Church @Home is “The New Normal”
So what does that mean when you have small children?
We began 2020 with ambitious hopes and expectations. Our church had been experiencing a time of growth on Sunday mornings, and we were planning to add a fourth service to accommodate the growth. And then Coronavirus put everything on hold.
Instead of building new teams to run hospitality, ushers, greeters, security, children’s ministry, and everything else for a fourth service, we quickly adjusted to provide Church@Home. And while we’ve been able to broadcast our worship and sermons on YouTube, we’ve been burdened that our kids ministry has been severely lacking.
Additionally, while leading our church family in Communion @Home, Pastor Miles realized that his own four kids (and by extension, all of the kids in our children’s ministry) didn’t really know what the Lord’s Supper was all about. These issues have caused us to prayerfully seek for a program for leading our church family in the discipleship of their children at home.
The book of Deuteronomy teaches us that parents are to be the primary spiritual teachers of children. In the modern church context that we’ve experienced over the last seventy years, most of the Christian education of children has taken place in a Sunday school classroom. To a large extent, the education of children has been outsourced. And though we believe we’ve provided a great children’s discipleship program at Cross Connection Church (and will continue to do in the future), going forward we want to equip parents to better train their children in the “nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4).
To this end we are working to incorporate The New City Catechism into our discipleship and training program for both the adults and children of our church. To do so, we will be developing an education management system to help equip the dads and moms of our church, so that they will be able to effectively participate in training up their children in the way they should go, so that when they are older, they will continue in the faith (Prov. 22:6).
The New City Catechism is a modern-day resource aimed at helping children and adults alike learn the core doctrines of the Christian faith via 52 questions and answers.
We hope to launch The New City Catechism for our church body beginning in July 2020. But if you are interested in sampling The New City program yourself, please take a look at their website, and download The New City Catechism App on your Smart Phone or Tablet, and check out The New City Web App. You can also download samples of the first five lessons of Catechism here, as well as the free activity book for leading your kids through the program.
Also, please send us your questions about our discipleship plans, as we move forward in prayerfully developing the new normal for church in 2020 and beyond.
