Page 6 - CBFK SUMMER Newsletter 2020 flip

What I’m Learning About
Children’s Ministry
During Our Pandemic
by Amanda Standiford, Minister of Children and Families, Lex- ington Avenue Baptist Church, Danville
I have only been in the church building a handful of times since this pandemic began. My visits have been brief, solitary, and to the point — I’m usually there to grab something I need for a Zoom call or a children’s sermon. The empty building isn’t creepy, exactly, but it does have a cavernous feeling sit- ting there unused.
And yet it’s a reminder of what I’m learning again and again during this strange moment in our history: the church is not the building, and it doesn’t need a building or even an in-per- son gathering to be real. The church is alive and lives in our relationship to God and to one another.
On some level, I think I’ve long understood the work of min- istry to be fostering that connection: crafting experiences and spaces and lessons that invite people to come close to God and close to each other. But in this season, I have seen and felt the need for that work in deeper ways than I ever have before.
The diaspora we’re living in is inconvenient. The technolo- gy we’re learning to use to connect with each other is often glitchy. Most of us are becoming Zoom experts and DIY vid- eo editors whether we want to or not. But I’m also really lean- ing into the beauty of this strange moment. Never before have I had kids and families so eager to be together in whatever
ways we can manage. Never before has time felt so abundant and gen- erous.
In fact, we may be freer right now to connect with one another than we’ve ever been.
And there is SO MUCH good connection to celebrate.
We do Godly Play via Zoom now, which means pets and younger siblings and interruptions. But it also means that the stories of the people of God are making their way into our homes and our real lives.
Our young families have delivered 100 yard signs, designed by the kids, to our church’s senior adult households. I have dozens of pictures of delightful (socially distanced) porch vis- its.
Our older kids are creating videos of themselves telling Bible stories. They’re wonderful and inventive, and so many adults in our church generously affirm the kids’ work on Facebook.
I’ve been continually digging for new ways for the kids to preach the children’s sermon in this season — this week, be- cause we had time and because we could, we attempted a Zoom drama, complete with changing backdrops and a few costumes.
A seventh grader reads a story to our preschoolers via Zoom every Wednesday night.
Our young adults and senior adults each gather weekly via video just to shoot the breeze — to have the conversations that might have happened in the hallway between Sunday School and worship, but without the rushing to the next thing.
Next week, a dozen adults, some of whom never set foot in the children’s hallway, will post signs in their windows with clues to a scavenger hunt the kids can do with their parents from their cars.
So yes, this season is hard. It can be lonely (I’m more grateful for my peer group and shared ideas than ever). It’s exhausting to plan and to deliver bags of materials and to run into meta- phorical walls and literal Zoom lag.
But in so many important ways, this is also church at its best — innovating, connecting, and figuring it out together, and, most days at least, I’m celebrating that.