Children in House Churches
been reading a book online by Wolfgang Simson of Dawn Ministries. His book is called Houses that Change the World which can be found halfway down the page on Dawn Ministry'sResource Centre
This is from p. 70
Children and Housechurches
Since housechurches are spiritual families, children are a natural and important part of the housechurch, just as they are a source of constant joy - and embarrassment - in a natural family. Children are needed to humble us with their questions, break up our endless ”adult” discussions, bring us constantly down to earth from our pious clouds, and act as natural evangelists and bridgebuilders. They also help us to prove the fruits of the spirit - patience, for example -, and will serve as heaven-sent spies to spot any trace of religious superstition and hypocrisy in us in an instant. Children have a ministry which is at least as important to us as we as adults have a ministry to them. They are, in short, as important to housechurches as they are to families. Any couple that just had a baby needs to answer the question: Are we now born into the life of our baby, or is the baby born into our life?
If we see a housechurch as a program-driven event with discussion-topics, tasks, objectives and an agenda to achieve (Jesus never taught us that), we might feel that children only ”disturb the adults,” and therefore need to be separated and put into separate children's groups with their own programmes to keep them entertained and educated. A special time for children can very well be a common exception, but not the rule. Otherwise children will very quickly be alienated from early ages on from church. Church, again, is not a meeting, it is a way of life. If we have children, they are part of our life, and therefore our
This is from p. 70
Children and Housechurches
Since housechurches are spiritual families, children are a natural and important part of the housechurch, just as they are a source of constant joy - and embarrassment - in a natural family. Children are needed to humble us with their questions, break up our endless ”adult” discussions, bring us constantly down to earth from our pious clouds, and act as natural evangelists and bridgebuilders. They also help us to prove the fruits of the spirit - patience, for example -, and will serve as heaven-sent spies to spot any trace of religious superstition and hypocrisy in us in an instant. Children have a ministry which is at least as important to us as we as adults have a ministry to them. They are, in short, as important to housechurches as they are to families. Any couple that just had a baby needs to answer the question: Are we now born into the life of our baby, or is the baby born into our life?
If we see a housechurch as a program-driven event with discussion-topics, tasks, objectives and an agenda to achieve (Jesus never taught us that), we might feel that children only ”disturb the adults,” and therefore need to be separated and put into separate children's groups with their own programmes to keep them entertained and educated. A special time for children can very well be a common exception, but not the rule. Otherwise children will very quickly be alienated from early ages on from church. Church, again, is not a meeting, it is a way of life. If we have children, they are part of our life, and therefore our
Comments
let me know when you find some wisdom about it we have gone around in circles on this one many times :)
We and our children have to design and build church to support
our (we
and our children's) life together before
God.
Here's what this looks like in our home church. We've found that there
are a
few activities that we can easily do together and there are a few activities
where our interests (that is, the kids' interests and the adults')
diverge so
widely that we need to just respect each other and not bother trying
to
understand it. Examples? Of the former, singing. Our kids and our adults
can
happily sing together for quite a while, so long as we adults can accept
substantial variations in the emotional direction of things (happy
to quiet to
laughing, etc.).
Another example: we can also pray together IF we don't require prayer
to be
done in a specifically grown-up way. Our kids seem to like their prayers
to be
more rote than our adults do. They also like them to be, um, to the
point. If
our adults subject our kids to long complex prayers we have usually
stopped
praying _with_ them and started praying by ourselves while they wait
for us to
finish.
But there are some things where our kids and our adults have just had
to
accept each other without trying to do it together. We enjoy each other
in
very different ways, for instance. Our adults enjoy each other by sitting
around and talking, an activity that our kids simply cannot comprehend.
Our adults sit and talk about issues and our lives and what
God is doing or what we want God to do.
Our kids just shake their heads. They don't even believe that doing
that is an
activity at all! Our kids would much rather do something exciting like
play
with each other. Maybe it's that our adults are "reality" driven and
our kids
are "fantasy" driven. I don't know. I do know that in our home church
we've
had to agree to disagree about that.
We've also come to do a lot of activities together that we do in different
ways. An example of this is our meals together.
Mostly our adults do the food preparation and our kids do the space
preparation, setting and clearing. Our adults have insisted that we
get to
make the food. But our kids have insisted that they define the menu
("What's
that stuff?
Chicken cordon what? Yuk! _I'm_ not eatin' it!")
(Notice an implication of this last point: our adults and our kids "insist
on"
things in very different ways. Our adults try to make their points
by trying
to convince others that they are right. Our kids try to make their
points in a
somewhat less rationalistic way.