Inspiring Website

If you are looking for new ideas or fresh inspiration in your spiritual journey with children, please visit  the Spiritual Child Network!

Sarah, Victoria and Carolynn share beautiful, sensitive and respectful ways to shepherd children in the discovery of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They also regularly update the website with new things. 


Some recent things that have inspired me:
- the story of Joe, a special needs child, who has learned to lead his congregation in worship
- liturgy boxes
- play spaces that encourage spirituality

I regularly go to this website and have been meaning to share it with you for a long time. But better late than never!

Christmas Eve / Heiligabend 2011

In Germany, the crescendo to the holiday festivities is Christmas Eve. In Berlin on this day, called "Heiligabend" ("Holy Evening" in German), people gather with family and friends for a special meal and opening presents. And many people also attend Christmas services at church even if they aren't that interested in religion the rest of the year.


Our church plant's tradition is to have a special Christmas Brunch together and then go to a local hospital to sing Christmas carols for the patients. This year after the meal, the adults gathered together for a short time of worship and I had a special service for the children. Since the other kids in our project were away for the holidays, it was just my two kids and me.


I had saved an orange crate a couple of weeks ago with the idea of turning it into a manger. Frontier Dreams has a lovely post about growing grass for the manger that I want to try next year. However, I started too late this year, so I have to admit that I used the nesting grass we buy for our hamster instead.:) I made a simple altar in the kitchen with nativity figures, the Christ Candle and the Godly Play Christmas board and placed the manger on the floor in front of it.


My daughter immediately wanted to know why it was empty and offered to get one of her dolls to put in it.  I told her it was empty on purpose and reminded her that Advent was a time of preparing our hearts to receive God's gift of Jesus. Today we would receive God's gift new and fresh in our lives and I didn't want to put a specific "face" on that gift. 


At the same time, we would also think about what we wanted to give Jesus as a gift. I then gave each of us some modeling clay and told the kids that we would make something out of clay that we want to give Jesus. It was a very informal, sweet moment with my children and God.

Some of our gifts for Jesus.

My daughter working on her gifts for Jesus. 

This was our third year in a row to sing at the hospital and it has come to be one of my favorite parts of Christmas. The patients are usually elderly and the familiar songs bring comfort to them as they spend Christmas Eve in strange place. Each year we have seen men and women moved to tears as we sing. We take our kids along and that it is an added blessing for the patients to see happy, healthy children. 

Our singing group.

My son is old enough to read the words to the songs now!

Our family Christmas portrait.

Being Americans, my kids have to wait until Christmas Day to open their presents. They don't seem to mind even though all their friends get to open theirs on Christmas Eve. Christmas Day is then a very relaxed day of being together, playing games and eating good food. (My husband and I bake a goose each year.)


And in Germany, we get two days for Christmas.  Dec. 26 is also an official holiday and most businesses are closed as well.  Everyone spends the day with family and resting from the previous stress. It's a great tradition and I think that every country should have two days for Christmas!


We spent our second Christmas day by taking a stroll in the park, playing games, learning with my daughter to knit (she got knitting needles and a how-to book for Christmas) and watching "A Christmas Carol".

Hope the next few days are peaceful for you as we count down to 2012!

Epiphany

Last Sunday we celebrated Ephiphany with the children in our church plant.  (The official feast day is on January 6 in Germany, but we didn’t have services on this day.)  The children have, of course, heard the story of the Three Wise Men many times during Advent. The Godly Play story for Epiphany stresses that Jesus was a king like no other and allows the children to ponder the meanings of the gifts. Although gold was a fitting gift for a king, frankincense and myrrh were unusual gifts because Jesus was an unusual king. 

I also added some “wondering questions” for the children at the end to help them explore the Three Kings’ spiritual journey and revelation.  How do you think the Three Wise Men felt when they finally reached the stable where Baby Jesus lay?  Do you think they found what they had expected to find?  Which of the three gifts do you like the best and why?

For the creative phase, the children could either choose to pick out their own art materials and work freely or they could work on an “angeleitet” (instructional) art project.  Below is the project that I presented.  It is a simple piece that came to me when I was out jogging and ran past an art gallery in our neighborhood with negative space paintings.  I chose the star as a symbol of God’s revelation that often comes after a long spiritual journey.  I left it white as a metaphor for revelation being an empty or blank place in us that God fills. 

 

A 3-year-old working on her project.

To paint this project:

1. Give the children a star pattern to trace or allow them to draw their own in the center of the page. 
2. Using a ruler, have them draw straight lines wherever they choose from the outside of the star to the edge of the paper, dividing the paper into quadrants.
3. Ask the children to choose 2 “cool” colors and 2 “warm” colors (after explaining what this means) and paint the quadrants.
4. The children may then fill the quadrants however they choose either with designs or pictures.

This is from a child who chose to work freely.

A normal Godly Play worship service does not usually include Montessori motor skill exercises, but because we have 3 and 4-year-olds in our services, I like to include some to help them further think about what they have heard and to help them in a practical way. Because the Godly Play story deals with the gifts that the Wise Men brought, I had the children practice wrapping gifts. I had planned to do this before Christmas, but couldn’t come up with enough small boxes to do it.  Then I saw on Leptir that Nataša had used wooden blocks and I thought this was an excellent idea! 

The tray with the materials. 

 

Maybe these ideas will help someone next year!

Advent Club - Week 4

I’ve had the wonderful opportunity this December to co-lead an Advent Club at a local elementary school.  The theme of this year’s club is “Die Hoffnung von Weihnachten: an unsere Mitmenschen denken” (The Hope of Christmas: Thinking of Others). We have been discussing with our 1-3 graders what hope is, how we can find it in the biblical narrative of the Christmas story,  and then experimenting with how to pass it on to other people once we have it ourselves.  

As usual, we began with a Godly Play story.  If you will recall, in the first week, I told the children the entire Christmas story, emphasizing that just as God chose to send hope into the world through a small, helpless baby, hope often comes in unexpected forms.  In week two I told the story of the Good Samaritan and we stressed that giving hope to others often costs us something.  This week we wanted to get the point across that hope and learning to give hope to others is a process and usually starts with small steps. So this week I chose to tell two Godly Play stories that illustrate this beautifully, the Parable of the Mustard Seed and the Parable of the Leaven (Yeast). 

A Baby that grew up to change the world, a tiny seed that became a large tree, a little yeast that caused the entire dough to rise . . .   “Oh, I get it,” said one of the boys, “From little things come big things.”  Exactly.  I lit the Christ Candle again and reminded the children that if I blew out the flame, the physical light would be gone.  But the hope of Christmas, the hope that God will make the world a better place through His children,  is a light that does not have to go out.  We can carry this light in our hearts the whole year whereever we go.  And even though the children are small, they have an important role to play in this world. 

Here is a picture of my colleague and the children thinking over the two parables and how they relate to the Christmas story:

After the story, we planned our final project, which would be taking place the next morning.  We would be receiving a visit from a preschool in another part of Berlin and would be putting on a party for them at our school.  (This particular preschool caters to the needs of children with cardiac problems, although we did not tell our children this.) 

Because the group that we visited last week, Die Arche, had given us gift bags at the end of our visit to them, we got the idea to make gift bags for the preschoolers.  

Here are some pictures of our children filling the bags, tying the bows and painting decorative tags:

The next day, the preschoolers arrived at 10 am at our school.  Our kids got to miss some of their regular classes in order to help put on the party.  Our kids wanted to do a game room and a craft room again, very similar to what we had done at Die Arche last week.

We began the party by sitting in a circle and introducing ourselves.  The preschoolers led us in some Christmas songs, and then we ate Christmas goodies together.

The group dynamic was very different this week because the preschool children were younger than our kids. The preschoolers were far more interested in our facilities and the different toys in the rooms than in playing organized games!  Also, some of our older boys were rowdier than usual, perhaps because they were the big guys on the block this time.  The craft time went well and the older girls in our group did a great job of helping the preschoolers. 

Here you see one of the preschoolers absorbed in a new toy:

Here are some photos of our craft time. The woman in the picture is a teacher from the visiting kindergarten.

Because the preschoolers could only stay for a short time, I chose a craft that the kids could finish in a short amount of time.  It is called Stacking Trees and I found it through the Living Montessori Now website. Here is a child displaying her “matryoschka style” Christmas tree:  

When I asked our children later about how the experience had been, they answered that it had been easier to mix with the preschool children and play with them, because they were younger.  The drawback had been that the party had been too short and the preschoolers had to leave just as everyone was getting comfortable with one another. 

This party was another small step in learning how to be an agent of hope for others.  Like babies that take small steps before they can walk, our children are learning to find their balance in interacting with complete strangers.  The experiences with these children during Advent 2010 are priceless and I wouldn’t trade them for anything!  May the small seeds planted in their hearts flourish and may God use their lives to shine light into dark places. 

On becoming a children's pastor

I didn't set out to become a children's pastor.  In fact, for many years, I wasn't sure if I even liked children or wanted to have any of them myself.  (Blame that one on a nightmare summer job as a daycare worker at the YMCA in my hometown!) But as in the cases of Georgia O'Keefe and Julia Child, I needed a bit more life experience behind me to find my calling.

After majoring in Russian and Foreign Service in college, I started on the path to becoming a career church-planter.  And I always worked mainly with teenagers and college students,  in the U.S. and Russia as well as in Germany.  Teenagers were great.  I could have deep philosophical conversations with them and then throw great parties with them.  They kept me young in a positive way.

But children's ministry never appealed to me for two reasons.  The main thing is that many of the children's pastors I know are über-extroverted people who ooze fun and love the thought of a roomful of 50 screaming little ones. I always thought you had to be wild and crazy and that just isn't me.  I have a strong tendency to be introverted.  I love to sit and think and be creative.  I much prefer reading a book or yoga to constantly jumping around and being in motion.

The other thing is that children's ministry is usually the last priority in church-planting.  Depending on where you are, it is much easier to start with singles.  Children are messy.  They are loud and require space of their own to move around in.  This complicates things for church-planters.  In fact, one of the most successful church plants in Berlin to date didn't have a children's ministry for the first 3 years.

That all changed during our second plant in Berlin after the birth of my second child.  We joined a team with a large number of children and there was no one to pastor them.  One of the men on the team took the job for a while, but he had to quit because he was needed to be the team administrator.  After a summer of being frustrated with the kids having only 'childcare' during church services, and realizing that if someone didn't provide a meaningful spiritual experience for them, they were going to be very resentful down the road, my dear friend Sarah took the job.  Sarah was single, a former school teacher and a lover of children.  I agreed to help her and together we laid a framework for children's ministry.  Sarah eventually had to quit, too, because she was needed for another job as well . . .

And then, I stepped up to the plate. One of the things that has always helped me as a church-planter is that I take risks and try new things. (Madonna and I have this in common that we reinvent ourselves in every phase of life.) It's part of how God made me.  So I took on the job and discovered that I really enjoy working with young children.  I love how their minds are curious and hungry to learn.  I love that they use all of the learning styles - visual, auditory and kinesthetic - to soak up and process information about their world.  I began to learn from them as well to see God and the world in a fresh way.

Besides on-the-job training, I began to research and learn from various sources about how best to teach and work with children ages 3-8.  Being involved in an Eltern Initiativ (Parent-run) Preschool here in Berlin also helped me to learn a great deal.  We tried some innovative things during that second church plant, which are topics for later blog entries. And in preparing for our third church plant, I 'stumbled' upon Godly Play . . .