Category Archives: Children
Losing Weight, Feeding Children
This is my church member and friend Dave Hamre. He needs to lose weight.
No, I’m not being rude. He really does. He says so himself.
But Dave is making a virtue of it. He has linked his personal slimming target to an effort to raise money for a charity called Every Child, which works for the welfare of children around the world. They keep families together, they protect children, and they ensure that children’s voices are heard.
For every pound in weight that Dave loses, he is going to donate a pound in currency to Every Child. However, he is also asking if others would like to donate to his cause. If you would like to, then please go to his Just Giving page and contribute.
Dave will appreciate any support you can offer. So will needy and hungry children around the world.
The Questions Children Ask
This video clip from the BBC comedy show Outnumbered has gone viral in the last year or two:
My reaction on watching it again this week is that many of young Ben’s questions to the vicar were all too reminiscent of the attitudes many adults have shown this last week when thumping their fists in the air to celebrate the killing of Osama bin Laden. Why not sort everything out with a quick bit of violence? These attitudes start young.
Probably the best question in the clip is from Karen, when she asks the vicar whether Jesus could have found another way apart from the Cross of saving people.
On Friday, I went into our children’s school to be quizzed by Year 1 and Year 2 children. It was our son’s class. On Thursday evening at the meal table, he told me the class had prepared sixteen questions to ask me. The little so-and-so wouldn’t give me a heads-up on any of them! His teacher was very pleased with that the next day.
Some of the questions were routine: do you marry people? What is a christening about? What does your font look like? Do you pray every day? But some were harder, and especially to give an accurate, succinct answer in understandable language. Why did you want to become a minister? Well, actually I didn’t …
After we got through the sixteen questions, the teacher invited a few additional spontaneous questions from the floor. That yielded one I could only answer concisely, and as briefly as I could in the limited span before playtime: do you believe all the stories in the Bible? A ‘yes’, combined with an explanation of needing to treat different literature differently, pointing to the different styles of books in the classroom.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, while I had questions about baptisms and weddings, I had none about funerals. The questions were about what interested and affected them.
But the honesty and directness were refreshing, and a world away from the spite and hate behind many such debates among adults here on the Internet.
Children And Communion
I was taking the bread along a row of communicants yesterday, when I arrived at three-year-old Jake. As is my habit with children, I knelt down to be nearer his height. As is also my habit, I dispensed the formal liturgical words such as, “The body of Christ keep you in eternal life,” and said something like this as I tore off a piece of bread and offered it to him: “Eat this to remember that Jesus died for you and loves you.”
He looked at me and said, “No thank you, I’ve just had my biscuit.”
Priceless. And certainly better than my own seven-year-old daughter, who took one look at the roll on the paten and said, “Is it Kingsmill?” Interesting that Kingsmill Bread’s latest campaign on its home page is Kingsmill Confessions …
Introducing Development Issues To Children
My six-year-old son Mark has an ambition in life. At one stage, he wanted to be a famous author. At other times, he has quite fancied being a professional footballer, helping Tottenham Hotspur thrash Arsenal.
But his abiding ambition is even more noble. He wants ‘to save Africa’. In his simple analysis, he wants to open supermarkets across Africa, so that people can buy enough food to live. When faced with the question, “Where will they get the money?” he has a simple reply: “I’ll build money shops as well.”
Sorted. Now take over 10 and 11 Downing Street, Mark. You can do it.
I thought I’d encourage his thinking about world issues. You can’t start them too young when they already care about the poor, can you? So Mark and I set about this afternoon going around the websites of various Christian relief and development agencies, in search of suitable resources to stimulate his interest.
We gathered only slightly more than zilch.
World Vision, nothing. Christian Aid, zero. Methodist Relief and Development Fund, nada. Compassion, you can sponsor a child but I couldn’t find anything for children who are interested in their projects. Nil points.
Only TEAR Fund had anything, and it wasn’t much. It took some devious searching to find a page of ‘children’s resources’, and it hadn’t been updated since 23rd June. All of these organisations had plenty for teenagers. Apparently, you only care when you get into the church youth group.
So come on, Christian relief and development charities, where is your material to inspire primary age children? Mark and Rebekah’s school supports a charity working in Uganda, Chilli Children. Is it that you have resources but they are buried under centuries of rubble on your sites? Or don’t you think six-year-olds know that Jesus cares about the poor?
Maybe someone reading this can point me to what I’ve missed, because Mark and I would dearly like to find some good Christian educational material for primary-age children. It must be there, but where is it?
Help!
UPDATE: following a conversation on Facebook, I have now been made aware that the Methodist Relief and Development Fund (possibly the smallest of the agencies I mentioned, except for Chilli Children) has a sister site, World AIMS. I found this site earlier, but was put off by the specific reference to Methodist schools (many of which are fee-paying). However, if you click on ‘Resources’, you can find various items of educational material, classified according to Key Stage. (For non-Brits reading this, the Key Stages are used in the British education system, and roughly correspond as follows: KS1 is ages 5 to 7; KS2, ages 7 to 11; KS3, ages 11 to 14; KS4, ages 14 to 16.) It could be easier to find, and the name of the website put me off the scent.
Another Memorable Birthday
My ‘big’ birthdays – the ones ending in zeros – always seem to be memorable. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not.
My thirtieth birthday fell on a Sunday during my ministerial training in Manchester. My fellow student John Wiltshire and his wife Judy invited me to their flat for a birthday dinner. I still remember the delicacy they served up: beans on toast. Not that I was grumbling on a student grant.
When the time came for me to head back to the hall of residence, John asked if I wanted to call a cab. Being an experienced city dweller, I declined, thinking I knew the safe ways back. No, actually, it was because I was too mean to pay out for one.
Big mistake. I was mugged on the way by a teenage thug. So much for being city-wise. I recall another student, Martyn Coe, who phoned my bank and got my credit card cancelled, and another, Stuart Wild, a former solicitor, who came to the police station with me.
My fortieth was much happier. It was the day I introduced my girlfriend Debbie to my family. My sister and brother-in-law had booked a table at a French restaurant, and my parents joined us. When Debbie came to order her steak, the waitress asked her how she wanted it cooked. In a memorable reply she said, “Cremated.” It was, she explained, the only way she could ever be sure of getting meat well done.
A year and a quarter later, Debbie was my lovely wife, and my family have had to grow accustomed to her frequent comparisons between spades and shovels.
So to my fiftieth, on Thursday just gone. Debbie and the children had prepared a bag-full of surprises for me, all planned with loving detail. Perhaps most special was that both kids had made their own birthday cards for me. Price doesn’t matter: love does.
After taking the monkeys to school, Debbie and I decided we would drive somewhere for breakfast. Turning the key in the ignition, we heard a strange noise. Had it not been a dry, sunny day, I would have sworn it was the sound of the rear window wiper. But even an absent-minded person like me doesn’t usually manage that.
At a garage later, we discovered it was the exhaust. I couldn’t complain: it was the original exhaust, and the car is eleven years old. Nevertheless, I hadn’t bargained on spending my birthday morning at ATS.
That evening, we were due to go out for a tapas meal. Our favourite babysitter was ready to come, but at tea-time, Mark started complaining that he felt sick.
“Don’t be silly,” I said, “It’s just that you woke up early. You’re tired.”
Wrong, Dad. The bug in his stomach announced its presence in spectacular fashion. No meal out, but fish and chips later from the chippie. Debbie said we should have stuck a candle in my cod and taken a photo.
But who cares? Having become a parent at a later age than most, it’s a small thing to miss a restaurant to look after a child.
Unless You Become Like Children
Isn’t that one of Jesus’ hardest sayings? Here is a wonderful prayer called ‘The Grow Down Prayer’ that takes up that theme and helps us to pray this through. It is available from the link I have given in PowerPoint format. With the supplied pictures, it could be a useful worship resource.
The Enduring Power Of Martin Luther King
Today, I took two assemblies in a school- one for the infants (ages 4-7) and one for the juniors (7-11). I was beginning a new theme for this term: heroes. Those of us on the assembly team from local churches had decided to eschew the word ‘saints’ in favour of something more understandable.
Not remembering that next Monday is the American public holiday in his honour I chose to speak about Martin Luther King. In preparation, I found this clip of the entire ‘I have a dream’ speech on YouTube:
I downloaded this, using the free utility YouTube Downloader. As you’ll see, it’s seventeen minutes long, so then I edited it in Windows Live Movie Maker to begin at the ‘I have a dream’ passage (at 12:29, if you’re interested).
After an introduction talking about issues of fairness based on real-life examples (Rosa Parks and tbe bus seat, water fountains, different schools, slavery in the case of the juniors and so on), I showed about one and a half minutes to the infants – up to the point where King says he wants hi four little children judged not on the colour of their skin but their character. With the juniors, I played a few seconds more – to the point where he envisions black and white children playing together and treating one another as sisters and brothers.
And that was when the Interesting Thing happened: when I paused the video for the juniors, several of them broke out in spontaneous applause. How wonderful it was to see the style and substance of King’s oratory make a connection with children in a different country, forty-seven years later.
So don’t tell me preaching is dead. We can legitimately talk about style, presentation and all the rest. But when we have a message to share and can do so with passion, surely the Holy Spirit still uses it to connect. Sure, King’s crusade was about a theme that would command common assent generally today, and when I went through the examples of ‘unfairness’ the juniors roared back their disapproval of what happened. But there is something here.
And it’s also about King’s story generally. Why did I choose King? Partly for this reason. Our chidren have been introduced to one or two famous figures at school via books recently. One was Florence Nightingale. Another was Mary Seacole. As a result, we have borrowed other books in the series from the library and read them with our two. One night I read a simple biography of King to Mark for his bedtime story. Granted, it omitted things like King’s alleged infidelities, but the impact on Mark was fascinating. The next day he told us he had changed his mind about what he wanted to do with his life. Previously he has wanted to be an English teacher or an author.
“Now I want to be a minister,” he said, “And tell people not to hate each other.”
He is only five. But I was only eight when King was murdered. There is real power here.
Mark
Our son Mark is five years old today. He was born as a ‘Monday to Firday, 9 to 5′ baby – that is, by elective Caesarean Section after Debbie had a rough final trimester in the pregnancy. (Seventeen months earlier, Rebekah had been an emergency Caesarean.) Debbie went into the hospital at seven in the morning while I took Rebekah to her childminder. But the planned trip to theatre at nine never happened, due to crises. Eventually, Mark was born at 2:21 pm.
A scheduled date for August had bothered me. It always would have been tight for him to stay in the womb until September, but I was bothered about him being one of the youngest in his school classes. (The school year begins in September in the UK.) I need not have worried, he has turned out to be the brightest child in his class by a distance. Amazingly, he is also one of the tallest. And had he been a September birth and had to wait until next month to begin school, I don’t know how he would have coped. I’m a proud Dad, in case you hadn’t noticed.
Having no brothers myself, I had always wanted to have a son, to keep the family name going. I know, it’s a guy thing. Not that I love our daughter any less – far from it, I feel a similar special father-daughter bond with her, compared with that my Dad has always had with my sister. And as our firstborn, she holds a special place in my heart. Besides, she is the most beautiful girl in the world!
Mark has certainly inherited my love of all things academic. He devours books, and has even started writing his own. Yesterday, he started writing his own Bible! He gets fixated on one thing and won’t let go. I call it tenacity and perseverance, Debbie calls it an obsession. It will stand him in good stead as he learns more.
He does have a redhead’s temper, though, and combined with the stocky build (that’s not from me) he’s developed in recent months, I don’t think he’ll have the trouble with bullies that I suffered for many years. I won’t be sorry if that’s the case, although he’ll need to improve his social skills in terms of conflict resolution as he gets older!
For some months now, he has compiled a list of girlfriends – especially one girl called Lily, but there are about thirty names on the list. They go on the list whether they consent or not – they just have to be girls he likes. One day he will learn that one woman is (more than) enough! But yesterday on the beach, Rebekah made friends with a five-year-old called Carla. Mark joined in, chatting the hind legs of a donkey. When Carla had to say goodbye, she came up to him and planter two smackers on his face. He looked so happy!
So – happy birthday, son!
Winning
Rebekah playing the camel derby
One joy of our holiday in Great Yarmouth has been the children’s discovery of the camel derby attraction on the Britannia Pier. Not a real one, as held in Kenya and other places, but a mechanical-electrical game where contestants thrown balls into holes to propel their camels along the track.
Rebekah takes great delight in it, win or lose. It’s all good fun. She competes to the best of her ability, and accepts the verdict, wherever she comes in the race. She has even been known to give her winning token away to her little brother. Although the first time she won, she was delighted to use that token in order to gain the prize of a jigsaw that had to be made up and coloured in.
Mark is totally different. If he wins, he is ecstatic. So when he beat about fifteen others one evening, he nearly went into orbit. But if he loses, he isn’t just disappointed. He goes into the hugest strops imaginable. Old cliches about redheads and tempers come into play. He is inconsolable. Winning is everything to him. For Rebekah, playing the game is the be all and end all.
So who is right? The Brit in me sides with Rebekah. Play the game and enjoy it, but don’t be crushed by defeat. However, that can be just a coping mechanism to stave off the pain of losing. I guess (going by stereotypes) that if I were American or Australian, I might be more likely to side with Mark. The competitive spirit means the world.
And maybe we’re too British like this in the church. We can play the game and not worry about how we are doing. We rationalise away failure with slogans about faithfulness. (Not that faithfulness itself should be denigrated.) We dislike certain emphases on ‘success’ that rely heavily on manipulation, and I have preached and written against such things before. But sometimes we do so in such a way that we forget the New Testament injunction to ‘run in such a way as to win the prize’. Granted, it’s a different kind of prize, but sometimes the passion isn’t there, and we aren’t devastated when things haven’t gone as they should have done, according to the Gospel. Could we do with a bit more passion and devastation in the church?
Baptism Sermon: Anticipating The Future
Many of us will have heard all sorts of stories about baptism. A friend of mine, when he was an Anglican curate, really did baptise the wrong end of a baby! Me, I just worry about the baby grabbing the radio microphone – or, worse, my glasses. Or there’s the story of the minister telling the congregation before a baptism, “The water isn’t anything special or magic, it’s the same water we’ll use later for making the coffee.”
But what, in all seriousness, shall we say about baptism today on Holly’s big day? Early in the baptismal service, I read two passages from the New Testament. The second was from Acts chapter 2. I prefaced it with these words:
‘On the day of Pentecost, Peter preached the Gospel of Christ’s resurrection. Those who heard the message asked what they should do. Peter told them:’ (Methodist Worship Book, p89)
And then I read what he said:
‘Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.’ (Acts 2:38-39)
I want to say this is all about anticipating the future. We anticipate future events. For example, later in the year we shall be conscious that Christmas is coming, and will make our plans. We shall ask people what presents they would like, buy special food, make arrangements to see family and so on – all because we are anticipating a future event. We want to get ready.
When Peter preaches ‘the Gospel of Christ’s resurrection’ he’s using that to make people think of the future. The resurrection of Jesus is a sign of the future, when God will raise everyone from the dead and he will reign unopposed over all creation. And what Peter calls his hearers to do is anticipate that future. In what ways?
Repent
Last Sunday morning I asked people how good their French was. It’s similar with the word ‘repent’. ‘Re’ means ‘again’ and ‘pent’ is from penser, ‘to think’ – like our word ‘pensive’. So to repent is to think again, and that’s what the New Testament Greek word translated here means, too. When Peter calls the crowd to repent, he’s telling them ‘think again’ – about the way you live your life, and change where needed.
I used to preach at a church that was on the ‘wrong’ side of a dual carriageway from the direction in which I lived. Every time I took a service there, I drove beyond it on my side of the road, to the next traffic light junction, where drivers were permitted to do a u-turn from the filter lane.
Repentance is like a u-turn. When we encounter Jesus, he makes us think again about the way we live our lives, and we do a u-turn in our lifestyle.
What does that have to do with anticipating the future? I think the point is this: when God raises us all from the dead, judges us and reigns without opposition, we need to be in line with his will. We need to start now – by doing a u-turn.
Be Baptized
Last month, every class from Broomfield Primary School came here during the week to look at our building and ask me questions. One of the things I showed them was the font. They were intrigued by our small, portable font, in contrast to the large stone font at St Mary’s.
We talked about what it meant. They knew we put water in the font, but not necessarily why. So I asked them what we use water for in everyday life. Some said for drinking, and I could have made something of that answer. But I concentrated on those who said that water was for cleaning ourselves. I tried to explain that the water in baptism is a symbol of God cleaning us from sin.
That’s what the symbolism of pouring water on Holly has been about today. It has been to show that God wants to clean us from every sin. Have you ever felt dirty inside after doing something wrong? God wants to remove that from us.
And it’s done, says Peter, ‘in the name of Jesus’, because these gifts come to us from God through Jesus, and especially his death on the Cross, where he died for our sins, in our place. That’s why we need faith in Jesus – to receive this cleansing from all our sins that are a barrier between ourselves and God.
What does this have to do with the future? It means that at the Last Judgment, God will – amazingly –deliver a verdict not that we are guilty but that we are in the right with him, all through Jesus.
And that leads onto the third element:
Forgiveness
I guess everybody knows that the central message of the Christian faith is about forgiveness. But what is forgiveness? Some people think it is pretending that a bad event didn’t happen. Others think it means excusing people’s actions, by explaining away their conduct. Others think it is about suppressing our anger when we have been wronged.
I don’t think it’s any of these things. True forgiveness looks the person in the wrong squarely in the eye, knowing where the blame lies, not excusing their actions, nor pretending we are not angry. But then, despite laying the blame where it rightly belongs, the one who forgives refuses to pass sentence on the wrongdoer.
And that is what God does for us in Jesus. He knows our actions are wrong, and he doesn’t pretend otherwise. He knows we are blameworthy, but he refuses to sentence us to what we deserve, which is life and eternity without him. He discards the sentence and invites us into his family, which we do but handing our lives over to him.
Again, this is about anticipating the future. Trust your life to Jesus Christ and follow him, and you need have no fear of God’s verdict on you, either now or in the future. He knows where we are in the wrong, but he refuses to pass sentence. In fact, the Greek word used for ‘forgive’ in the New Testament means ‘to set free’. We are like prisoners, expecting to be sentenced for our crimes. But instead, the Judge sets us free by forgiving us.
Our call, then, is to receive that by giving ourselves over to Jesus Christ, and then to set others free as we forgive what they have done to us.
The Holy Spirit
So far we’ve had two commands – ‘repent’ and ‘be baptized’, plus one promise ‘the forgiveness of sins’. 2-1 to commands, then. But finally, we have an equaliser from promises: all who repent, are baptized and receive the forgiveness of sins receive God’s own presence in their lives – the Holy Spirit. Why?
At the secondary school we attended in north London, my sister and I had an English teacher who worshipped at a high Anglican church in central London. My sister once asked him why he went there. “I’m just a terrible sinner and I need to feel forgiven,” he replied.
“Don’t you feel that God can change you?” my sister enquired.
“No,” he said.
But the Good News is that change is possible. It isn’t just that God forgives us and cleanses us. As the saying goes, God loves us just as we are, but he loves us too much to leave us as we are.
And that’s why Peter promises the Holy Spirit to those who become disciples of Jesus. So that not only may God forgive us in Jesus Christ, he may also start the long work of making us be more like Jesus Christ. In that sense, God is anticipating us for heaven. The Holy Spirit fits us for the life of God’s kingdom, where everything will conform to his will.
Conclusion
Two thoughts as I close. Firstly, I don’t want our regular churchgoers here to think this doesn’t apply to any of them. Remember that Peter addressed these words to devout religious Jews in Jerusalem for a major feast. Sometimes, those who have been involved in religion all their lives need to hear the call to conversion as much as anybody.
Secondly, what does any of this have to do with one-year-old Holly? She can’t repent, she can’t understand her baptism yet as washing her clean of sin, she can’t appreciate the forgiveness of sins, let alone the power of the Holy Spirit to live a new life.
But today, Ruth and Mike make the promises for her, on the basis of their own faith. They do so, because they aspire to Holly making this kind of commitment for herself, when she is old enough to do so. Today, we promise to pray and prepare so that becoming a disciple of Jesus one day seems the most natural thing in the world for Holly.
