Second Church Steps

Butterfly Days The Children's Circle Preschool year end rituals are among the things that I have missed the most in these difficult days of sheltering at home.   One of my favorites involves butterflies and waiting.   Classrooms of children watch for butterflies to open –in their classroom!   It is a momentous occasion.   We pray with the teachers that the butterflies will emerge.   We watch and wait with the impatient children.   The children learn words of waiting, hope, and anticipation to go with those feelings. The butterfly is also a metaphor for the impending end of the school year, when the children will go forth to new places, new people, and new experiences…taking their early learning and stories of becoming with them. Then, it struck me that these are butterfly days , and how we talk about them with and NEAR our children matters. Words matter, and stories are memory forming. Parents, we are all aware, acutely aware, of the diff...

Parental confession:   my children did not grow up on Mr. Rogers.   They just didn’t fall into that group. They were more Barney and Sesame Street.   This bothered me for a VERY long time.   It bothered me like, how “we ought to be going to church, but we aren’t” bothers some other parents. Is watching Mr. Rogers the same as going to church?   No.   Words matter and Fred Rogers was carefully and fully inclusive; he never spoke of “God” or “sacraments,” but his neighborhood was a study in formation, children’s radical formation where all are welcome, feelings are named, and children are respected. I think it is Kingdom work to facilitate those same things being found at church.   No, not just at Sunday School – which is usually story telling focused and appropriation tasked.   I mean, at church: At coffee hour where there are tables for their size among the adult-sized tables.   At worship where there are “movement breaks” and we...

Five Minute Family Devotion Just as our children look for eggs at Easter, so we need to train them to look for Easter. Easter is a season; it is the 50 “great days” before Ascension, when Jesus goes to heaven. These are the “walking around and seeing Jesus near us” times. Sunday we heard from Pastor Chris Henry, “this is the beginning.” Perhaps you might want to begin your season of Easter Dinners, during the Great 50 Days, by having children select an egg and read the note inside and complete the sentence. There are two kinds of prompts in these eggs. There are prayer prompts and a God sighting prompt. OPTION: Your children can have fun filling their Great 50 Days eggs! I am thankful for…I am hoping for…I am praying for…I am asking for…I see God… I am thankful for… I am thankful for… I am thankful for… I am thankful for… I am thankful for… I am hoping for… I am hoping for… I am hoping for… I am hoping for… I am hoping for… I am praying for… I am praying for… I am p...

The church often “side-steps” Good Friday with children.   I understand the impulse, but children are so acutely aware of the danger and violence of this world viscerally before verbally. School violence, images on screens, video games, flowers dying in winter… It is often unspoken but ultimately unavoidable.   The Erickson Institute states that “it is, in fact, highly damaging for a child to experience trauma before they have the language skills to create a narrative of their experience.” [i] Therefore, I feel it is important to give children language to talk about the things they see, hear, and notice around them… Especially faith moments like Holy Week and Good Friday. How would you do that with the story of Jesus’ crucifixion?   Taking my cue from Mr. Rogers, we can “look to the helpers.” [ii]   Jesus died, but he was not alone. His friends were there.   His mother was there.   God was there.   Jesus must have been so scared. His friends...

Our heroes always, almost always, turn out to have feet of clay.   They are not impervious titans of moral, ethical, and philosophical perfection.   Our heroes are always, almost always, men and women who are human and flawed and frail.   The Genesis story tells us that God formed the first man and the first woman out of the “dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7, NRSV). We are dust, and the Ash Wednesday liturgy reminds us that we shall return to dust (based on Genesis 3:19). What stands between dust and dust?   There is the breath of God, breathed into molded ground to give it life.   There is the water of baptism, poured onto this molded ground to form it into a life of service.   This watered ground becomes moldable mud; a clay for the Potter’s hand to fit us to our ministry and mission in the world. At no point, do we become other than what we are made of and made by.   We are clay footed servants of the living God. Lent is a time when the ...

I am on the cusp of VBS, and my thoughts have turned to food.  Well, it is only natural since this year's Vacation Bible School  is about planting, gardening, seeds, and harvesting.    The Gravely Tractor and Wagon Have you heard of the “new” food approach called Farm to Table?  That is where the consumer/cook is mindful that the food on our plate is a product of the food grown on the farm.  When I was growing up, that was called, “Granddaddy’s Garden.”  My grandfather was an accountant, but in middle Tennessee that didn’t mean he couldn’t “hoe a row” in the backyard.  My grandfather’s garden was kind of “farm sized.”  It was a good acre or so and fed his household, his daughters’, and quite a few neighbors’ as well.  The string beans wound their way up the corn stalks, and there were some spots on those apples which would still burst with flavor.  Add into this mix that my grandfather had advanced glaucoma and could not s...

Be a FIG and DIG This is one of those days when you think you are doing one thing, and you end up doing another.  I thought I was going to be writing about “BALANCE,” you know—“to everything there is a season.”  Instead, I have spent the morning doing some study about fig trees in the Bible.  Yes,  I said “fig trees,” those things that cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness and signs of  the Hebrew People’s abundance and plenty during King Solomon’s time (Genesis 3:7 and 1 Kings 4:25).  The stories most often retold about “figs” in the Bible are the account of Jesus cursing the tree that does not bear fruit, and the parable of the gardener bartering one more year during which he will work diligently to make a fig tree produce fruit.  I looked at 44 instances of “figs” which are medicine, food, abundance, sweet, shade giving and a long lived symbol of peace,  and  I found the parable of summer.  How did I miss this figgy morsel?  It...

Covenants are important and life giving moments in our lives as Christians.  They are moments of promise and faith.  They are moments of action and attention.  They  are important moments that have a unique beginning. These promises are not chores to check off or dates circled on a calendar; they are holy promises that begin with God.  They all begin with God choosing us and choosing to be in a relationship with us.  In return we are loved, claimed, and wanted.  This gives us the freedom to respond with truth, kindness, caring, and service to others. We learn about truth when we read God's book of hope and good news.  We care for God's people both our friends, neighbors and ourselves by participating in  Sunday School, Choir School, or VBS. We serve others by living as a people of promise. How do we live as  promise people?  We do it by remembering that we are HOLY PROMISE People  and lived the truth that so is our neigh...