Disaster relief work in Japan may not look like a prerequisite for children’s ministry, but maybe God knew what He was doing when He called me to both.
When my then-home church invited me to interview for the role of children’s pastor, it may have seemed like it came out of left field, but it felt right to me, albeit in an odd way. I believed that God had been preparing me for the role, even through my 2 years of disaster-relief ministry in Japan.
But before booking my flight to LAX, I knew I had to talk to one person.
The previous children’s pastor.
I wrote her an email to let her know what was going on, and I asked for her thoughts on me taking the role.
She offered me words of wisdom, warning me that this role would be no cake walk but encouraging me to go for it, affirming, “I have no doubt your very presence will bring (needed) stability and trust.”
With her blessing, I felt comfortable proceeding with the interview.
While packing for my trip, I grabbed a few books on children’s ministry with the intent of reading them in preparation for the interview. However, the Holy Spirit nudged me to pray first, ask God for a vision for the ministry, and read the books after receiving a vision.
So I did, and two people came to mind as I prayed.
The first was a former missionary kid who had walked away from faith as an adult. This sobered me, as it showed that you can grow up not just in a Christian home, but in a missionary home–missionaries, the Christians who are supposedly so hardcore, we gave up our comfortable lives for the sake of the gospel–and still not accept Jesus as your savior. This showed me that being immersed in a Christian home or environment alone is not enough to nurture a child’s faith.
The second person who came to mind was an American expat whom I met in Japan. He told me that he grew up in “the Bible Belt” and knew his way around the Scriptures.
Whenever he or his brother had tough questions– for example, the classic, kid-vexing “How did Noah fit two of every animal into the ark?”– his “fundamentalist” father would pull off his belt and whip the boys, citing Proverbs 13:24 (in King James, of course): “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.” Their father would beat them routinely for the slightest of infractions, but asking questions about faith were certain to earn severe corporal punishment.
When the boys came of age and could leave the house as adults, the expat’s brother walked away from the faith completely, embracing atheism, while my expat friend became a universalist, believing that all roads lead to God and that no single religion has a monopoly on salvation.
These boys grew up learning the Bible inside and out, but did they ever own their own faith, or were they just doing what their parents imposed upon them?
I wondered if they had ever sought God on their own accord.
In contrast, I did not grow up in the church and did not read the Bible until I was in my thirties, but I had been seeking God since the age of 17. I thought about my Japanese friends who had never been in any sort of Christian environment growing up, but had been seeking “Truth,” “The Way,” or a higher power all along and were instinctively drawn to Jesus: the blind woman, the 85-year old, the chain-smoking tsunami survivor.
Was seeking the key factor? “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jer. 29:13 NIV). A vision started to gel around three points:
1. How do we get children to seek God out of their own will? It’s not enough for them to know Bible stories. If they don’t know God personally, then the stories could be seen as no more than fairy tales that their parents forced them to learn.
2. Children must be allowed to ask tough questions. Children are naturally inquisitive, so we cannot and should not stop them from asking questions, no matter how challenging they might be. And, if we don’t know the answer, we should simply confess it rather than make up an answer that could ultimately harm them– they could look back some day and realize that they’d been deceived by a parent or Sunday school teacher.
If your faith can’t handle tough questions, it might not be rooted very deeply, like a plant that gets torn out of the ground during a storm. Besides, God is bigger than any of our questions and His ways often defy human comprehension. (Hopefully, my personal stories help illustrate this.)
3. Children must be taught the overarching narrative of the Bible, not just bits and pieces of it. How many times do your kids come home from church with a coloring book page of Daniel and some lions, or Jonah and a whale, or Jesus riding a donkey? (Somehow, animals are always involved.)
These are all important stories, but do the children learn how the stories are all related? Do they know that every story in the Bible points to the narrative of who Jesus is and why we need Him?
Children are capable of much more than we adults give them credit for. Why should they be content with a simple craft or a single story when they can handle complex narratives? If an 8-year old child can track the characters, plots, and relationships in a series like Star Wars or Harry Potter, or if they can memorize hundreds of Pokémon names, along with details on each one’s strengths and weaknesses, they can handle more rigorous teachings on the Bible.
But didn’t I just say that knowledge alone is not enough? That to seek God individually is a key component to one’s journey of faith?
Yes, I did say that.
I took all of these swirling thoughts and hammered them into a mission statement:
For children to become rooted in Jesus, in God’s word, and in his or her identity in Christ by instilling a love of God in each child, imparting wisdom and knowledge to them, and inspiring them to be who God created them to be.
There, I had a vision for the ministry. I wrote it down and packed it for my trip.
On the plane from Narita to LAX, I took out a book that the previous children’s pastor had given my family years earlier: Spiritual Parenting by Michelle Anthony. It was my first time cracking the book open. (Yes, I confess, I have a lot of Christian books on my shelf that have yet to be read.)
I was relieved to find alignment between what Anthony, a well-respected, seasoned children’s ministry leader, had written and the vision I received through prayer and reflection. I’m glad I hadn’t read the book first.
Eleven hours later, I was in Los Angeles, jet-lagged but eager to reconnect with the beloved community Soo and I had left behind two years earlier.
Boy, was I in for a shock.
