May 12, 2022

Parents and guardians of kids at Galileo Church—

Grace and peace to you, from God our Parent, inventor of families and babies and toddlers and kids, and our Lord Jesus Christ, who famously insisted that the littlest of children come to him.

We’re touching base about our kids’ ministry. You probably know that we are reinventing it right now, as we haven’t had any kids’ ministry for over 2 years (!!) due to the pandemic. You might not know that, in our whole church’s history, we have never had this many interested and active kids! And we especially haven’t had this many young kids! So all of this is brand new territory for our church. We couldn’t be happier to be reinventing our kids’ ministry to best help the faith formation of all of these kids.

One of our virtues at Galileo Church is the holy practice of screwin’ up and gettin’ better. We try not to shy away from admitting when we make a swing and a miss. It happens to the best of us! (Even Jesus, it turns out. Mark 7:24-30.) So, we are not shy about confessing a couple of hiccups we’ve noticed about how we’re doing so far in this new thing we haven’t done before. First, so far G-Kids (3:30 on Sunday afternoons) has been pretty free-form, without much deliberate faith formation. And maybe that’s been right for these first few weeks, to let kids get to know one another and get to know me and the volunteers who are helping me, and just readjust to being together in real life. But we’re thinking now is the time to start introducing some communal prayer and storytime.

Second, we worry that we might have set an expectation that kids are supposed to be in the kids’ corral during worship. That wasn’t ever what we meant—the kids’ corral (which used to be called the “toddler corral”) is for kids who are not yet ready to be fully in worship, so that they can still be present in worship with us. But we’re thinking we maybe miscommunicated. We’re so sorry if we’ve made you feel like your kids are exiled to that corner, or not welcome in the main part of the barn.

In order to build on what we’ve learned, we’re reminding ourselves and each other of G-Kids’ mission: G-Kids facilitates Christian faith formation for our church’s kids, as our first evangelistic priority. It aims to do that in five ways:

Identity formation in safe space
Practicing the practice of worship
Practicing communal prayer: kids sharing “wows” (highs) and “pows” (lows), with prayer
Biblical-theological literacy
Friendship with other church kids and adults

We’re going to try a few new things to better embody these goals. First, we’ll try a new schedule for the G-Kids hour before worship. Like this:

3:30 to 3:45: unstructured arrival and playtime.
3:45 to 4:00: circle up and share “wows” and “pows,” and pray.
4:00 to 4:20: split into two groups. One group will go outside with volunteers; the other will stay inside with Remi for a story and activity.
[5 minutes to switch]
4:25 to 4:45: The groups do the opposite. And then it’s time for worship!

You might have noticed: that schedule is gonna require more volunteers! Two adults outside with kids, plus one inside with me, equals four adults, three of whom are volunteers. Long story short: if you have kids in G-Kids, your shoulder is probably about to get tapped to help us out every so often. <3

Second, the next curriculum in G-Kids will have the goal of orienting kids for worship: helping them know what to expect in worship, and why we do what we do in there. One week we’ll talk about the welcome; one week we’ll talk about the body prayer; we’ll talk about singing; scripture reading; sermon; benediction. The hope is that, having learned about that piece of liturgy in G-Kids, the kids will be listening for it in worship. We’re hoping this will help them be more interested in what happens in worship.

Third, we’re going to expand the kids’ corral to help kids experience worship as worship. We’re adding a speaker in there so that you and your kids can better hear what’s happening in worship. We’ll also expand its physical footprint, so that it bubbles out into the worship space. We’ll call that “worship learners” space, for kids who are interested in worship but still need the gentle restraint of the corral (and maybe proximity to the alternate activities in the corral). To be clear: this is to help kids learn how to be in worship, not how to sit in worship. Worship for Galileo Church is not about sitting still and quiet and keeping your hands to yourself. Every week we say that everyone has permission to do something else if what we’re doing in worship isn’t working for them. That includes access to the sensory library, retreat to the far corners of the kids’ corral/annex/quiet room, use of coloring books and marker boards, even walking freely about the space. We extend that permission to kids, too. Everybody is fully welcome to use the space in the way need it to help draw their own hearts nearer to the heart of God. We are not training kids to be quiet and unnoticed. Rather, we want them to be more in worship, more singing and dancing and even crying and noisy, more themselves, more with us!

We don’t have specific instructions from Jesus about a lot of things we try to discern, but for our welcome of kids, we absolutely do. “Let the little children come to me,” he said, “and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs” (Matthew 19:14). We just want to let the little children come. Jesus didn’t ask them to change, to be less like little children: less loud, less messy, less... well, childlike. Just like at Galileo Church, we don’t ask anybody to be less themselves: less gay, less flamboyant, less neurodiverse, less noisy, less grouchy, less sciency, less cynical... less anything. We bring our whole selves here. Kids, too! It would just break our hearts if Galileo Church raised up another generation of spiritual refugees, for whom church is “boring, irrelevant, useless, or even painful”—or even kids who can’t imagine being Christian anywhere besides our church. We’re trying to do better than the churches that raised us, y’know?

We hope you can see how hard we’re trying, church. We don’t know how to do this yet. We’re eager to learn, with God’s help. Thank you so much for reading this far. We’ll follow up this letter with a phone call from an SCT member, to ask you: how can Galileo Church be the best church for your children’s faith formation?

Grace and peace,

Remi

G-Kids and Faith Formation