The Sound of Forehands Clapping

My family currently attends two small groups: one that we host and one at an elders house.  We have been doing the one at our house for some time (I am horrible with dates, but let’s say 6 months.)  The setup has been pretty much the same from the beginning.  People arrive, we talk, transition into eating, send the kids off to play or watch a movie while the adults spend time working through Scripture and then praying for each other.

When we started going to the group at my elders house (oh let’s say 2 months ago) I asked him what we’d do with the kids.  He said they could play in the backroom or maybe they could play on the other side of the large living room.  I opted for the living for, well, I am not really sure why.  Similar setup as our group: people arrive, we talk and eat some kind of dessert, we tell the kids that we’re going to start the discussion now and so they need to play quite and then we work through Scripture and close with prayer.

The kids adjusted fairly quickly to the idea of playing quietly off to the side.  Seldom are they very disruptive (often they are slightly disruptive though!) and those concerns are usually covered when our pastor inevitably includes thanksgiving for the childrens presence during prayer.

We kept our kids present during this groups study time for no other reason then “why not?” but in retrospect I see some good benefits for my kids:

1) they get to witness the example of mom and dad and other adults discussing the Scriptures and praying for each other.

2) they get to practice self-control and God knows that I know that self-control takes practice…

3) as the years tick by it won’t be too long till I’ll be saying “Hey Liberty I’d like you to sit on the couch for tonights discussion because it’s on what you were asking me earlier this week.” or “Myra do you want to share about that situation so we can pray for it?”  Hopefully being more physically present in the group will make such transitions easier.

Out of that experience and hearing how they do “church services” at a friends local church, we’ve decided it makes the most since for us to stop having our kiddos go to sunday school and start staying during the praying, preaching and singing.  The reasons for this are pretty similar to the list above.

1) they get to witness the example of mom and dad and other adults paying close attention to the teaching of the Scriptures, praying as a local church and singing songs to God.

2) they get to practice self-control (the more the marrier!)

3) I am hoping that as time goes on they’ll start paying a little attention and then some more and then some more to the sermon, the singing and the praying.  I’ve love to see them as they are learning to read to start reading the lyrics and singing along.  I’d love to be able to discuss the teaching each Sunday as a whole family on the way home, or during lunch.

To encourage this I am thinking that each week before Sunday it’d be good to include some family teaching on the upcoming passage and/or memorization of part of it.  I am hoping that maybe, just maybe, when the passage is being preached one or more of the kids will tug at our sleeves and whisper “he’s talking about what we talked about” or “I know that part of the Bible”.

Any how those are just my thoughts.  If you have kids, what do you do with them on Sunday or during a small group?  If your family was a part of a local church when you were growing up how did they handle this?

This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Local Church, Parenting, Preaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.