Wired for Worship: Week Six

With Advent coming up the following week, last Sunday was our last lesson on worship. The kids really seemed to love the unit, and we loved teaching it. So our last week, we went back to Jesus and focused on what Jesus has to do with worship. The topic was communion, which is a little tricky to explain to kids... Okay, very tricky. Symbolism doesn't quite grab their fancies.

Thanksgiving was coming up that Thursday, so we did a little Thanksgiving review. The kids were all wondering what in the world Pilgrims and Native Americans had to do with Jesus, I'm sure. We talked about how there was one big Thanksgiving meal years and years ago, to celebrate the Pilgrims and Native Americans meeting together. Then, every year since then, we've all sat down as a family and filled our faces with stuffing and turkey and casseroles--as a reminder of what the first Thanksgiving was like. This was the perfect tie in to Jesus.

I asked the kids what meal they had every week at church. Communion eventually came out of the crowd, and we talked about how the first time Jesus and his disciples had the Last Supper was very special, and that it was a passover event. Jesus held up the wine and the bread. We talked about what the wine and the bread symbolized. Jesus' blood shed for us, and His body broken for us. I asked the kids why Jesus' blood was shed for us, and His body was broken for us. SIN. Then I drew their attention to a little chalice up at the front I'd drawn. It was empty, and next to it was a piece of bread. I had all of the kids call out sins they'd committed, and we wrote them inside the chalice. There were a lot of sins. But what did those have to do with Jesus? Why did Jesus have to die for our sins?

We use the analogy of cleaning. When Mom mops the floor, she tells you not to go on it, you might get it dirty. Because as soon as your dirty feet touch the clean floor, it's no longer clean. We talked about how God is that way. If we touch him with our dirtiness, God is no longer clean. But the difference is that God is unable to be unclean. If God wasn't clean, He wouldn't be God. So instead, we're kept at a distance in our dirtiness. But what happened was that Jesus shed his blood, and his blood covered us, so that we can be clean with God, who is also clean. Then we colored in the wine on the chalice, over the sins. The sins were no longer visible. That's how Jesus' blood was shed for us.

We read 1 Corinthians 11:26-28.

"For whenever you eat this bread or drink this cup, you are proclaiming the Lord's death until He comes. Therefore, whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. A man ought to examine himself before eating the bread or drinking the cup."

Taking it verse by verse, we talked about what it means to be "proclaiming the Lord's death". The kids were all pretty quick at this one, which surprised me. The simple idea was that we're telling everyone that Jesus shed his blood and broke his body for us. Then we talked about what an "unworthy manner" could be. This one took a bit of work. But we talked about how Jesus did this FOR us, and how communion is more of an exchange than anything else. When we go up to drink the wine and eat the bread, what we're doing is giving Jesus our sins, and taking the body and blood he gives back to us. If we don't give Jesus our sins when we go up, we're going up in an unworthy manner, and we're taking from the Lord without giving anything. That's why we need to examine ourselves and give our sins to God when we go up there.

Leading from there out, we talked about how communion is an act of worship. Because Jesus died for our sins, the way that we thank him is by actually taking what he gave us. How would you feel if you gave somebody a present and they didn't take it, they just gave it back to you and didn't want it? You would feel hurt. That's what we do to Jesus if we don't take the body and blood that he gave for us. And we give him our sins in exchange for it. One of the kids mentioned that everything we do with God is a give and take, and how worship is like that too. Worship always starts with God giving us something. It never starts with us. It's ALWAYS our response to God. And so when God gave His son for us, we respond in thanking him by taking what He gave us, and giving Him what he wants. Cleanliness. And the whole reason he wants cleanliness is so we can be with Him.

We did the Hot Seat again that week, and it was really wonderful some of the things the kids said. I have the audio clips of it, but I need to figure out how to post them. Here's one from the week before, though.

The question was "What is worship?"

Child: It's like, a relationship.
Amanda: How do you think God feels when we worship him?
Child: I think he feels glad, and happy...
Amanda: How do you feel?
Child: It makes me feel glad that I did it.

Reminder: Christmas Unwrapped rehearsals are every Wednesday night from 6:30-7:30ish, and Sundays at 10:30 (between the services.) The actual event is on Sunday, December 13th at 6 PM.

A Letter to Non-Christians

Shane Claiborne wrote books like "The Irresistible Revolution" and "Jesus For President", and was just published in the December/Christmas edition of Esquire, which is pretty cool. I read what he wrote, which is basically a letter to non-Christians and found it really interesting some of the things he said. And I agree with him on most points (I hesitate to say all until I've really read it all and prayed through it and thought about it). I think it's an important reminder to us Christians that when people first called followers of Jesus "Christians", it wasn't a compliment, it was an insult. Sometimes I think it's still that way today. We're following a Jesus who was spit on, mocked, and hated because he preached love and joy and peace to people that the rest of the world hated, ridiculed and spat on. Jesus wasn't clean cut, and he wasn't wearing polo shirts and jeans to church on Sundays. He was the homeless, raggedy man on the side of the road with nothing to eat, no rock on which to lay his head, and his whole ministry was preaching to those like him about the greatness of God's kingdom, and preaching to those "above" him about the greatness they were missing out on. So often, we Christians forget about this, and we forget to live into the CHRIST part of our name. So maybe this Christmas season instead of focusing on the love and joy and peace that Christ brought to people like us (the modern-day Levites, Pharisees, Sadducees, you name us), we should focus on bringing that love, joy, and peace to the people that Christ lived and breathed with while he was on earth. Those most like him, with no place to lay their head and no food in their stomachs.

http://www.esquire.com/features/best-and-brightest-2009/shane-claiborne-1209

Cut and pasted for your convenience:

To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity.

Forgive us. Forgive us for the embarrassing things we have done in the name of God.

The other night I headed into downtown Philly for a stroll with some friends from out of town. We walked down to Penn's Landing along the river, where there are street performers, artists, musicians. We passed a great magician who did some pretty sweet tricks like pour change out of his iPhone, and then there was a preacher. He wasn't quite as captivating as the magician. He stood on a box, yelling into a microphone, and beside him was a coffin with a fake dead body inside. He talked about how we are all going to die and go to hell if we don't know Jesus.

Some folks snickered. Some told him to shut the hell up. A couple of teenagers tried to steal the dead body in the coffin. All I could do was think to myself, I want to jump up on a box beside him and yell at the top of my lungs, "God is not a monster." Maybe next time I will.

The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less fascinating. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus.

At one point Gandhi was asked if he was a Christian, and he said, essentially, "I sure love Jesus, but the Christians seem so unlike their Christ." A recent study showed that the top three perceptions of Christians in the U. S. among young non-Christians are that Christians are 1) antigay, 2) judgmental, and 3) hypocritical. So what we have here is a bit of an image crisis, and much of that reputation is well deserved. That's the ugly stuff. And that's why I begin by saying that I'm sorry.

Now for the good news.

I want to invite you to consider that maybe the televangelists and street preachers are wrong — and that God really is love. Maybe the fruits of the Spirit really are beautiful things like peace, patience, kindness, joy, love, goodness, and not the ugly things that have come to characterize religion, or politics, for that matter. (If there is anything I have learned from liberals and conservatives, it's that you can have great answers and still be mean... and that just as important as being right is being nice.)

The Bible that I read says that God did not send Jesus to condemn the world but to save it... it was because "God so loved the world." That is the God I know, and I long for others to know. I did not choose to devote my life to Jesus because I was scared to death of hell or because I wanted crowns in heaven... but because he is good. For those of you who are on a sincere spiritual journey, I hope that you do not reject Christ because of Christians. We have always been a messed-up bunch, and somehow God has survived the embarrassing things we do in His name. At the core of our "Gospel" is the message that Jesus came "not [for] the healthy... but the sick." And if you choose Jesus, may it not be simply because of a fear of hell or hope for mansions in heaven.

Don't get me wrong, I still believe in the afterlife, but too often all the church has done is promise the world that there is life after death and use it as a ticket to ignore the hells around us. I am convinced that the Christian Gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and that the message of that Gospel is not just about going up when we die but about bringing God's Kingdom down. It was Jesus who taught us to pray that God's will be done "on earth as it is in heaven." On earth.

One of Jesus' most scandalous stories is the story of the Good Samaritan. As sentimental as we may have made it, the original story was about a man who gets beat up and left on the side of the road. A priest passes by. A Levite, the quintessential religious guy, also passes by on the other side (perhaps late for a meeting at church). And then comes the Samaritan... you can almost imagine a snicker in the Jewish crowd. Jews did not talk to Samaritans, or even walk through Samaria. But the Samaritan stops and takes care of the guy in the ditch and is lifted up as the hero of the story. I'm sure some of the listeners were ticked. According to the religious elite, Samaritans did not keep the right rules, and they did not have sound doctrine... but Jesus shows that true faith has to work itself out in a way that is Good News to the most bruised and broken person lying in the ditch.

It is so simple, but the pious forget this lesson constantly. God may indeed be evident in a priest, but God is just as likely to be at work through a Samaritan or a prostitute. In fact the Scripture is brimful of God using folks like a lying prostitute named Rahab, an adulterous king named David... at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam through his donkey. Some say God spoke to Balaam through his ass and has been speaking through asses ever since. So if God should choose to use us, then we should be grateful but not think too highly of ourselves. And if upon meeting someone we think God could never use, we should think again.

After all, Jesus says to the religious elite who looked down on everybody else: "The tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom ahead of you." And we wonder what got him killed?

I have a friend in the UK who talks about "dirty theology" — that we have a God who is always using dirt to bring life and healing and redemption, a God who shows up in the most unlikely and scandalous ways. After all, the whole story begins with God reaching down from heaven, picking up some dirt, and breathing life into it. At one point, Jesus takes some mud, spits in it, and wipes it on a blind man's eyes to heal him. (The priests and producers of anointing oil were not happy that day.)

In fact, the entire story of Jesus is about a God who did not just want to stay "out there" but who moves into the neighborhood, a neighborhood where folks said, "Nothing good could come." It is this Jesus who was accused of being a glutton and drunkard and rabble-rouser for hanging out with all of society's rejects, and who died on the imperial cross of Rome reserved for bandits and failed messiahs. This is why the triumph over the cross was a triumph over everything ugly we do to ourselves and to others. It is the final promise that love wins.

It is this Jesus who was born in a stank manger in the middle of a genocide. That is the God that we are just as likely to find in the streets as in the sanctuary, who can redeem revolutionaries and tax collectors, the oppressed and the oppressors... a God who is saving some of us from the ghettos of poverty, and some of us from the ghettos of wealth.

In closing, to those who have closed the door on religion — I was recently asked by a non-Christian friend if I thought he was going to hell. I said, "I hope not. It will be hard to enjoy heaven without you." If those of us who believe in God do not believe God's grace is big enough to save the whole world... well, we should at least pray that it is.

Your brother,

Shane

To Live Is Christ (Paul): Week Six

First off, thank you all for your prayers and thoughts concerning my dad. He is home from the hospital and doing well. :)

This was our last week of studying Paul for this semester, and it was super fun. We've been doing Paul since August, studying the chronology of his ministries, from the very beginning as a little Jewish school boy to this Wednesday, when he was shipwrecked on the island. We had a lot of fun doing this lesson, and I had a great time teaching it. A great last week of Paul for the next few weeks while we focus on Christmas Unwrapped and Jesus' birthday.

So, keeping in theme with boats and being shipwrecked, I thought, 'hey, let's act this story out'. So, the kids were divided into two teams. They each had to pick one Paul--who got to wear cool reindeer antlers--and Paul was the only person allowed on their boat. I gave each group a cardboard presentation board, some rope, stickers, markers, tape, and paper. My special helper and I got scissors and the kids directed us on what to do. The basic objective was that they had to build and decorate a boat that could carry Paul on his different missionary journeys. This was really fun and the kids loved it! I gave them a few minutes and we had beautiful boats with wonderful names. Paul sat down in the boat, and the other members of the team got to pick some cargo to take with them. They could pick three out of water, food, a blanket, a pillow, and a bible. One group picked food, water, and a blanket. The other picked food, water, and a bible. And the boat was packed and ready to go... But where?

We broke this video up into a few parts. The kids all gathered round as we watched the first part of the video. I didn't tell them which island to go to (there were a few islands around the room). They had to listen to the video, figure out where to go, and then go do the first thing there. So we went to Cyprus first. Paul got a bandaid, and they were able to switch out one of their items for a piece of an anchor (the bible verse). Then, if they didn't have a blanket, they lost an arm (frostbite's no fun!), if they didn't have food, they had to have another person on their boat (famished!), and if they didn't have water, they couldn't speak (their throats were too scorched). So we had some disabilities going on, and then we watched the second part of the video.

So the kids went off to Crete and we played a quick game while they were there, similar to front of the boat, back of the boat. The person that was left standing got to pick if they wanted to take another piece of cargo on the ship, or take one away from the other team. The kids got the next part of the anchor, and had more disabilities than they could count, and off they went toward the final place, Rome... But then the winds howled, rain poured (from spray bottles, it's a tough world out there!), and their boats were tipped over by the wind (played by Me). They had to "swim" (army crawl) to the nearest island, which happened to be Malta.

So we watched the last part of the video, and we talked about how now, the Maltese people have a huge population of Christians on the island, and it's all because of Paul! Paul probably thought this shipwreck was going to be awful and there was no good from it, but God turned it into good by using it to spread health and Jesus to the people on the island. That was cool!

I showed two That Will Leave A Mark videos, and we talked about what kind of mark we thought this event left on Paul. The kids thought it probably strengthened his faith. Then I asked the kids to think about the event that made the biggest mark on their own lives. We had little brothers and sisters, deaths of grandparents, first days of schools, getting punched... All of these things that happened. We talked about how these marks can be good or bad, and when they're good, it's easy to navigate. But what do we do when it's bad? When we have shipwrecks in our lives, how do we swim to shore. I had the kids close their eyes and go back to that memory and to look around the room, and see if they could find Jesus. When they did, we talked about how when future things make their "mark" on our lives, we should look around and find Jesus, and He'll direct us where to go.

The verse for the week: "We have this hope as an anchor, firm and secure." - Hebrews 6:19

Next semester we'll be talking about the different Pauline epistles. We'll spend two weeks on each of the different Pauline epistles to the churches. What I would like to do is have someone come in that has been to each of the cities those churches are at (Colossus, Ephesus, Corinth, Thessalonica/Salonia/Thessaloniki, Galatia, Rome, Philippi) and bring pictures and memories so the kids can see that each one of these epistles was written to places that actually exist. I think that would really bring home the realness of the bible to them, and I would love to be able to experience that with them. So, if any of you know anyone who has been to any of these cities, please let me know :)

To Live is Christ (Paul): Weeks Five

We've done a lot of studying Paul this year, and will be next year too. Last week, Paul and Silas were in jail for telling people about Jesus. The kids acted the story out while making chains out of fruit roll ups. It was really fun. I gave the kids 7 minutes to build a make-shift jail out of chairs, blankets, whatever they could find in that room (it's amazing what kids can find when you tell them to build something!). I should have taken a picture of this jail--it was amazing! I would never, ever want to be inside of this jail. We stuck a Paul and a Silas inside the jail, tied their hands and feet together, and made them sit there while we read the story.

In the story, Paul and Silas are walkin' around, tellin' people about Jesus and are thrown in jail. While they're in jail, they still talk about Jesus (some nerve, eh?). Then, one day as they're praying in their jail cells, the chains fall off their arms and legs, the door to the jail cell opens, and they're free. But what do they do? Nothing. They sit there, and continue to pray. At this point, the kids and I are both going "huh?"

So, we find out as we read that the jailer comes, sees that Paul and Silas stayed, and is blown away by how they followed the rules (basically. See, parents, this is a lesson you can get into!) So he takes them home, and Paul and Silas convert his entire family into Christians. Talk about some good repercussions for obeying the rules!

So, the kids ate their chains, we talked about Paul and Silas, we freed Paul and Silas from jail, and then we showed another "That Will Leave A Mark!" video. We talked about how Paul made his mark by staying in the prison and then converting the jailer's family. Then we talked about what the kids can do to make a mark in the lives of the people around them. They loved the makeshift jail!

Wired for Worship: Week Three

One of the biggest challenges of Children's Ministry (or any ministry, really) is finding how to incorporate God's truth with current day to day affairs in a way that the kids really understand. The goal is to get the kids to the point where they can do that themselves--find God's Word in their every day life and live into it.

This weekend was Halloween. The kids came in on Sunday sugar-hyped, wishing they were home to eat their candy and reliving their nights as Hannah Montana, a hamburger, a SWAT team member, etc, etc. The difficulty is how to take that hype for Halloween and turn it into a hype for Jesus and a desire to learn.

We played this video and asked the kids how they saw the people worshiping in the video. People worship in all different ways--some raise their hands, some sway, some sing, some pray--but God wants one thing from all worshipers. He wants us to worship him in truth (John 4:24). Worshiping in truth means that we take off our masks (hey, halloween!) and come before God as our real selves, and we don't hide anything. Then we played a song for the kids and let them worship their God in truth!

Some quotes from the kids:

"I really love that I don't have to go to school on Sunday. I can just be with God and love him all day long and think about him all day long."

"When you worship God and you can just give Him your heart, it just makes you feel better on the inside and everything you worry about just goes away."

Hopefully I'll get some audio up of what the kids said, and some pictures of them worshiping. The lesson was really powerful, moreso for the teachers than the kids, I think!