What About My Family?

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I was honored this month to have an article published in this month’s March/April 2010 Issue of K! MagazineK! Magazine is one of the premiere magazines for people working in children’s ministry, and I am a big fan of the magazine.

The March/April issue focuses on family ministry, the idea that parents and the church working together can accomplish more in the spiritual development of kids than either working alone.  When I found out what the issue was going to be about, I knew that the issue of children of divorce needed to be divorced in this issue, so I offered to write an article called “What About My Family?”  The article offers some advice to churches on how to make sure that children of divorce are not left out in the cold in the name of “family ministry.”  The article also, for the first time, shares some findings from our online Divorce Survey.  Here is an excerpt from the beginning of the article:

Family ministry is all the buzz in the world of children’s ministry these days. It seems as though the whole children’s ministry world is painting the world orange! Deuteronomy 6 has become the “go to” verse in children’s ministry, and for good reason. There is much to be learned there. God clearly calls the family to be the primary vessel for imparting and teaching spiritual truth to our kids.

Like many things, though, it’s easy to take a good thing too far. In the lingo of Orange where red is the family and yellow is the church, there is a temptation to lean too far towards the red side (family) in order to compensate for years of yellow driven ministry. When churches do this, they run the risk of losing an ever growing segment of our population and a dwindling portion of our churches – children from divorced homes and single parent families. When our focus is simply on “helping parents to disciple their kids,” what are we saying to kids whose parents have either abandoned them or are in no emotional or spiritual state to disciple them? In those situations, we leave these kids asking and wondering:

WHAT ABOUT MY FAMILY?

There was one unfortunate printing error in the print version of the magazine.  Between pages 85 and 86, a couple of lines were inadvertently left out.  That portion of the article includes a quote from one of the respondents to our Divorce Survey related to the church’s response to children of divorce, and I wanted to include the entire quote here:

Another woman, when asked if she felt judged at church gave an even more haunting response:

“Not at the church I attended. They didn’t get involved in people’s lives. You didn’t really know anyone except your own friends or school mates.”

The entire article will be published here on Divorce Ministry 4 Kids in coming months, but I encourage you to go out and get this article of K! Magazine if you work with kids.