Bearing Gifts and Receiving Burdens: A Theological Approach to Ministry with Children
2012, 19 pp
When adults talk down to, or over the heads of, children, when adults assume children are
neither capable of understanding nor even interested in knowing Bible stories, or of participating
in worship or in the political life and ministry of an ecclesial community, adults rob children of
the very community they need to learn what it means to be the church. And this, of course, is
what happens in churches, in communities, and in families everyday. This failure to take
children seriously is simultaneously to fail to receive the gift, and to bear the burden, of the
child’s presence. Moreover, insofar as the church likewise fails to receive the gift and bear the
burden that is the vulnerability of one another in community, made most acutely present in and
through the young, the church fails, in fact, to be the church. In what follows, I suggest that
fundamental to what it means to “be” church is becoming a community of people whose lives are
formed in the virtues such that receiving the gift and bearing the burden of children becomes a
habit, something woven into the very fabric – into the very DNA – of what it means to be the
body of Christ.
Type | |
Genre | Personal Theory/Thesis |
Expression | General Writing/Recording |
Topic | Faith Formation, Children's Ministry, Spirituality at Childhood |
Audience | Children, Leaders |
Language | English |
Publisher | Sopher Press |
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