Love First: A Children's Ministry for the Whole Church

Preface

When the rector of the church I serve as theologian-in-residence first approached my wife about leading our Sunday school, Colette was a bit ambivalent. It was only a modest proposal for an interim position; our church school director had resigned after Easter and we needed just a bit of leadership to carry us through the remainder of the school year until summer and the search for a new staff member. Colette has been going to Episcopal churches since she was a child, so she was familiar with the Scripture and traditions of our denomination. But her profession is as a family therapist, not a children’s minister. She was concerned because she hadn’t had any training in scriptural interpretation, the history of the church, or the tenets of Christian doctrine. I’ll just try to teach one thing, she said to me. Love.

I thought to myself, There is no other commandment greater (Mark 12:31). And I thought to myself, Upon these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets (Matthew 22:40). And so I said to her, I think that’s just what the church needs.

Colette had about three days to prepare for her first Sunday. Given the rush, she didn’t have a lesson plan, specific Bible story selected, theological theme to convey, or even another volunteer to help. All she had was eight or nine skeptical children and forty-five minutes to fill while the grown-ups sat in church during the first half of the Sunday service. Intuitively, Colette began with the foundation of our faith and boiled it all down to Christ’s greatest commandment. She gathered the few children together and she spoke about loving God and our neighbor, explaining that this was Jesus’s teaching. She asked what love looked like and felt like to them, who they loved, and who loved them. She listened carefully to what they said and then asked who needed love and how they might share some love with those people. Lastly, she distributed colored paper, markers, paste, and scissors and helped the children make little love notes and greeting cards that read, Somebody at St. Barnabas loves you. With these in hand, they wandered around the church parking lot leaving their love letters on the windshields of some randomly (and some not-so-randomly) selected cars. The children were delighted, thrilled at the anonymity, gratuity, and whimsy of their little gifts of love, amazed that they could so simply and truly follow Jesus. When they were done spreading their love, they entered the sanctuary together and joined us grown-ups for communion.

After church, back at our parsonage that abuts the church parking lot, Colette told me how wonderful the morning had been while I looked out our window as a few final congregants left coffee hour and returned to their cars. I remember seeing them smile, chuckle, or even wipe a tear from their eye as they read the notes. I remember watching them tuck the notes with tenderness and thanks into the pockets of their handbags or their suit coats. Colette’s few weeks as our children’s minister quickly turned into a few years, and during that time she developed the Love First program our church now uses, described in the book you now hold in your hands.

I teach theology and ministry at Harvard Divinity School and serve as a priest in the Episcopal Church. Since seminary I’ve been thinking seriously, practically, and theologically in settings both pastoral and academic, about the work of faith formation. Much of the best and most interesting thinking in this regard has focused on the latter term, on the idea of what formation is. But what Colette’s program leads me to consider—as both a theologian and a pastor—is how we might rethink the former term also, and reimagine what faith is too.

We have faith, we assume, when we believe something to be true. When we say in our creeds I believe in God, what we think we mean is, I believe that God exists. This is fine, so far as it goes, but this notion of belief—of belief as the acceptance of a certain set of facts—is not only what faith can be. The Greek word pistis, usually translated as faith or belief in the English New Testament, means something more like trust than factual agreement. Former Archbishop of Canter-bury Rowan Williams has even suggested privately replacing the words I believe in our creeds with I trust when we recite them. I wonder what the impact for our faith might be if, when we say, I believe in God, what we mean is, I trust God.

This is not just a rhetorical question. It cuts right to the core of what our creeds and covenants mean, I think. Trust is a behavior, and so it must bear out in the communities we build, the people we serve, and the manner by which we live our lives. This is why the Baptismal Covenant of the Episcopal Church marries our creedal statements of belief to corollary promises of love, support, community, reconciliation, and relationship. On the covenantal terms of our baptism, it’s not enough just to agree to some facts. To trust in God is to live as a Christian, and the covenantal promises of our baptism, when taken together, affirm this. Building faith in Christ, building Christian community, and building God’s just kingdom are all intimately and necessarily related.

This is what the Love First program has intuited since its first Sunday: that beginning with love is beginning in faith, that building faith in children means building trust in them too. It means trusting that their experiences of love are experiences of God, and then giving them language from our tradition with which to express those holy moments. It means trusting that their urge to serve is a work of the Spirit, and then giving them the opportunity to act and feel like the disciples they already are. It means trusting that their questions and confusions are signs of serious faith, and then inviting them to explore the complex stories and teachings they have inherited on their own terms. Though this program covers less of the Bible than some others might, I believe it is more—not less—biblically based. What it forms in children is a relationship of trust with Holy Scripture rather than a mere familiarity with Scripture’s stories. This trust accommodates the questions and challenges children face, as they grow far better than any simple biblical literacy. Though the program uses a light doctrinal touch, I believe it is more—not less— firmly founded on Christian teaching. What it cultivates in children is a deep trust in God’s love rather than rote dogmatism. This trust invites authentic, even courageous, theological reflection. Open and honest, it both welcomes and weathers the uncertainties of belief that all people encounter as they grow and change in faith.

The truth is, in only a few hours each month, we cannot teach a child all the answers she will need with respect to Christian doctrine, Scripture, worship, and ethics. The tradition is too complex, the demands of modern life too unpredictable. What we can do, however, is to show our children, in word and in deed, that our Christian teaching is a description of God’s love; that our Christian Scripture is a testament of God’s love; that our Christian worship is a celebration of God’s love; that our Christian ethics is an application of God’s love. We cannot give our children all the answers, but what we can give them is this trust in God’s love. We can teach our children to trust God and themselves and one another. We can teach them to live their lives wholly in that trust. And then we can wait for the good faith we have fostered in them to lead them to the answers their lives and their loves will demand.

The Rev. Matthew Potts, PhD

Associate Professor of Religion and Literature and of Ministry

Studies, Faculty of Divinity, Harvard University

Theologian-in-Residence, St. Barnabas Memorial

Episcopal Church, Falmouth, Massachusetts

Introduction

Truth be told, when I was in my twenties, religion wasn’t very appealing. I wasn’t sure how my brand of church was any different from the others that seemed to have gone off the deep end. Organized religion—particularly Christianity—appeared to have morphed into something much different from what Jesus had envisioned. Church looked like it was about accumulating wealth, creating beautiful buildings, and excluding others—all things that Jesus openly condemned.

Even though—a couple decades later—it looks like some parts of Christianity are still a ways away from the core teachings of Jesus, I can say that after wading through some of the baggage the church brings, I’ve discovered some invaluable things that are almost impossible to find elsewhere. At its best, church is a unique setting that opens its doors to people of all ages, literally from birth to death. And it accepts these people in all forms, from the joyful to grieving, the lonely to the overwhelmed, the sick to well, the rich to poor, the entitled to the marginalized. You can be introverted or extroverted, hardworking or lazy, chatty or quiet. Any way you are or feel, church can be home to you.

Church became increasingly attractive after I had children. I worried a lot about how I was going to raise my children, what communities I wanted to surround us, and what my children would learn by the places we went, the things we did, and the people we called friends. I spent many nights around the dinner table making a case to my children about why gratitude was important, only to realize that our conversations about gratitude really only happened in the first three minutes of dinner and almost always involved vegetables. I sensed this wasn’t going well for us.

I had a hunch that if I didn’t work hard to make our family’s values clear, then I might be overrun by the things our culture values: competition, success, consumerism, and personal fulfillment. These are the values I feared would trickle into my children’s hearts and brains, and weasel their way to the top of their list of priorities. If I wanted it any other way, it was becoming clear I’d have to work at it.

Before I became director of children’s ministries at Saint Barnabas Memorial Church, I was a parent who spent Sunday mornings wondering what her children were doing in Sunday school and how it related to our everyday lives. The wife of a religion professor and one of the clerics at Saint Barnabas, I spent evenings asking clarifying and needling questions about the historical context of how we arrived at the religion and church that we see today. I asked Matt on a routine basis, "Is church trying to make religion irrelevant and confusing to children?"

All of these ponderings and conversations were aiming to uncover whether or not I could get what our family needed from church: something that increased the volume on love and kindness and drowned out the less desirable values of competition and consumerism that were seeping into our family’s culture when I wasn’t looking. The church should be the logical place for a family to find the support they need to raise caring, loving, and compassionate children. The church proclaims the teachings of a man who preached (a lot) about love and caring for the marginalized. If our family was coming to church on a routine basis and it was still unclear to my children what church was meant to be, then our church—at least—had some serious self-reflection to do.

The Self-Reflection

I’m a trained family therapist and was working as an in-home therapist when I decided to take the position at Saint Barnabas. I practiced several different models of family therapy, but my favorite was—and still is—the solution-focused model. It might sound redundant, since you’d assume all forms of therapy would be focused on a solution. But that’s not necessarily the case. This one spends almost no time unearthing the root of the problem, and instead looks ahead toward solutions for arriving at a desired outcome. More importantly though, this model is built on the assumption that every person or family can generate solutions to their own problems; they might just need a little nudge.

That’s how I’ve always felt about our church: we have everything we need. Too often churches are searching for the magic pill that’s going to reinvigorate their children’s program and bring back the families who’ve stopped coming. The remedy might be a curriculum, a climbing wall, or a bouncy house. If you buy it, they will come. Looking elsewhere for the quick fix can distract you from looking inward within your own congregation for your very own solutions to your very own problems, a solution that binds together the whole community.

Millie, my seven-year-old daughter, has a favorite, though clunky, saying that often rings in my ears, Be yourself. Do not be your friend. It takes a few seconds to figure out what she means by this. "Be yourself. Do not be your friend." When Millie writes this on birthday cards, bookmarks, placemats, or the refrigerator, I’m not sure if she knows how desperately most of us need to be reminded of this. Millie’s motto easily applies to all forms of envy, including the envy that some churches have for those congregations which appear to have it all. We’re all guilty of peeking at what the neighbors have and feeling like we want that same thing, even if we never gave it much thought prior to fifteen seconds ago. Our church was guilty of that, and we briefly contemplated ill-fitting ideas, because duplicating someone else’s program seemed a whole lot easier than the process of self-reflection and reinvention. We didn’t want to hear that the best solution was not their solution, but our solution. That seemed like a lot of work and no one knew how to get there. To me, it felt like we didn’t have much choice; enthusiasm for our children’s ministry was quickly evaporating.

This is the story of our mid-size Episcopal church’s struggle to reach today’s young families. The process of self-reflection helped us locate the intersection of the needs of children, families, and the church. We took a risk to rethink (completely) how we teach children about God, religion, faith, and the church in a way that is meaningful to children, families, and our faith community today—and in the future. We erased our preconceived notions about what we thought we needed, we recycled the old curricula, emptied the rooms, and moved forward with one single commitment: make it all meaningful. What resulted was a program that the whole church was proud of, one that children and parents loved and teachers wanted to teach, and a new way of being that breathed life into our congregation. We finally had what we really needed. And we did it ourselves.

When word spread that our program was growing and that there was enthusiasm among children and parents—two highly coveted things in the world of children’s ministry—other churches started inquiring. It looked to some like we were sitting on the golden ticket and everyone wanted a copy of it; whatever lesson plans or resources I could hand over would be greatly appreciated. In my first conversation with Church Publishing, I told my (now) editor that I didn’t have anything, really, to offer these other churches; this was not something to be circulated in an e-mail. This was, instead, a new model of children’s ministry, one that would have to be nurtured and fostered by the whole church community. Churches would have to be all in if this were going to work.

This book is for churches who want to be all in because you know, too, that your congregation has the gifts it needs to reinvigorate the life of your children’s ministry and the life of your church. Or, as they say in the field of family therapy: you believe that your church can generate solutions to its own problems.

Our program assumes that children already experience holiness in their lives; likewise we assume the experience of God is authentic in