Sometimes what gets me thinking about children’s ministry comes completely out of the blue. I was recently reading the autobiography of the theologian and missionary Lesslie Newbigin. Before becoming the Bishop of Madras, Newbigin was a curate in Scotland, where he worked for three years with the superintendent of a Sunday School. His description of his experience of this time with children really got me thinking.
He wrote that ‘it [was] good for a theological student to learn how to talk to children and for a future missionary to learn how to cope with what seemed like continuous failure.’ (Page 32, Unfinished Agenda.)
The words ‘continuous failure’ resonated with me for a few days after I had read them. Mostly because there are times when I can completely identify with them and partly because I know that some brilliant children’s workers in my church have felt the same way too. A few weeks later, I stumbled across these words by a Canadian musician called Spencer Krug on making music. He said:
‘Trying to express pure ideas through song-writing somehow belittles them. The medium just isn’t sophisticated enough to be a true reflection of the ‘soul’. It always ends up being cracked and distorted. So to make music that does justice to its subject is an almost impossible task, for me, and I basically always fail in some way. I think most artists do, and that’s why they keep making art.‘
I think he’s on to something here. I put the important bit in italics. If we take the idea that our task – the art of sharing God’s story of redemption and renewal with children – is impossible, and we will fail in some way, it might help a bit. To do children’s ministry that does complete justice to God is impossible. By ourselves we’ll never express the fullness of who God is, we only can see him in a mirror, dimly, (to quote Paul in his first letter to the Church in Corinth). Earlier in the letter, Paul says that he ‘planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow.’ Whenever we take part in helping others believe we have to believe that God is there too, helping children grow, and filling in the gaps that we will undoubtedly make.
I’d like to end with the final part of a poem called ‘The Long View‘. It was attributed to the Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, who was martyred in 1980. These words have frequently helped me remember what I’m about.
Taking the long view
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation
in realising that. This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well. It may be incomplete,
but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
Tim Broadbent is Children’s and Youth Minister, St Mary’s Islington.