For the most part pastors view children in a congregation as a welcome I and healthy sign. Young families bring energy and enthusiasm, vibrancy and growth. Most churches put considerable energy into drawing families with children into their fellowship. However, few pastors would deny that ministry to children and their families presents a challenge that can stretch pastoral limits.
Under some serious circumstances there is no responsible course of action except to refer a family to someone with the additional professional qualifications necessary to provide help. But we can also grow in our understanding of children and families and develop skills for ministry that will enhance both our abilities to handle situations as they arise and to know when we are in over our heads.
Understanding children
In a seemingly insignificant moment, our view of children was unforgettably set. "Look out, Pastor; there's a person behind you" was all a mother said as Ron was stepping back, about to plant his size 11 shoe behind him without looking. Turning to apologize to the person he had nearly bumped, Ron was surprised to see no one, at eye level at least. Down about three feet, however, there was a little girl smiling up at him. "There's a person behind you" has rung in our ears many times since as we have considered the needs of the little people in our congregations. All persons deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, to be heard and understood, to be ministered to according to their needs, to receive care when in trouble. Viewing children as persons will significantly shape our ministry to them and their families and will heighten the importance of such a ministry.
"Train up a child in the way he should go" is a slight twist on the usual reading of Proverbs 22:6 that emphasizes the importance of making allowances for the differences in children differences based on temperament, gender, developmental stage, position in the family constellation, and patterns of growth. Many difficulties with children grow out of unrealistic expectations that often arise from a lack of understanding of the significance of these differences. Adults, for example, who expect a 3-year-old to share willingly, a choleric child to put aside his or her agenda readily, primary-age boys and girls to like each other, or children approaching puberty to share everything with their parents, are setting themselves up for frustration if not confrontation.
Parents need reassurance that their children are quite normal. We recall hearing Adventist child psychologist Ruth Murdoch respond to a parent who was concerned about toilet training difficulties with a 3-year-old. "Most children have this worked out by the time they turn 15," she said with a twinkle in her eye. "If you are still having problems then, we'll need to get to the bottom of it!" Normal behavior for children covers a wide spectrum. Opportunity to exchange stories with other parents and to learn from counseling with individual families will provide many avenues for parent education and bring much comfort.
The feel for normalcy
A parent's feel for normalcy may be skewed in some areas because of some personal occurance experienced while growing up. Pastors who intentionally confront personal issues and seek whatever help is needed to grow steadily toward wholeness in their own lives will have a better sense for the concerns that arise with a family in the congregation. They will also be in a better position to recognize behavior that needs professional evaluation and to encourage and assist families in accessing the resources available. For example, a child who demonstrates sexual behavior beyond his or her understanding and experience, a child who is suddenly failing at school, a child who bears the brunt of savage put-downs at the hands of other children, an exceptionally bright child who cannot tolerate the routine of schoolwork---should more than pique your attention.
Your pastoral success in ministry to children and their families will be largely proportional to the quality of the personal relationships you have established with them. Visiting the homes of your members regularly not only enhances relationships but also allows you to observe the patterns of family interaction at home. A warm relationship of trust and the open, natural dialogue you have established over time provide you with the best hope that you will be able to coach the child(ren) and family through any problem that presents itself to them.
Pastor as coach
Family therapist and rabbi Edwin Friedman speaks of the pastor as coach in his book Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue (1985). Typically, pastoral training places its emphasis on preparing pastors to officiate at family events---i.e., providing how-to's and creative ideas for performing a wedding, a child dedication service, a funeral, a baptism, a graduation. However, Friedman points out that the most effective pastors are exceptional not so much because they are skilled officiators, as important as that may be. Rather the extraordinary success of their ministry lies in their ability to maximize their unique entrance into people's lives that their position affords and to envision themselves as coaches of families through life's transitions and crises.
Thus it becomes more important that pastors know the families within the circle of their care and establish strong relationships of openness and trust with them than it is that they preach polished sermons from the pulpit. For it is such close relationships that open the way for the pastor to enter the family system in moments of need, offer encouragement and hope, expand a family's imaginative capacities toward more satisfactory alternatives, and provide a nonanxious presence wherein a problem time can be refrained as an opportunity for growth.
We cannot overemphasize, however, that in instances in which child abuse is suspected, moral responsibility and the laws in most states in the U.S.A, at least, mandate that a report be made immediately to child protective services. This course of action provides the best hope for healing the victims involved, and the rehabilitation of the abuser. The pastor's responsibility is to report the evidences of abuse, to cooperate with government agencies, and to render pastoral care and support to the entire family as appropriate legal processes are followed and as abusers undergo professional therapy and rehabilitation.
Adopting a needs orientation
Many times our response to children is reactive rather than proactive. We tend to react to behavior and seek to reshape it according to our adult standards without much consideration of the reason for the behavior. We need to remember that most behavior is driven by need. In his books How to Really Love Your Child (1977) and How to Really Love Your Teenager (1981), child psychologist Ross Campbell convincingly argues that if we placed more emphasis on meeting a child's needs for love, focused attention, affectionate touch, spiritual nurture, open dialogue, reasonable limits, kind but firm discipline, and healthful physical care, we would go a long way toward correcting inappropriate behavior and toward raising all-around healthy children.
A boy suddenly became quite introverted and appeared to be avoiding contact with his peers at school. The teacher observed the usually friendly lad slinking into his chair just before the bell and leaving school through the back fence as soon as classes were dismissed. Made aware of such puzzling behavior, a pastor who has adopted a needs orientation will first wonder what is making him or her do that. In this instance a few minutes of warm, casual talk and active listening opened the way for the boy to reveal the source of his problem. It seems the boy's frugal father had bought his son several pairs of new pants at a sale. Unfortunately, they were bell-bottoms when all the other boys were wearing straight, fitted cuts. As soon as the pants were replaced, normal behavior patterns immediately resumed.
Thinking family systems
It has been said there is no such thing as an individual, only pieces of families. In every family these "pieces" are networked together in a system. Relational ties exist between every person and every other individual in the family. Movement by any individual or group of individuals within the network has repercussions for all the others. Often young people are less equipped to adjust appropriately to change or conflict in their intimate relational systems. They also tend to be less sophisticated than adults in masking disturbances at home. They act out the pain and distress they are feeling. The behaviors and attitudes of children often serve as a barometer for the inner working of the family as a whole and are indicative of the influence the family system has upon its individuals.
We once heard Dennis Guernsey, professor of family sociology at Fuller Seminary, tell of an experience he had as a youth pastor when he made friends with a troubled teenager at odds with the law. Wanting more than anything to see the youth make a new start, he encouraged him to take care of his body, provided him with some new clothes, helped him get a part-time job, and drew him into the inner circle of the church youth group and his own family. Dennis was so proud of the progress he saw in the young man that he began telling his story as a testimony to the power of God. Then the phone rang at midnight.
It was the police with his young friend in custody. At the station, where he faced the boy in whom he had invested so much, Guernsey's eyes reflected the questions of his heart: Why? "You just don't understand," the boy muttered, scarcely lifting his head. "You don't live where I live."
Integral to family systems theory is the notion that networks of close relationships constantly move toward homeostasis. That is, they seek a stillness, a "being at rest." Similarly, families seem to operate by unspoken laws that seek emotional equilibrium, power balance, and a sense of being normal. Children often assume difficult, stressful, life-altering roles to help their families attain and maintain this equilibrium roles such as that of the hero, who shoulders the responsibility for maintaining the system's integrity and preserving its positive image; the mascot, who seeks by clowning to distract the family from its internal pain; and the scapegoat, who draws the blame for system difficulties to himself or herself and achieves a kind of harmony among others because their focus has shifted to the scapegoat's misbehavior. Observation of such roles in children dictates a closer look at the relational functioning of the family. While the child may appear to be the patient in need of treatment, in reality the patient is the family itself.
The family systems hypothesis that significant symptomatic behavior in children is linked to conflict in their parents' relationship has proved so helpful that it should be considered in counseling children and their families. For example, a mother wondered why her primary- and junior-aged sons fought more when their father was home than when he was working. In a subsequent interview with both parents, we asked about their marital relationship and discovered that they did not communicate, were often in conflict, and had virtually no private couple life. As they described the typical scenario of fighting between the sons they were helped to see their family system in predictable action: (1) fighting upsets and angers dad; (2) dad administers discipline; (3) boys appeal to mother for help; (4) mother approaches father to discuss the boys' needs; (5) boys play contentedly nearby while father and mother are together and talking. We suggested that an intentional improvement in the parents' relationship that is visible to the sons will likely lead to improved behavior on the children's part.
Conflict or dissatisfaction in the marriage may result in a child either intentionally or inadvertently being drawn into the marital relationship in a manner called triangulation. As in the illustration just given, a child may seek to close the gap between the parents by acting in ways that bring the parents together by their joint focus on the problem child. Another type of triangulation occurs when a child becomes a surrogate spouse i.e., one of the spouses seeks emotional fulfillment inappropriately from the child instead of from their marriage partner. Similarly, a child may become a surrogate parent because of the physical or emotional absence of one of the parents. The remaining parent finds a parenting partner in the child and, by assignment or default, parental responsibilities for other siblings are assumed by this child.
In either of these types of triangles, a child is drawn across the generation boundary and is shifted from his or her appropriate position in the family system. Thus anything that can be done to improve the marriage relationship and allow the child to be a child among siblings will strengthen the appropriate generation boundary, help in the differentiation process, and restore healthier system functioning.
The ultimate goal
The spiritual goal of ministry to children and their families is to strengthen the family unit as a center for making disciples. Early in our parenting it broke over us that our own children were little nonbelievers placed in our care. Thinking of our two sons as non-believers changed our perspective toward them considerably.
Studies of children (Schickedanz, J. A., Schickedanz, Hansen J., and Forsyth, P.D., 1993, in Understanding Children) show that there are particular environmental principles critical for healthy child development. These principles include the presence of warm, positive relationships, a few basic rules formed by the family to protect the needs of all, open dialogue, an atmosphere of caring support, and an environment in which children can readily take up the tasks of preparing for adult responsibilities. Families possessing these traits are most likely to produce children who will adopt the spiritual values of their parents in adulthood, develop higher levels of spiritual maturity, and consider the needs of others as well as their own.
Parents need to see this style of family management modeled in their midst. They do not need a perfect model. No pastoral family can provide one anyway. Far more significantly, pastors can provide a view of a family stretching toward God's ideals while at the same time opening a window on how Christian families find forgiveness and reconciliation when they fall short. Our task is to lead our children to the Saviour we have found.
One of life's greatest challenges is to achieve a level of maturity in which we are responsibly independent, while being healthily interdependent. To prepare our children for both is the responsibility of parenthood. Pastors who serve children and their families well will seek to empower parents to steadily release their children as separate individuals, enabling them to take on the decision-making and responsibility appropriate to their age and level of maturity. Children need both roots and wings.
Helping the child in times of crisis
In case of child abuse
• Take the child's report seriously.
• Protect the child.
• Make a report to and cooperate with any available child protection services.
• Listen to the child's feelings. Help release him or her from personal guilt and respond to spiritual questions.
• Help the family access available community resources.
• Encourage the abuser(s) as they undergo professional treatment.
• Provide supportive pastoral care for abuser(s) that helps them take responsibility for their actions, make all possible restitution, and become engaged in the change process.
• Facilitate family reconciliation if and when it becomes possible.
• Assist with grief recovery when grief is present.
Divorce
• Help divorcing parents find ways of telling their children about the divorce.
• Listen to the child's feelings, i.e., anxiety, fear, rejection, abandonment, hurt, confusion, frustration, resentment, and discouragement.
• Assure the children that the divorce is not their fault and the reunion of the parents is not their responsibility.
• Help children identify the positive attributes of both parents.
• Encourage parents to settle their differences without drawing in their children.
• Provide hope for the future and practical support when life seems to be crumbling.
• As children go through stages of grief and loss, help them with the reestablishment of trust.
Death
• Help children accept the reality of death.
• Listen to their feelings; let them weep as they need to and feel pain as a necessary part of healing.
• Invite them to talk about the loved one who has died, but be tolerant of silence; let your presence show that you care.
• Talk to children about the loved one, recalling memories, even humorous anecdotes; let them know you have not forgotten the one who has died.
• Provide the comfort of physical touch—a gentle squeezing of the hand, an arm around the shoulder.
• Provide hope for the future, to know that life can go on, even though we must say goodbye to the hopes and dreams that will never come to pass.
