Nov 26, 2018
By Jane Mackintosh
Conference President
Last month I shared my first idea about how we can “get ready” as Seventh Day Baptists to serve the Church when she returns to the Sabbath. The first idea was to pursue Biblical counseling, training to help with the woundedness of people sitting in our churches. Doug and I just returned from Florida where we spent a weekend training a group in Daytona Beach. Then we head to New York City the first weekend of December for another training. If a group in your church is interested, please contact me at grandmamack@comcast.net for further info.
The second idea I have about how we can “get ready” is to turn our focus onto Children’s Ministry. The Barna Group, who specializes in statistics, says that 90% of Christians come to Jesus before the age of 21, with the bulk of us meeting Jesus between the ages of 4 and 14. Logic says to me that if we are serious about evangelism, we should be flipping the focus of our churches away from adult-centered ministry to child-centered ministry. I have been challenged to describe what this might look like as most of us will defend our church focus citing that
we have camp programs, VBS, Sabbath School, etc. The first place I would look for evidence is in our budgets. Look at your church budget, including the pastor’s salary, and determine what percentage of the budget is used for children’s ministry. If we are serious about children, what about a children’s pastor? Since most of our churches cannot afford more than one pastor’s salary, what about considering a children’s pastor as the senior or only pastor? Why is the assistant pastor in training relegated to youth ministry and then “graduates” to the senior pastor position, leaving the youth ministry? Is there even a specialty in seminary for children’s pastor? How welcome are children in the worship service—i.e., how do we welcome children to participate and be part of the ministry team of our worship services? Do children and youth consider themselves part of the ministry of the church—or do they only see themselves participating when they grow into adulthood?
I grew up in a Southern Baptist Church and I have to say that my church did this well. Sunday evenings were dedicated to Training Union (like Sunday School) and we were always taught evangelism techniques and challenged to share our faith with our friends. Sunday evenings, we led the worship time, played piano and organ if able, ushered, collected offering, and if we chose to, even preached the sermon. I think I began leading the song service with my friends playing the piano and organ when I was in junior high. When I was a senior in high school,
I taught a junior high girls Sunday School class. This may have been unusual, but I think this church was serious about calling kids into ministry.
I don’t have answers—but I think we need to be asking some questions and taking a hard look at what we are doing with children. There is no Junior Holy Spirit. So if children have the same Holy Spirit we adults do, what does that say to us about their call to ministry? Are we selling our kids short by assuming they are not ready to be ministering where they are planted? Are we training them to do so?
Next month, I will share some of the things we will be trying at Conference to call children into worship in a way they can engage and share the truth that they are ministers of the Gospel right now.
