Are you desperate for children’s church leaders?
Maybe you should ask Bubba. Men with calloused hands can teach children’s church too.
According to the U.S. Government, 1/3 of the children in the U.S. do not have fathers active in their lives. In some minority communities the nearly half of the children live without a father’s influence. [source: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/fatherhood_report_6.13.12_final.pdf].
This amounts to a crisis. I’m not talking about a national, political or even racial crisis. I am talking about a crisis in the lives of these kids. To a small child, a dad is a hero, a star, a role model extraordinaire. Children learn their concept of masculinity from their fathers. Absent the presence of a good father, those concepts will develop from some other source. Too often that source is a bad one.
Even worse, in my opinion, is that a father’s absence/neglect/abuse really, really messes with a person’s concept of God. God has chosen to reveal himself to us as our “Father”. I have seen fatherless kids (and adults) struggle with the concept God as “Father”. I don’t often quote President Barack Obama, but I will on this subject. From the experience of his own childhood, he says that there is a “hole a man leaves when he abandons his responsibility to his children.”
Maybe, just maybe, we need to think outside the box a little bit. Many of the kids in your children’s church are desperate for the example and love of kind, godly man. So that brings us back to Bubba. Bubba may not be you stereotypical children’s minister. He may have perm-a-dirt under his fingernails or be graying at the temples. Perhaps he has never taught a children’s class in his life. That’s okay.
Can he pray? Can he read the Bible story? Can he sit at the short table, pass out crayons, and color with the kids? Can he brag on a little girl’s coloring page or listen to a little boy’s tall tale? Odds are that if Bubba becomes a part of your children’s ministry he will fall in love with those children and they will fall in love with him.
As I said a few paragraphs up, I have seen fatherless people struggle with the concept of God as Father, but more importantly, I have also seen many fatherless kids blossom under the attention of a godly man.
So, give the men in your church a chance. Do something unconventional in children’s ministry. In the process you may just find someone to imitate the greatest Father of them all.
"Father of the fatherless…is God in his holy habitation." Psalms 68:5 ESV
"Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world." - James 1:27 ESV
