Matt Markins: Making Child Disciples in a Secular Culture

One of our biggest initiatives coming into this year has to do with children and youth. We really feel that the timing is right to develop Missional Community for and among children. Partly, this has to do with the rate and complexity with which young people are encountering challenges in their lives. Like Harry Potter, the real threat of war is upon them, and they will not have the luxury of growing up before they have to face real life problems, including battles for spiritual life-and-death and for their their core humanity. The second part of this is that we see a real spiritual moment for children to create a different reality without their imaginations limited by the world we older people have come to accept.

I ran across this podcast by Mark Makins in an email and the title grabbed me. Mark is the CEO of Awana — a childrens club and curriculum organization focused on enhancing children’s ministry in churches and supplementing this at home. Awana is used in more than a hundred countries around the world and thousands of churches in the US. His take on child discipleship may help inform us as we work to develop our own ways of developing and supporting children and youth:

Feel free to post your reactions in the comments below. I have a few I’ll share below. As our conversation evolves, we’ll be starting a workshop on this topic with a live meet-up in the early part of this year.

My reactions:

• Post-Christendom: Markins’ take on post-Christendom is just a little off. Mostly, he doesn’t take into account how much “secular culture” is claiming the Christendom is responsible for many of the problems of our day and age. He relates the current trend as mostly indifference — moving beyond Christianity after it has blessed and built our entire civilization. What he misses is that the current culture is actually calling the Church and the Christian West to accountability. When that call to accountability meets resistance in Christendom, it foments to hostility. One problem with Markins’ story is how he would explain the peace and stability of non-Christian civilizations. One may claim Christian civilizations are more equitable and advanced, but that fails to dis-entangle the heritage of colonialism and the relative advantage it provided for the West — all under the oversight of the Church. Unless we come to repent deeply with actual actions, and do this work of disentanglement with colonialism, our children will have little they can say if they get into the real marketplace of ideas in the larger culture. I now know many young adults who were discipled exactly as Markins outlines, but who where unprepared for the confrontation of Christendom and its mixed legacy, and who totally lost their faith.
• Belong, Believe, Become is a useful framework on the three core needs of humans and the rough sequence that is typical. However, there are numerous atypical stories and human needs are relatively more complex (see Maslow’s Hierarchy). Some humans need to “belong” because human community meets multiple needs including physiological, safety, belonging, and esteem needs. It’s fine to lump these all into “belong” so long as we design community that pays attention to the full spectrum, especially when talking about children in times when many of these needs may not be met by family other other communities. Likewise, “believe” can include both the cognitive and aesthetic needs and “become” can include self-actualization and transcendence.
• “You can’t build the bubble.” Markins rightly points out that it is no longer possible to use sheltering as the strategy to disciple kids. While some separation for the world is advisable, as some point we must move “from protection to preparation”. This is critical. More than just showing youth that the Gospel is relevant, we must show it is powerful to heal humanity and impact the world for the better.
• Resilience is based on relationships to loving, caring adults. We need to hear this, since this is both the most critical issue and the sole strategy for success. The situation of youth is largely caused by a lack of parenting and engagement by adults who are lost in their own quest for identity and actualization. Without solving this, it is unlikely that their is any solution to the situation of youth.