What About The Children?
Decades ago, while pastoring a previous church, some interesting things happened.
A few weeks after starting at the church, I was there alone and decided to snoop around. There I was looking through closets and other storage areas. Everything was what you would expect stored inside a church. A lot of seasonal decorations, costumes, and props for children’s plays, baptismal robes, and the like.
Outside the church was a garage. Others had already told me that all that was in the garage was the lawnmower and a few outdoor tools. Upon entering the garage, I was shocked to discover a fifteen-passenger van. The vehicle had four flat tires. I checked the plates, and they were current.
The next deacons meeting contained an interesting conversation. I asked about the van. The deacons told me the church used the van once a year in December to take the elderly around to see the Christmas lights. I insisted that paying insurance year-round, registration, and plates for one sightseeing trip a year is not worth the money. My suggestion was to either start using the van or sell it. The deacons told me that if I wanted to use the van, I could, but I shouldn’t expect any help.
There was a low-rent government housing project three blocks from the church. Outside the complex was a huge playground; kids were always there. Julie and I started knocking on doors. Within a month, we were stuffing twenty to twenty-five kids into that fifteen-passenger van for every service: Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night.
Often the kids came hungry. Mac and cheese, peanut butter and jelly, a bowl of cereal, or any other cheap meal you can think of. It did not matter if the kids were hungry. It did not matter if the van was overstuffed. These kids were elementary school age and were in desperate need of Jesus.
Some of the children were overly loud; others, you couldn’t pry two words out of them, but all of them needed the love of Christ. All of them needed salvation. Few of them knew the definition of the word “sit.” As Julie taught them, she did a wonderful job keeping things one rung below the chaos level, and even a better job showing those children she and Jesus loved them, and all of them knew it.
Meanwhile, I was fighting with God every week. Ever since I preached my first sermon, my prayer has always been, “Lord, what do you want them to hear?” I wasn’t fighting with God because I was struggling with sin; I was fighting with God because nearly every Sunday He was bringing me back to the same topic: A Christian’s condition of heart.
The Bible covers tens of thousands of topics, yet every week, I kept coming back to the condition of heart. I pleaded with God to let me preach about something else. There were multiple Sundays when I would come prepared to preach on a different topic, and as I got into the pulpit, I’d toss the notes to the side, go to a different passage, and preach about how a Christian’s heart should be.
As human beings, we wear multiple hats. Two of the hats I was wearing during this time were the hat of Pastor and the hat of husband. For two years, we were bringing the vanload of children to the church. My wife was teaching every service. Even though she was only in her early thirties, I could see it was taking a toll on her physically, and more importantly, she wasn’t getting fed spiritually as she should. She never heard a sermon; she never sat in a class; she was always teaching. Something had to give. As her husband, I am responsible for her spiritual well-being.
After much discussion with each other and God, Julie reluctantly decided to give up teaching on Wednesday night. Church curriculum usually runs by the quarter, and we were three weeks through thirteen weeks of a quarter. I decided to announce that we needed a teacher for the Wednesday night children’s class to start at the beginning of the next quarter. My prayer was that someone would volunteer within two or three weeks and Julie would have a month or so to train the new teacher. However, what I thought was the answer and what God knew should be the answer were two different things.
At every service for the next ten weeks, I announced the need for a teacher for the children on Wednesday nights. No one volunteered; not even an “if no one else will do it, I guess I can” was offered.
As Pastor of a church, I am pastor to the eight-year-old as well as the eighty-year-old. I believed if I brought those twenty-five 6-12 year olds upstairs to listen to me preach, it would not do them any good, and more than likely, it would not be long before the twenty-five would be zero.
Another nearby church of like faith had a kids program on Wednesday nights that started a half hour before our services and ended a half hour after our church was over. On the first night of the new quarter, we picked the kids up as usual and took them to the other church. At the end of our services, I asked if anyone noticed anything different. Several people noted that Julie was upstairs with the adults. I asked if anyone had noticed that the kids were not there. Deer-in-the-headlights stares. I explained to the congregation what we had done. I explained that if no one was willing to teach them, I had the God-given responsibility to take them to someone who would.
The following Sunday, I preached another sermon on the condition of the heart.
About a year and a half later, I asked the church to have a meeting about what the church’s future was, specifically, in what direction does God want us to go, what does He want us to do. During that meeting, a prominent member of the church, a deacon, stood up and said, “We have too many kids running around here. We have twenty-five children here every week; we only need ten or twelve.”
I asked the church if anyone had anything to say about the previous comment, either pro or con. I watched the second hand on the clock go completely around. One full minute, no one said a word. I broke the silence by stating, “If no one is willing to stand up for the children in this church, I can no longer be your Pastor. I will bring my notice of resignation to tonight’s service.”
I brought my letter of resignation to that Sunday night’s service and preached on what the church should look for in their next pastor. That was the last time I was there.
Instead of resigning, I could have stayed and tried to prove my point, but the point had been preached for three years. My oldest son, with tears flowing down his cheeks, pleaded with me, “Why didn’t you fight this, Dad?” Other Pastors at the time told me I should not have left.
But here is how God works. In the weeks that followed, people started examining their hearts. About two months after I left, they hired the former president of a statewide child evangelism ministry as their next Pastor. Before long, that van was replaced by a school bus and the twenty-five increased to fifty. Several years later, my son, the one who cried, was hired by the church as co-youth pastor.
I could have stayed and fought the issue of bringing the children into the church, but it was not my fight to fight; it was God’s, and He knew what He was doing all along. Why over three years of preaching about the condition of the heart? God already knew those twenty-five kids would be in that van. God already knew I would decide to send the children to a different church on Wednesday nights. God knew a man would stand up and proclaim that the church had too many kids and the church’s response. When I started at the church, God was already working in the lives of the fifty kids I would never know who would ride the bus years after I left.
God fought the fight. God won.
It’s never our battle to win. The battle belongs to God.
Preacher Tim Johnson is Pastor of Countryside Baptist Church in Parke County, Indiana. His weekly column “Preacher’s Point” may be found at: www.preacherspoint.wordpress.com