Knowing you, Knowing me - laying the foundation for a new year with your children's group

Martyn Payne

Welcome to a new month, a new school year and a new beginning to your church's children's work. Maybe too there will be some new faces in your group this September, or perhaps you are taking on a completely new class or age band in this work.

New beginnings are always challenging. Even after years of teaching in schools and churches, I still have sleepless nights before starting all over again following the holiday period! Am I still up to this? Maybe I am getting out of touch? Do I really have the time to do the work justice? Where will my new ideas come from?

When I think like this, I take comfort in the fact that all God's great leaders throughout history felt the same when faced with the work God had called them to do. Indeed, quite a few of them - Moses, Gideon or Jeremiah, for example - would have gladly run away from the task ahead! But God hasn't made a mistake. He promises to enable those whom he calls; and in fact, just think about it, God has been working in your life for the past... (insert your chronological age!) years, to prepare you for this very moment. What's more, God loves you and me as we are, even before we start putting ideas together for that opening activity to our first session with the children; and God says to us, just as he did to Jesus at the beginning of his ministry, 'you are my beloved child and I am pleased with you' (our paraphrase - see Matthew 3:17; Luke 3:22).

So, with our nerves a little settled and our 'yes' to God reaffirmed, what next? What is your first step?

Is it to read the Bible passage for the first week and look at the session notes?

Is it to launch a major web search on the story to see if there's anything in the Barnabas ideas bank?

Is it to dream up an exciting icebreaker or devise a theme-based and energy-consuming game for the session?

Is it to concoct a topical balloon-popping quiz on the key Bible verse and put together an eye-catching collection of objects to tell the story?

Is it to assemble materials for an elaborate must-keep craft or to pick up 'idea number 19' from your book on 1000 creative ways to pray with children?

Well, at some stage you may, quite understandably, want to focus on some, if not all, of these important elements to a teaching session. But, worthy as each certainly is, might I suggest that there is something even more important that should come first - and I'm not talking about your own personal preparation in prayer, which I hope I can take as read.

No, there is something else, on which everything depends, and it is quite simply this: being prepared to put in time and effort to build deep and committed friendships with the children in your care. This relationship-building is key!

Now I know this is hardly rocket science but in the rush and hurry to use those 40 precious minutes with your group to maximum effect each week, it can be forgotten! However, unless each child in your care during that time believes that you are first and foremost interested in him or her as an individual, then all the best teaching and learning you can muster can do no more than skim the surface of their lives. Looking back over my years of working with children, I wonder how often I have been tempted to sacrifice just this, because I felt under pressure to deliver a curriculum, complete my lesson plan or meet a learning outcome! How much better to spend longer - yes, even the whole session if need be - listening and talking with the children and building relationships of trust and acceptance, rather than pressing on to try to cover umpteen Bible stories or explore no end of vital Christian doctrines.

Our inspiration and pattern for this is the life and teaching of Jesus himself, who spent time developing his friendships with those disciples close to him; who, although he did work with the crowds, also healed and blessed people as individuals; and who taught us that the Good Shepherd knows his sheep by name and takes time to search for and celebrate the return of even the most wayward of them.

All children's leaders instinctively know this, of course. Forgive me for feeling I needed to remind you (and myself) of what is at the heart of our ministry from God. As I see it, perhaps the true mark of a good children's leader is his or her willingness to sit down alongside children where they are - and indeed at their eye level - to listen more than to speak; to share their concerns and interests; to delight in what makes them laugh and agonise with them about what makes them angry or sad. These are leaders who want to find out what really matters to each child, and it is only by starting with children where they are that they as leaders have any right to open up the stories of God with them, inviting the children to enter the stories and to hear God speaking for themselves. And there's more! For, as so many of us will testify, those are the leaders who then hear God speaking to them through the voices of those very same children.

So, as you start this new academic year with your group, do not skip this relationship-building element in all the sessions ahead of you. If this foundation stone is well laid and regularly revised and renewed, then the house of your spiritual nurture of children is much more likely to stand. Taking time truly to get to know each other and relax together is vital for a mature experience of worship and learning, whatever our age - something that maybe the church in general has occasionally forgotten. It is not surprising that it is this very issue that new models of church such as Messy Church are addressing in their emphasis on 'chilling-out together' in order to create a church that can then worship and learn more meaningfully.

Although children's workers already know this, I hope it is good to be reminded, especially in an age when even in our churches product is valued over process. It is as we spend time with children like this - knowing you, knowing me - that we too are blessed in our work, and we discover more of who we are meant to be in Christ, simply because we are with those who can teach us how to enter the kingdom of God.

During the holidays I found the following quotation in a church. It is from the pen of the Victorian poet Francis Thompson. It made me smile but also reminded me, as I hope it will remind you, of why God has called us to this particular work that now lies before us in the months ahead.

Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of to-day. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite space

(from his essay on Shelley , published in the Dublin Review a year after his death in 1908)

For more about Messy Church, see the Messy Church website.

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