Intergenerational Friendship and the Foundations of Effective Children's Ministry
Why our commitment to children's and youth ministry comes from theology, not from how easy or rewarding it feels
Why stick with ministry to children and teenagers? It’s messy, it’s slow, they can’t reciprocate the effort I’m putting in, and that glitter is never coming out of the church carpet.
“Our commitment comes from our theology. Not from our desire for community or our love of community. Because community is hard work.”
This is a central insight from Stuart Crawshaw in this week’s episode of The Shock Absorber podcast, and it explores an important tension for those of us in local church ministry. If you have experienced a healthy church community, you know how wonderful it feels to know and be known. It feels like home, a place where everyone knows your name. And yet community does not come easily. It is hard work to create the kind of community in which you can genuinely relax.
Being grounded in our theological commitment to children, youth, and the local church you are growing them into, helps with the momentum required to do the good works prepared in advance for us to do.
Kids and Youth Ministry is not easy work. But it is fruitful and fulfilling work, working in the strength that God supplies to know, love and obey King Jesus, and invite other young people into that adventure of faith as well.
Friendship is an Ecclesial Category - The Shock Absorber
While Stuart Crawshaw struggles to calibrate his stargazing app, he’s having much more success in defining the themes of his PhD research into the history of Soul Revival and what led to the success of the Soulies youth community through the 1990s- 2000s.
This week we’re exploring the theme Ecclesiology of Intergenerational Friendship. Jesus calls his disciples friends in John 15:15, a concept that shaped the guiding ecclesial metaphor for the fledgling youth community that Stu was experimenting with.
If the young adults were friends with Jesus, and the teenagers either were already friends with Jesus or were being invited into that friendship by becoming Christians, why wouldn’t the young adults and teenagers be friends with each other? Why wouldn’t you extend that circle of friendship to older adults and to children as well?
At a time when teenagers were reaping the hurt of no-fault divorce and fractured home lives, friendship was the doorway into Christian belief and into the intergenerational community of God’s people in the local church.
Also in this episode:
How the industrialisation of schooling led to the institutionalisation of homogeneous friendships
Why churches don’t listen to anyone under 30, and how to resist that in your own ministry
Why Joel is excited about the World Cup and whether Stu will celebrate the Cup “coming home” to England
Catch the full conversation in the links below or on your favourite podcast app.
Building Blocks of a Fruitful Kids Ministry - Cross Formed KidMin
What are the key building blocks of an effective Kids Ministry?
This was the question asked of Hunter Williams and I as we jumped in on a colab episode with Hannah Augustine from the Kidz Matter podcast.
Whether you are starting from scratch, or taking some balcony time to reassess how your established ministry is going, our conversation took us through the must haves and the must nots of leading children’s ministry.
This includes:
The importance of clarity, community and curiosity
How identity and values shape your ministry’s direction
Creating a strategic roadmap for your ministry
And, of course, the three spheres of a child’s faith formation in the church — Children’s Ministry, Family Ministry and Intergenerational Ministry
Catch the full conversation in the links below or on your favourite podcast app.
If you’ve got a question or topic about Children’s Ministry that you’d like us to cover on the Cross Formed Kidmin podcasts, send me a DM or leave a comment below.