Years ago when I had a small boy learning cello, I offhandedly asked a person in charge at our church if Jubal might play a song or two in front of the congregation sometime. More than anything, he was losing his confidence in performing. I wanted him to have the opportunity to regain it, and I perceived the kindest, most encouraging audience would be at church. Where else would people come up afterward, hug him, tell him how proud they were?
Before we had moved to Denver, we had taken the kids to nursing homes where we sang and played music on our own. The residents seemed to enjoy it and the staff even thanked us for bringing some lighthearted fun into their day. They genuinely looked forward to us returning each week.
This time, the response I got from the fellow in charge at church was, “Sure, let me know when he has learned Amazing Grace.”
I am sure he didn’t intend to offend me by brushing me off–he simply misunderstood. He thought the usual church flow might be interrupted, and there ought to be order. He didn’t want the service to be compromised, didn’t want to shortcut prayer time or sermonizing. Didn’t want a child to be the center of attention.
You see, the guy in charge looked at a child as somebody who could be worked into the situation, given enough practice. If the moment was opportune, if the child was prepared, if the tune was acceptable…If.
Primarily, the man in charge misjudged children.
But Jesus–more of the minimum-wage nursing home worker and oft-overlooked elderly folk-type– looked at children and said, “Get over here and climb up in my lap. You’re the reason I’ve come!”
That’s how important kids, and child-likeness in general, are important to the kingdom.
“The kingdom of God belongs to such as these”–that’s how God places their value. They own the place.
My little girl asks me all the time to tell her more about Heaven. I tell her how wonderful it is, how every good thing is there, and no bad things. “Well,” she concludes, “dying is happy, then, if Heaven is full of only good things.” I swallow tears, because she’s right, but also because she believes it so determinedly. She won’t stand for a Heaven without a swimming pool and all the fresh strawberries and cream a person could eat.
I’ve lived a life of hardening into a person who guards my hope. “To live is Christ”–this I can lean into, and something I need to teach my kids by my attitude and actions.
“To die is gain”–this is something a child with childlike faith must remind me.
We thought about this as we were already backing away from church. We decided we should instead focus on discipling our own kids as a home church because the mainstream church was a poor substitute. The mainstream church these days tends to serve the grown-ups, the churchified–and keep them happy, a world within a world. They often pursue ventures that have very little to do with following Jesus–bigger, better buildings, higher entertainment value, engaging in bait-and-switch tactics. Feel-good, electric-charged music and speaking. Conferences. Less responsibility. More coffee.
Kids don’t make the list.
We had done the humble task of nursery care and lower-level Sunday school for years–thinking it was a noble job. But most parents always seemed more than happy to dump their kids in our care, turn on their heels and leave to go to “big” church. We were childcare, plain and simple. Sometimes accused of giving fruit gummies and juice to kids who “didn’t need the sugar”. Save for a tiny minority, they didn’t give a sniff about what we taught their children–out of sight, out of mind. And to be honest, we weren’t given a whole lot to teach them.
This alone has taken years for us to reckon as possibly un-Christlike. We were told it was our “gifting” and we should probably do it forever, seeing that the “Body” is made up of hands and feet. Shut up and do your part. And bring better snacks.
But as our kids grew into bigger kids who diligently read their own Action Bible front to back, we saw how wrong the mainstream church was in limiting children to soggy spiritual koolaid and crackers in the basement. They needed more to chew, and we couldn’t rely on the church to spackle the holes in their theology, seeing it, in itself, was full of holes.
Little do they love their little neighbors by feeding them a steady diet of truth. Little do they look at sinners–children–and, forgetting self, love them into disciples of Jesus. Little do they say, “Get over here and climb up in my lap!” or “You’re the reason I’ve come!” or “The kingdom belongs to such as these.”
We can’t afford to wait for the right church to do the right thing.
If, indeed, our struggle is not against “flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places,”–we have a lot of strength training to do.
My own kids have a front row seat to the action–they go to school everyday and witness the messed-up, foul ways of the world. (I’ll admit I despair sometimes and talk to Jesus about it regularly.) Then they come home where we’re reading through the book of Judges–”there was no king in Israel and everyone did what was right in their own eyes” (Judges 21:25)–and we are learning just how dependent we have got to be on God to fight our battles for us.
We read the stories of how cowardly the Israelites were in fighting their enemies so that God had to raise up a woman (Deborah) to lead them to victory. How Gideon took his three hundred warriors, clay jars, torches, and horns–no weapons!–and God used him to defeat the Midianites.
The spiritual application is not lost on us. In speaking of fairy tales Chesterton wrote,
[they] do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
(Tremendous Trifles)
And these are no fairy tales we’re reading on Sunday morning. Kids understand story, and God supplied all of Jewish history for a tender mind to digest and to point, ultimately, to a Savior who did, does, and will continue to fight our battles for us. The Word of God, when planted in the soil of a child, is living and active and grows directly around one’s heart. It helps them to grow in wisdom and maturity, just like Jesus.
This is the best thing we have ever done, if I’m being honest–to put down the things I once thought were noble and important, or what looked popular or seemed grown-up and dignified–for the kids’ sake.
We have a lot to teach each other.
Ironically, our kids are excellent musicians now–pretty advantageous in a church-at-home situation. They get center stage. My five year old twirls and belts out hymns. My seven year old beats the drums–the ones they never let him touch at church. The ten year old hits every high soprano note the rest of us can’t. My former-cellist, twelve, leads us with guitar.
Every time I hear their music, it sounds like worship.
Praise Him with the harp and lyre! Praise him with timbrel and dancing, praise him with the strings and pipe, praise him with the clash of cymbals!
Psalm 150
The blind and lame came to him at the temple, and he healed them. But when the chief priests and the teachers of the law saw the wonderful things he did and the children shouting in the temple courts, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” they were indignant.
“Do you hear what these children are saying?” they asked him.
“Yes,” replied Jesus, “have you never read, ‘From the lips of children and infants you, Lord, have called forth your praise’?”
Matthew 21:14-16
