Worship

Family Ministry Reconsidered (part II)

Welcome back.  Our journey through part I of this article caused us to question our understanding of the word, “family”, and to understand family as both the individual family that is made up of a variety of combinations of people and our local church family.  Both of these understandings of family become vehicles where the faith can be passed down to the next generation.

Before we continue, please allow me to identify the elephant in the room.  In each of our churches we work hard to educate our children and youth to know the Bible and to be good people.  Many of us have committed our lives to teaching the Bible to our kids; and this is good.  However, more often than not, it seems that we get sidetracked in thinking that teaching the Bible and learning the details of the stories is our goal.  Perhaps this has occurred because we have bought into a “school” model that tells us that learning information or data is of ultimate importance. While this may in part be true in our schools, in our churches we desire much more.

Family Ministry Reconsidered

The buzz word today is “family” ministry. Incorporating the word into the common language of the church has become routine and ordinary.  One can’t talk about ministry without talking about family ministry. The word can be found in magazines, curriculum, college classrooms, and even in ministry titles. I can remember about twelve or so years ago changing my title from Children’s Pastor to Pastor to Families with Children.  I wanted to be on the cutting edge of this new emphasis that recognized ministry to the whole family is much more glamorous than ministry to just children.  I believe my heart was in the right place and my intentions were to try to meet the needs of the entire family while still focusing on the children I had been called to serve.  I suppose it was a good start, but my understanding of what it meant to minister to the family was certainly lacking.  I think the same may be true today when many hear the phrase “family” ministry.

“Rosetta Stone, My Lawn Mower Manual, & Congregational Worship”

Last Sunday our family was out of town so we visited a church.  It is a church in the same denomination as the congregation that I pastor.  It is located in the same state.  We are even part of the same district.  But, as with anything we experience for the first time, there were some things that were very different between our churches.

I noticed the size difference.  The church we visited on Sunday is probably on the verge of what we’d call a “mega church” or as a friend of mine describes it, a “Wal-Mart church:  they’re a big box”.  They offer a wide variety of opportunities and ministries and appear to do them quite well. Our church is more of a “Cheers” church:  where everybody knows your name.  We don’t offer nearly as many ministries but there is a high level of intimacy between the people who worship at our church.  We visited the big church for the first time and nobody knew it except for us.  That wouldn’t be possible in our church.

Exploring Worship as Lex Orandi – Lex Credendi

One of the most dangerous popular notions of worship is that worship is simply one of the activities we do. We identify it as one of the activities of the church. Or, we see it in pragmatic terms as a key generator of energy or outreach, shaping our practice of worship to facilitate these outcomes. In this article I want to outline an understanding of worship as central to the life and understanding of the worshipping community.

The pastoral leader declares the priority of God’s story, placing our lives and self-understanding in the context of God’s work and Kingdom. But that declaration is also a call to formation, calling the church to live as people and a community within that story. The role of the pastor-prophet is never merely informative, but is to embed God’s story in the life of the community such that it forms the life of those within the community. One of the most important means for a pastoral leader to accomplish that is through the worship of the community.