How (not to) engage in mission with young children

Image: jannoon028 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I have a vivid memory from 2007.

It is etched on my brain because it became a “kairos” moment for me and my husband, Rich. At the time we were living on an inner-city estate. Part of our “missional activity” involved weekly door knocking to various houses .We would often be invited in to chat, pray, and read the bible with people. I would take our eldest son, Josiah, who was at the time around 18 months old. On this particular day we were in one home praying for one of the women who had broken her leg. I had left Josiah to amuse himself. Mid-way-through-prayer-for healing I became distracted by a loud unceasing banging. I peeked through my closed eyes to see my adorable toddler whacking the woman’s washing machine with one of her crutches. I guess maybe he wasn’t so enamoured with the “missional activity” as I was.

That moment confirmed what I was beginning to already conclude: mission with families is a different ballgame. We had moved specifically to the area because we wanted to reach out to the local community, but with a toddler and another baby on the way we needed to re-think. Being missional couldn’t look the same for us as it did to most of the other young adults who were part of our team.

So I swopped the door-knocking with trips to the park, the library, and the local baby groups. Having a baby (or a dog) instantly opens up relationships. We invited people into our family activity. We had one woman who would turn up on-the-dot- at 5.30 every evening. She would come in, put the kettle on for us all, help bath Josiah, and then sit down and read the bible with us as a family. Our friendship with her developed from a simple act of inviting her to choose a Christmas tree with us.

When we miscarried a baby we invited people in the community to join with us in a ceremony to plant a tree in remembrance. Allowing others to minister to us in times of sorrow is a powerful thing, and we found relationships deepened so much in doing this.

Some other things we have tried:

• Litter-picking and prayer-walking in our local area as a family.
• An alpha-course in our front room with another mum who was keen to learn more of Jesus.
• Opportunities to pray for other mums just by being present at toddler groups.
• Just this morning we simply took the kids with us to a few of our neighbours to give out small Christmas gifts, and a card with a little prayer for the family inside.
• Kids parties
• “Hanging-out” with other families and mums

These are ‘normal’ things we can do as a family, not additional missional-add-ons. They are small, simple acts of engaging with those who don’t yet know Jesus. And they are completely accessible as a family. We haven’t always seen much visible fruit from the things we’ve done, and we’ve made many mistakes along the way, but it’s a journey God is taking us on. We are constantly re-thinking what it looks like to reach out to those God gives us; we now have three children and with each season of life our approach needs to adapt according to the demands and needs of family life. What worked 5 years ago with one child no longer works with three children. I know that as we offer ourselves and our family to God even in the simplest of ways he can use it for His glory – because that’s the kind of amazing God we have.

How have you engaged in mission with children – we’d love to hear your stories and testimonies to encourage and inspire one another.

Written by Anna Robinson

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Missional Communities with Youth, Kids and Families

“Ah, what this Missional Community really needs, is some babies and toddlers.”

Have you ever thought that? No, me neither. And yet I find myself co-leading a missional community (MC) and being mother to both a baby and a toddler. In fact our MC has 6 little people in addition to our 15 adults. Despite this set of circumstances, I seem to know very little about how to successfully mix babies, toddlers, family life, and MCs. I know more about the challenges that come with the territory, and I know a lot more questions than I do answers. So below is my account of what I do and don’t know about children, youth, families and MCs.

Becoming a parent is bad for your intelligence. When sleep-deprivation leaves you without a working short-term memory, it becomes difficult to give as much to planning, meeting together or performing the usual tasks of leading a community. While some individuals manage to bounce back within a few short months of having a baby, others find that things never return to ‘business as usual’, and have to make major adjustments to how they are able to participate in the life of the MC. They (we) live in the space between their desires to be involved and their actual capacity, which generates at least some pain, frustration and confusion for themselves and those around them. This is difficult, and something we are still trying to work out. Patience and gentleness are called for in large measure.

This is one area where I don’t have many answers, but I trust that God will lead us into new discoveries, and as always seems to be the case, out of our own boxes. Perhaps we have a blind spot when we think about ‘reduced capacity’. Perhaps there are whole other ways of doing and being and leading community that will allow us to enter even more deeply into the richness of community life, even when we can’t remember what we ate for breakfast this morning. I suspect greatly that there are.

Adding children to the mix requires a leap in creative thinking and flexibility. Alas, our idea for a picnic combined with some contemplative meditation never made it off the drawing board. But other ideas have, and have given us space for the adults to make time to talk to God and each other, and the children space to participate too. We have found using activities with symbolic meaning have worked well. Planting seeds together whilst praying for the things we hope for, and painting pictures to show God what we are thinking about are a couple of examples that worked really well. A carol-singing walk together worked great once we adopted the pace of the slowest walker, writing a community thanksgiving song based around the thanks of both the adults and children was a real hit, and meeting around tea-times has actually worked well (fed toddlers are happy toddlers).

Sharing very personal testimony with toddlers around who are in the mimicry stage of language-learning doesn’t work very well. While the toddler will adore the feelings of attention flowing in his direction, the adult will have the vague feeling of being mocked.

We’ve found it helpful to have a clear idea of what we’re trying to achieve and when. Evening meetings when children are tucked up in bed are best used for ‘up’ time with God or for deep discussion with each other. Daytime meetings with children around are best used for building friendship, catching up on news and involving the children in ‘up, in and out’ aspects of community life. I’ll be honest, I don’t always get masses out of activities planned with a toddler in mind – attempting to work with a toddler tends to un-focus the mind - but I know that the evenings are the time and place for me to be refreshed. Having said that, it can often be difficult for both parents to get out to an evening meeting, so taking the focus off evening meetings and looking for other spaces in our day that we can share together is something we are working towards.

Call in the big guns when the time calls for it. It’s a noticeable trend that as the number of children in our community increases, the number of adults able to participate in things decreases. So when we’ve planned outreach events, we have called upon the fire-power of the church youth group. I can thoroughly recommend this tactic. You will get enthusiastic young people with energy to come and help out, and it’s of massive benefit to them as well.

Use babysitters if you have to. We recently took a Sunday morning to share and discuss vision together (there was too much to fit into an evening) and quickly realized we would need babysitters to come along too. Your sitters will find your small people adorable for at least the first hour, and after that their sense of duty will get them through ok. You will have had a couple of hours of being able to talk together without getting side-tracked by Iggle-Piggle, so well worth it.

Learning how to mix MC life with small children has been a huge challenge. We have had to relinquish things that have been precious, such as un-interrupted conversations, and find new ways of doing things that meet the needs of everyone – our children, our parents, our adults without children. This can’t usually happen all at the same time, so we have had to make different spaces for different kinds of activity, with mistakes made along the way. My prayer is that Jesus would teach us to let go of our pre-conceived ideas, meet us in our confusion and draw us ever more deeply into life in all its fullness together . And Jesus, if you could just help my baby to go to sleep on Wednesday night so we can both get out to the meeting, that would be great too.

Written by Sarah Cooper

Missional Communities with Youth, Kids and Families.

This week we begin a new series exploring developing missional communities with Youth, Kids and Families.  As I write I honestly don't feel like I have lots of tips and ideas for how to make this work.  In fact in our context this is one of the key questions that we are trying to crack.

What I do have is conviction backed up by story.  My conviction is this:  the best missional communities are the ones that start to function as family and family includes more than one generation.

A little bit of our story:

A few years ago we were sat with some now-very-good friends talking about our lives.  We were both couples about to start families and both recognised we needed some back up going into that new phase of life.  So we started meeting once a week and having dinner then doing the pub quiz.  Time went on,  babies came and so did new members, some who were also young married couples about to have kids others who were young adults.  We were never an exclusively family focussed community; we were just a family.

Community life began to change a little to accommodate the arrival of little people. We couldn't just meet on nights any more,  so we set up a weekend brunch.   Babysitting rotas and plans had to be co-ordinated and plans for worship or mission had to accommodate the potential risk of loud crying,  cold children or the need for feeding.  All of this I think humanized the community,  made it more real.

We had lots of picnics and barbecues,  we did a few dedications or baptisms,  we planned some family fun days and somehow the boundaries between the community life and just family life began to get very blurred.  Young adults came to take our young kids out for trips and give us a break.  Community members became lifelong friends and god-parents.   We took little faith-risks together, and involved our kids.  We went and served our community together,  with our kids.  And all this seems to have been attractive,  other people joined us and we grew.

Our kids knew they were part of that family,  their closest friends were from the community,  they got to experience being raised by a group and so the faith of the community started to become their faith too.

We've moved on to a different place now,  God called us there to work specifically with Children,  Youth and Young Adults.  We're trying to figure out how to connect them up with missional communities.  We don't really have a set of ten easy steps to do that yet,  just a desire to try it out and a personal experience that it can work,  can be a lot of fun,  can be beautiful.

Maybe there are some readers out there who have stories similar to this.  If so I'd love to hear your thoughts: How do you include kids and youth in your missional community?

Sustaining Missional Living

This week I'm in Holland at a Learning Community with Paul Maconochie and Rich Robinson. The teaching and input which they give is excellent but sometimes it's difficult to engage with as I've heard it so many times before! However, I do find that God often highlights one little aspect of something I've heard again and again to pinpoint an area of my life where he wants to bring revelation and change. This week it was the teaching on the semi-circle and having a rhythm of abiding-fruitfulness, rest-work, Covenant-Kingdom. (You can find more on this in the various 3dm books, as well as in other posts on this blog.) The semi-circle is an important part of sustaining missional living.

The past term has been crazy and exciting and very busy for all of us in the team. For me, many things have felt overwhelming, stressful, and pressured. I've felt like I'm going to drown, have thought there's no way I'll make it through and have definitely questioned whether I was doing the right thing!*

In the middle of the storm, it's easy to forget who God is and what he says about me. I forget he's in the boat. I forget the vision he's given me. I forget that he has called me for such a time as this. I forget that his promises are to never leave me or forsake me. I forget that it's in his strength that I can do all things. I forget that his grace is sufficient for me. I forget so many things when I'm feeling buffetted by the wind and the waves.

The trouble has been that I've been trying to write these things on my heart in the middle of the storm. What I've realised is that by then it's too late!

I need to take the time to abide, to remain in him, to listen to God's voice and allow him to transform my mind BEFORE the storm comes. When there are less busy times I need to make time and allow God to change the way I think so that my behaviour is different when it's time to act. I need to talk with those around me about the prize that Jesus is setting before me so that they can remind me of it when I'm running just to keep up. And even in the midst of the busyness, before I head out into the fray I need to make time to connect with God so that I can be reminded of who he is, what he's done, who he says I am and what he's calling me to do.

I obviously still need to learn how to do this and I want to take the time over the quiet weeks coming up to rest and abide in Covenant with him so that I'm better prepared for the storms ahead.

Have you learned to do this? What has or hasn't worked for you?

*It hasn't all been bad! There have also been lots of times of joy and excitement and encouragement.