number of pray-ers (a massive 73% of this 20 million).  What is more, 80% of UK church-goers pray for people in poverty in the world. Schools are not exactly places of poverty but the effect of poverty is evident. They are certainly places of need and also huge potential. They are at the heart of the community, just like churches strive to be.

People, whether they themselves pray or not, might therefore reasonably expect Christians to pray for schools. So how can those of us engaged in children’s and families’ ministry, especially for those of us who operate in the ‘prayer capital of the UK’, help others to pray for schools? [Read more...]

I was asked a question recently that isn’t actually that uncommon but still worries me whenever it’s asked; it slightly shocking that anyone would ever need to ask it. It generally goes like this…

It’s going really well with our children’s work, we have made efforts to include them in our services and consequently numbers are rising and whole families are coming not just children. However, there is a small and vocal minority who seem very intolerant of children acting like children during our services and they are making the children feel very unwelcome. As you can imagine this kind of stuff gets me pretty angry, frankly how dare they act in a way that hinders children being part of our church communities, why can’t they see that more people coming to church is good news? [Read more...]

I suppose I shall start by being honest with you; there are many books I have read from the charismatic-evangelical end of the church that have annoyed me.

Too often they are lightweight and reflect little thought or study and therefore come down to just being a collection of unsupported thoughts that lack any kind of depth as they reflect nothing more than the author’s personal experience.

So I must start by applauding Lynn as this book avoids that trap and contains a great deal of evidence of reading, study and reflective practice. All the points that are made, even when the author feels they are recounting something they have heard from God are well supported by reading as well and therefore I think it’s a book that you could read and get stuff from even if you don’t come from the same part of the church as the author. [Read more...]

Our year-long course in children’s ministry drew to a close last week with our final session where we all share what we have gained from the course and the influence it has had over the way we work; and then we all hotfoot it down the pub. There were some really interesting insights and ideas that had come from people applying the ideas from the course into their own local context. Here were my highlights – from the session not the pub! [Read more...]

Take a moment to have a look at the picture above. It’s piles of two pence coins but it’s there to represent a week’s worth of time in the life of a child. This was a challenge that Martyn Payne brought to those on the Children’s Ministry Academy course in his session last month; the three piles represent the amount of time spent at home, at school and at church in the average child’s week. His point was to ask the question as to why we put so much resource into what we do with children on a Sunday when it accounts for such a small proportion of their lives.

I don’t completely agree with this analysis as it seems to assume that what happens on a Sunday happens in isolation and wouldn’t have impact or outworking for the rest of the child’s week. I believe that good children’s work of any tradition would seek to resource children and provide them with a framework that would allow them to understand their lives in the light of God being part of it. That would be a good question to ask yourself and help you critique your ministry: ‘how is my time with the children impacting these two key areas of a child’s life?’ [Read more...]