Don’t flay the sheep.

Zora in church

Now here’s an interesting conundrum about my life:

I’m the pastor at my church who is supposed to be the “expert” on children in church. But I rarely worship with my own child because on Sundays I am up front and she is in the back with daddy.

So I really don’t know much about worshiping with kids. Take everything I say with a grain of salt.

On Saturday night, I had a rare opportunity to drag her along to the closing worship service at a conference I was attending with 5 of my youth groupers. A few highlights and things I learned:

1. Kids dance in worship. In fact, it might keep them going a little longer if you encourage it. In the aisles, too, because when else are you going to get away with that if you’re not a pentecostal?
2. Zora likes the singing. So we played that up. Sing along, watch other people sing, color in the worship order, follow the notes with your finger, feel mama’s face while she sings
3. How to get her to listen and not sing along with the choir? Tell her to imitate the director. She’s well on her way to a fine musical career.
4. To the gentleman sitting in front of us: I’m really sorry she kept touching your hair. I hope you were OK with that. I’m going to go with the assumption that you were. I like it when she does that to me, so I’m guessing it wasn’t an awful experience.
5. At a very young age, it is possible to register theological protests during the service. The denomination that was hosting this event is in the midst of a debate about children at the table (made humorous to me by their use of a child at the table to assist the pastor by asking questions about the Supper ala the Passover tradition). Zora saw the bread being broken from the back, and yelled “I want bread.” Seriously, was I going to not let her have it? Have you ever denied a toddler something you were eating?
6. In retrospect, though, perhaps I should have given her the half of my bread chunk that was not soaked in wine. Because I’ve recently been in churches that push grape juice, I forgot and Zora got a good chunk of wine-y bread. This may have contributed to the chugging of 4 juice boxes when we got back to our seats. (And, when I say “chug” I mean it…she removes the straw, throws her head back, and does away with the box in a few gulps.)

All in all, a good evening. She was still talking about it the next night, but we think she had the event a bit confused with a trip to the circus a few months ago. After recalling that there was a singing, and a choir, and bread, she said, “And the clown came out of the piano.”

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