“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
Sarah, thanks for these comments. We have a MC with roughly equal number of under 5s as over 5s! So it is great to hear of other people with similar issues.
ReplyDeleteRight now we have a weekly evening slot without the kids, and then try to live life together and include our kids in that, as well as in specific ad-hoc service or community activities that we do.
I heard of one MC (it might even be yours!) who had an adult discussion time called TGIB - Thank God It's Bedtime! That strikes many a chord with us....