I spend a lot of time teaching adults about cultural shifts. We cannot be an effective Church without being culturally proficient, so when longtime church people try to “bring in young families” or wonder “why people don’t come to church anymore” I realize we have a lot more work to do.
Sometimes I show slides of a 1950s first grade classroom and a 2018 first grade classroom and ask people to point out the differences. Even during the course of the past few months, our children’s classrooms are making dramatic shifts. Did we ever dream that this rhyme would be displayed in a child’s classroom:
Lockdown, Lockdown, Lock the door.
Shut the lights off. Say no more.
Go behind the desk and hide. Wait until it’s safe inside.
Lockdown, Lockdown. It’s all done.
Now it’s time to have some fun!
There really is an exclamation point at the end of the poem. And it hangs on the wall of a kindergarten classroom in the United States of America.
I don’t really have anything else to say about this except that we are called to be The Church for the people who go to kindergarten in this school and for their parents and for the human beings with mental illness who prompt new security measures. How are we doing?
Image from the Twitter feed of Georgie Cohen of Somerville, MA. This will be her child’s classroom when she begins kindergarten this fall.
A Church for Starving Artists 
>>we are called to be The Church for the people who go to kindergarten in this school and for their parents and for the human beings with mental illness who prompt new security measures.<<
All of us need to figure out how we are doing this. Just had a similar conversation with pastor and elder this week. Our church community does not look like the traditional church of 1950s because we no longer live in the 1950s. We are four distinct congregations with a myriad of ministries in the community. Not everyone who steps on the grounds comes to a traditional worship service. Nor should they for us to present Christ Jesus.
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