"Why does a Lieutenant Junior Grade with nine months' experience and a track record for plea bargaining get assigned to a murder case? Would it be so it never sees the inside of a courtroom?" (Daniel Kaffee, A Few Good Men). Sometimes I feel like this. Why would a single guy with no kids be placed in charge of youth (I have 9 years experience in this) and all things children's ministry? (No experience). I write this post with much fear and conviction, knowing that the Lord has placed this burden on my heart. I write this with all humility and hope that Christ would be glorified.
Throughout my years in youth ministry and my almost 6 months of children's ministry, I've found one common trend that all churches and parents face: how do I parent my child? I want to pose the question: "why do we treat our kids like iphones?" I don't have an iphone but I understand that you can download all kinds of apps that can make your phone do anything and everything the heart would desire. I saw a commercial for the iphone where you can download a list of birds and it can tell you the type, characteristics, and the specific "chirp" it makes. You can also download an app that will tell you if the plant you ran through is poisonous. Really?
In today's culture, kids are way over scheduled to the point where you need to make plans weeks in advance to hang out with them. I spoke with another youth director who told me that kids in their small group can hardly meet weekly because kids have multiple sports (not just one), private lessons for instruments, lessons for manners (i don't know how to spell the name of it), parties with friends, or other activities their kids are interested in. We recently went to Spring Storm and I spoke with my friends from Central Pres in Clayton and they said the same things about kids who needed to cancel coming because they forgot they had something else planned on that weekend (signups were months before).
Are we allowing culture to schedule our kids or are we taking that role back as parents and setting our kid's calendars ourselves? I'm not saying that having your kid in all these different activities is wrong but I wonder, "where are we scheduling God in the lives of our children?" Is it absolutely necessary to have our kids involved with 4 different things that their relationship with God suffers because they can't come to church or be more involved with ministries that are age specific? What would it look like for us to schedule God, first, in the lives of our children and allow everything else to fall into place after Christ? Help me out here, because I don't have kids... But, I know a lot of them, and they seem like they might have too many apps.
-Simon
