Archive for the ‘Children and Parenting’ Category

The Church Can Live Better Than Just A Well Paying Job

Sunday, 27th February 2011
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Children and Parenting

I’ve been paying more attention lately to our language around work and vocation. I’m realizing patterns that I think are embedded pretty deep within us and serve to rule our lifelong actions rendering us unable to truly live the way we were intended to live. If the church is to stand apart and model an alternative lifestyle to the society as a whole, then I wonder how much of our dreams should be caught up in the rat race of “work.” Our economy rules; all dreams must exist and function within the regular flow of how our economy flows.

The regular successful white Canadian life now looks like extra-curricular activities, school, well-paying job, family, land and house, vacations, retirement and then death. If you experience that life, then you are successful, should be happy and are expected to pass this kind of ‘freedom’ and ‘opportunity’ onto your kids so they can also have this fulfilling life. Everything we do exists in and around how money exchanges hands, and we have no clue what it looks like for it not to be this way. From allowances to RRSP’s our lives are dictated by how much money we have, are going to have or don’t have. The first half of our lives only purpose is to lead us and prepare us for a well-paying and fulfilling career and the second half of our lives is using that career to our advantage so we can get everything we want and die well-intentioned and happy.

I’m not content having my entire life climaxing at a career. In fact, when I die, I don’t want people to know me by my job at all. I don’t want my career to define my life and give me my identity. Even if it leads to all the good things that jobs to provide, I still don’t want my values and what I think are good things to be defined by job. Even if my job is good and I love it (which I do). I wonder if Christians should be about something drastically different. Instead of living for work, as the saying goes, we work so we can live. It’s simply a means to an end. A necessary evil that we should do as little as possible of so we can actually experience and contribute to all that life has to offer. I’m not talking at all about those that love their job and those that hate it. I’m not talking about being irresponsible and slacking off and doing as little as possible. I’m talking about reshaping the way we raise our children and how they see vocation. Not setting them up with values so they have the appropriate canned response to “what do you want to be when you grow up?” But giving them a platform to see participating in a global economy as a small part of who they are as a human and unleashing them to discover and imagine who they are and how they can participate with God in his reconciling work in the world.

Everyone says they just want their kids to be happy. But then in the same breath we go and define what happiness should look like for them. It is obviously going to university, working a prestigious job, having cool shit and having more kids and repeating the cycle. Obviously. How can one be happy if they don’t finish their high school? Work as a server at a restaurant? Not have a luxurious vehicle? Not travel to exotic places? I don’t think we really want our kids to be happy, I think we want them to look like us, because anything else is terrifying and way too risky and for some other family or community. So we work our jobs, make lots of money, because that’s just what we do. Then we pass those values onto our kids, because that’s just what you do.

In being downtown I’m starting to get a better grasp on what living looks like. There are a number of people downtown that are living out their lives and excited about everything they are doing in the world. There is Shawn who’s mission in life is to help people see how beautiful the world is and reshape people’s habits to become more based on geographical location rather than politics. He doesn’t really care about his “job” but his entire life is consumed by his mission, sometimes he makes cash and other times he doesn’t. His entire life is consumed by one central idea and money and jobs and the economy are simply either in the way or become tools to help him accomplish what he has set out to do. Ask him the question, “So what do you do?” And where everyone else spouts off what field their job is in, he probably couldn’t tell you. His job does not define him. Christians can learn by this kind of ordering of his life. We too have a mission in life. We too should be entirely consumed by the idea that God has saved the world and is restoring all of creation to himself. That is where identity lies. That is what should drive us to participate in the economy or not.

We need to infuse proper values into our communities that give our children an identity that runs deeper than what society offers them. If we just want them to look like everyone else and fit in, then let’s just keep on doing what we are doing and we’ll just raise more robots that tow society’s lie of identity and fullness. If we want kids who actually have something worthwhile to live for (and will probably end up dirt poor) then I suggest we start taking some cues from our downtown friends and those that have been able to model an alternative way to the normal way of doing things.

Downloading (Stealing?) Rather Than Channel Surfing

Thursday, 2nd December 2010
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Children and Parenting

I’m tired of the onslaught of advertising myself,  I can’t even imagine what we’ve done to our children at this point by exposing their fragile minds to the brilliance of the marketing system who are out to win them over.  We have lost.  I don’t know one family who has successfully guarded their children against the flow of consumerism, celebrity culture and death-dealing values that the empire around us is constantly bombarding us with.

I’m just going to go off here for a second on a random thought that came to mind once while thinking about this.  I’d like some push-back because it will probably be necessary.

I enjoy good stories.  I enjoy films.  I enjoy TV shows.  I enjoy the radio.  I hate commercials.  I despise that these stories can’t be told without some corporate agenda behind them to monetize the stories into millions of dollars.  I despise that this kind of art can’t happen without needing to monetize it.  There is something about CBC Radio that is freeing when you never hear an ad.  I think TV needs to go in this direction.  The problem is radio is free, TV is generally owned and operated by corporations who are profiting obsessively over it.  Partly as a response, we have refused cable into our house.  We don’t have channels, so I can’t watch TV, which means I don’t have to worry about commercials.   We’ve ended up downloading our movies and tv shows through different means and using Boxee to play it for us on our home TV.

I realize there is plenty of arguments for cutting out television all together.  I know there is subliminal messaging and product placement.  I know that one option is to throw out the box in the living room all together.  I’m just not there yet.  I enjoy the artform.  I enjoy the stories too much to throw them out.  So at this point the house decision is to keep the television but cut out the cable, which pretty much cuts out advertising for us at this point.  However with the approaching new technology of streaming internet shows its only a matter of times before commercials are unavoidable with that technology as well.

So at this point I’ve settled with downloading my media, most cases the commercials have been removed already.  I think one of the things I want my kids to learn right off the get go would be how to obtain their media through other sources rather than watching TV and being subjected to whatever happens to be on at that specific time.  So my thought is that I will probably teach them to steal before I teach them to surf.  Instead of learning how to turn on a TV and just click through whatever they want.  I’ll teach them how to downloads torrents, use Usenet, use the forums where people post these shows online for free and commercial free.  I’ll just call it stealing since I know that seems to be the term for it.  So until we can eradicate unnecessary empty box time completely, we might as well not being paying for it and not being subjected to the worst parts about it (the commercials).

I know what your thinking.  This is illegal.  Well, maybe, but its quite complicated and all signs from what I can tell says that its not necessarily illegal, maybe you can prove me wrong?  I know what else your thinking, what about all the people in the industry you are putting out of work.  Well, its true, the corporate way of doing movies and TV shows will probably become less and less likely if less and less people watch the ads.  I’m OK with that though.  I’d rather see smaller communities produce more creative and indie flicks anyway, we don’t need these massive industries just to entertain us.

We should probably be using these alternative ways to use the internet when we can.  Join the pirates if you will.  Kester Brewin wrote a great series of posts on pirates and what they do and how we need more Christian pirates.  I don’t really have any interest in prolonging the inevitable death of massive media corporations who control most of the content we watch anyway, so while we try to decipher what is worth keeping and what isn’t, we might as well not be supporting them in the meantime.  That’s it.  That’s all I got right now, just a random thought I had while watching Shop Till you Drop, which is unrelated, but I like to let my mind wander.

Why Children’s Ministry Hasn’t Been Working

Thursday, 22nd July 2010
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Children and Parenting
This might come as a redundant post to where many people have already landed.  I think though I’ve finally placed my finger on why children’s ministry at my church and the other churches I’ve worked with have never felt complete.  They have always felt unthoughtful, typical and forced.  It’s the same how I see a lot of parenting.  I’ll be careful with this, because of course I am not a parent.  However, you can’t help but notice the harmful ways we have raised our kids over the last fifty years.  Everything from what they eat, watch, participate in, how we talk to them and how we don’t spend time with them.  It’s all pretty messed up.  So I guess it’s fair to say I’ve felt weary about raising children in general, not just in our church communities.  However, I’ll focus on children and church for this post.

For the last four years at the story, we have been looking for the right way to raise our kids in the church.  Of course, we have come up against a lot of problems.  Some of the problems being:

1. Children get 45 minutes a week in a separate room to learn child-appropriate lessons, build relationships with other children and experience the Sunday gathering at their level.  Only 45 minutes with their own programming and a few hours if you include the singing and the potluck.

2. Every parent parents differently at home.  Every teacher teaches differently at their  schools.  Because we only get 45 minutes, there is no good way  to build a discipline or rhythm into the day or the children for how things are done or what is expected.  So we are forced to plan things by the lowest common denominator to work with the most amount of kids.  This usually means that plenty of the unique kids with special needs, or that don’t like classrooms or that are disciplined differently don’t get the right kind of love or attention.

3. The curriculum in most books and in most packages that we have seen or purchased is complete crap.  It teaches bad theology and cleans up the stories and almost always ceases to place the stories in the proper context of the entire narrative of the scriptures.  The only option we could come up with was to write our own, which of course we have no time to do that, so I just stay constantly frustrated with what we are teaching.  It’s like playing a preacher’s video over and over again because we don’t have time to prepare our own sermon, and the preacher sucks.  We would never do it for our adults, but we do it for our kids all the time.

For the longest time, we’ve really put not much a lot of consideration into the kids and what was happening.  We would try and find suitable curriculum and rotate different parents through the teaching schedule and just let it happen.  We did make some changes, and I think these changes were very positive for our community.

1. We put in a toddler area into the middle of the seating for Sunday morning.  Parents could stay in the service with their children played or coloured.  It was a great way to integrate everyone and meet them where they were at.  Sure the kids got loud, but we’ve never not had that happen, so it was a good compromise.

2. During the singing, we gave all the kids instruments of some sort, usually percusison.  Over the past year we’ve watched as kids who were normally disruptive, running around and moping because of the singing, move to the front, grab and instrument and sing along.  The kids are learning our songs and worship is now more centered around them.  It’s amazing how much kids learn beautiful songs when you just keep singing them over and over again.  When kids are involved in singing, it’s easy for a community to follow suit.

However, once the kids move off into the other room and their own curriculum starts happening, our creative direction sort of ends.  We don’t really know what to do.  And I think I’ve figured out what our problem is.

I feel like our problem is that we have focused all of our attention on what the kids are learning and what curriculum to use or create.  Instead, what we should be focusing on is how we treat our kids, how we are teaching them, how we are sharing the stories of our faith with them and working together as a community to co-operate in raising our kids as a community.  I’m really not interested in having the pressure of parents for 45 minutes a week to infuse in them as many Christians character traits as possible.  What I am interested in is working alongside of the community and the children to build relationships with them, grow with them in a healthy way and all learn through our growth.  We’ve been trying now to just teach them what we know, teach them what is right and use the right curriculum so that they are engaged and interested throughout the entire 45 minutes and come out “learning something.”  Instead, we should be spending our time focusing on families (pun intended, but not really) and how they interact with each other and interact with the community at large.

This means we need to be spending time helping the teachers and the parents be better teachers and parents.  This means that we have to start creating a culture that we have reached a consensus on in how we treat people, treat families and treat children.  This means that we have to work together, especially parents, to figure out boundaries, rituals and agree on the stories that are important to pass down.  This isn’t about curriculum anymore.  It’s about an entire lifestyle that we are creating for our children so that they are meaningfully integrated into our community, not just another program that we organize so they are entertained.  Curriculum will always have very little impact on our children.  The environment that we raise them in, the relationships that they build and the experiences that they have with each other and with the community has a whole will be what defines their relationship to the church as they grow up.

We’ve been reading Godly Play recently, and I just finished reading Honey, I Wrecked the Kids and have been dabbling in some Montessori philosophy of education.  This I feel is just the first layer of unpacking everything we need to learn as a community and how to grow with kids.  But for the first time, I feel like we are on the right track.  It feels good.

Kids, The Elderly and Why We Have it Backwards

Monday, 23rd November 2009
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Children and Parenting

After being in Florida for the past week, and watching as parents everywhere lavish their kids with every experience and material good, necessary and unnecessary, I can’t help but think that our culture has really missed something.

While we were in South Africa, one of the main things that we noticed about their world was the elderly and how they were treated. They were the head of the household, the kids served them and they called the shots. The kids on the had a lot of responsibility. One of the key things we picked up on was during dinner time.   Here in North America, when we eat, we serve the kids first. We make sure they have everything they need, give them their drinks and then we will eat once they are all taken care of. In Africa, the kids served the adults, the oldest going first. Sometimes the kids would only get a little bit to eat because there wasn’t enough. Then they ate in the kitchen while the adults ate and then they cleaned up when it was over.

Kids nowadays start their lives being treated like royalty. The younger you are the more focus is given to you. We want to make sure our kids have the best childhood ever. We want them to love us because we were amazing parents. So we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars lavishing them with everything possible. We treat them like princesses and princes.  We spend extra money to make sure they have the best education, the best teachers, the best clothing, the best extra-curricular activities, the best about everything.  This is how we all feel right?  We would think that we are bad parents if we didn’t give them the absolute best.

Then of course as they get older, they become less special. It’s these same children who have to pay their own way through school. It’s these same children who end up in nursing homes while their children are off chasing their dreams that they were told were all theirs; dreams of riches, fame, being special, being happy (you know all the same characteristics that these same princess have that we think its OK for them to want to be one).

I realized then that this is sort of the same problem as Andy Crouch spoke about with the differences between practices and purchases. Just like purchases start off great and slowly go down on the satisfaction scale, so does our lives.  It starts off great as children and slowly gets worse and less.  Maybe we should slowly increase and evolve the time, energy and focus towards our kids over time rather than treat them now like they don’t have the rest of their lives ahead of them.

For some reason, we treat childhood as if it’s something to be adored and sought after. We are seeing kids taking way longer to grow up and middle aged people wishing they were younger. Growing old is feared and being young is sought. I can’t seem to think we have it backwards. Why can’t the best days always be in front of us all the time. How come the best days now always seem to be behind us? It doesn’t lead us to a very happy and fulfilling life if everyday we wake up knowing that it wasn’t going to be as good as the last. If we can however shift our focus back to how we used to view things I think that it might be a lot healthier for us. Everyday we wake up knowing that life is getting even better and more exciting.

This isn’t all to say we should love and treat our kids well. Just be realistic about it. Their best days are ahead of them. Prepare them for those days rather than try to compete with them. Shape your families so that as you get older, you become more respected. Make it exciting to get older. Teach your kids how to make the best out of their lives so they can live purposeful and meaningful lives the older they get. The deeper they get into purchasing for pleasure and needing great experiences to be entertained the more they are going to want to stay children so they can be fed that kind of life.  Rather, discipline them now, teach them to practice, teach them what it is really life to live a life of freedom and their lives will continually get better and better.  There is no freedom in being given everything instantly without having to earn it.  True freedom, as we know, comes through years of patience, practice and discipline.  All we are doing now is allowing our kids to experience life without truly experiencing freedom.  I don’t know about you, but I want our children to truly be free to live lives that they were meant to live.

Disney Princesses: Is It Really Normal That All Little Girls to Want to Be One?

Sunday, 22nd November 2009
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Children and Parenting

Phil Nellis posted this image on Google Reader today.  Funny, Rachel and I spent the entire dinner talking about this exact issue.  Do we really want our kids to want to become like these princesses or have them as their role models?  We didn’t even get into their stories, we just focused on how shallow and materialistic they were here at Disney World.  This image though picks apart a bit more about these princesses and of course leaves us with the question; do we really want our kids growing up with these girls as their role models?  I’ve always been told that it’s normal for all little girls to want to be a princess.  These of course are the princesses that they want to be like.  Really?  Is this that normal?  Don’t even get me started on the teen pop stars.

disney_princesses