How to Help After a Natural Disaster

In the wake of recent hurricanes Milton and Helene, many people are looking for ways to help. Six years ago, my community was devastated by Hurricane Michael. Prior to going through that tragedy, I had led mission efforts and responded to natural disasters for decades. And yet, being the recipient of mission taught me lessons I could have learned no other way. I 'd like to share some of those lessons to be hlepful to those who are inclined to serve.

First and foremost, I learned anything that anyone does makes an enormous difference. I experienced some kinds of help that were extremely helpful and some that were less helpful. But for those in a disaster zone, just knowing that people care and haven't forgotten makes all the difference. During Michael, I had one man from Oklahoma send our church over $20,000 to help victims. A church from Ohio send us a small prayer quilt. A huge financial gift and a prayer quilt were both extremely precious--they were both signs that while the national consciousness moved on quickly, many people still cared and that we would not be alone in recovery. So, whether it's a donation, or sending a team to clean up debris, or putting together a flood bucket, do something, anything. It makes more of a difference than you can ever imagine. Even if you serve small way and even if you make mistakes in serving, it's better than not serving at all.

That being said, let me share some things that I didn't know before I went through Michael that changed the way I will serve in the future.

I learned that communities experience distinct phases of recovery after a disaster, and that the help they need in each phase is dramatically different in each phase. Immediately after a disaster, power is out, roads are blocked, homes are destroyed, grocery stores closed. Things feel apocalyptic. Big disaster organizations, whether governmental or charitable, are set up for long term recovery, so much of the immediate stabilization happens through churches and neighbors helping neighbors. In the first week or two after Michael, bottled water was desperately needed, but once the water came on, we didn't need it anymore. Churches heard we needed water and weren't able to send it quickly enough to help us, but by the time it arrived we had little use for it and it stacked up in an enormous pile that took nearly a year to be used up.  People on the ground are grateful for any help at all, so they will not tell you when something that was once helpful has become a burden. For example, they won't tell you not to send clothes because they are afraid to sound ungrateful and because they are afraid that they won't get the help they need if they reject what they don't need. So an enormous pile of clothes ends up sitting outside the church begging for anyone to take it. It makes a big difference to be sensitive to this reality. If you want to be as helpful as possible, especially in the first few weeks after the storm, give the help needed when it's needed for the appropriate phase of recovery. How do you know what's needed when? Ask the people on the ground. 

I learned that various organizations partner together to serve affected communities after storms, and I learned what each group does in relation to the others. United Methodist Committee on Relief provides money in the form of huge grants. UMCOR's grants are distributed through Annual Conferences. What they do best is "case management"--they train local people to serve in a role like a social worker specifically for disaster victims. Mennonites have the best teams of house builders. Mormons have the software that keeps track of all the projects in a community and they send huge teams of young people for very short term clean up. I've seen up close what FEMA does and does not do, what Red Cross does best (their shelters during the storm itself are indispensable, for example). I never would have known the infrastructure of disaster response without experiencing up close and being part of it. I've learned from this experience that giving money is super important for many reasons. Going to a place and doing projects is good, sending supplies is good, giving money is really good. These people know what they are doing. UMCOR is better than you can imagine, and the stuff we know they do like flood buckets and sanitary kits all comes from on-the-ground understanding of what really helps. Also, United Methodist Annual Conferences really do great work, and they often have to wait for the grants to come through from UMCOR, so giving to UMCOR and also to the Annual Conference creates flexibility and helps with immediate needs.  Also, disaster organizations have extremely strict guidelines for the use of disaster funds for good reason. But those very good guidelines can sometimes be restrictive in ways that make it difficult to help with situations on the ground. During Michael, we had several hundred thousand dollars given to our church that went directly to help people in our community, and without those donations many people would never have been able to be helped or would have had to wait a long time to get any relief.  So finding a trusted local church with a terrific accountability structure within a disaster zone to support with relief funds is wise also. I have a dear friend, Ed Glaize, who is pastor of the United Methodist Church in Boone, NC, and I am glad to see people sending support to his church as they serve that area. I've noticed that First UMC in St. Petersburg, FL has a QR code on their website specifically for disaster relief. It really helps to give money, and it really helps to give money through UMCOR, conference disaster relief, and a trusted local church. 

I also learned that quite a few people who go on mission have an unrecognized desire to have a certain experience on their mission trip. I learned to pay close attention to the teams coming to help and to try to find them work that would meet their desire for the kind of experience they wanted to have in serving.  I learned that occasionally teams could be difficult if the work we asked them to do didn't provide the experience they desired.  Many years ago, I went to help in Biloxi, MS after Katrina. We were asked to help with debris at a large, nice home. At the time, I had mixed feelings about helping someone who appeared to be well-off when I assumed there must by many less fortunate people who needed help more. Since going through Michael, I learned that a disaster puts everyone at the same level, that everyone needs help. As someone who has now coordinated teams with projects, I understand just how difficult it is to identify the work that needs to be done and to coordinate the teams and their abilities with the known needs.  I've looked back on my thoughts and feelings while working at that big house in Biloxi with regret. If every team came with a willing spirit and without judgement, the recovery work would be far more efficient. At one point I had someone on a team complain about a person who seemed to be taking more supplies than the team member thought he needed. What that person didn't realize was that the person was distributing supplies in his neighborhood, that no one was hoarding or taking advantage. Everyone was just trying to help everyone survive. Like I said before, it's better to show up and make mistakes than to stay home. But if you want to help, it's more helpful to come with a willing heart without judgement to serve however needed to whomever you are sent for whatever project you are assigned. I can still remember the conversations with people who simply told me the skills and resources they could bring and told me to just put them to work wherever and however they could be helpful. A few times a dealt with knowledgeable and experienced team leaders who could tell I was feeling them out for the kind of "experience" they were looking for, and knowingly assured me they only wanted to help however they could.  Those people with open servant hearts were like angels of God to us.

Here's something else I learned about mission from going through Michael--people are more important than the task. The debris will get cleared, the roof will be repaired, supplies will be distributed. Eventually the work will get done, and it makes an enormous difference to do the work and help the people see progress. But when a disaster survivor seems to be holding you up from your job to talk to you about their pain, listening to that person is the priority. When a tough guy breaks down in tears talking about how he doesn't recognize the town he's lived in his whole life, hearing him out is what he needs. People in a disaster zone need to talk when they need to talk (or not talk when they don't want to talk). After Michael, I was invited to go to the Bahamas to help following Hurricane Dorian. We had no task, no project. We just listened to people, especially pastors. They were so grateful. If I hadn't gone through Michael, I wouldn't have understood why a mission trip with no task was important. It was important because people are important. By all means, do the task. But go for the people.

Here's something else I learned--the world moves on quickly. The news cycle turns over daily. In a week or two, Helene and Milton will be forgotten by most of the nation. When that happens, a deep dread will settle into the collective soul of affected communities. They will feel like the recovery will never end, and, in fact, their communities will have permanent consequences (not all of them bad). People who come in three months and six months and a year will let the communities know that they are not alone, that God has not moved on from them. Those who come after the immediate rush is over will embody hope. It's OK to plan to help with Helene recovery in three months or six months or next year or even the year after that. Help now. Help later.

Something else to be sensitive about--When you go into a disaster zone, you are also going into a person's home. It helps to respect survivors' space and routines. We are all creatures of habit, and none of us likes having our world turned upside down. When a disaster strikes, everything in life gets disrupted. Anything a team can do to respect the need for a community to get back to a sense of normalcy is helpful, and anything that disrupts life further can be a real challenge. When we went through Michael, we were so grateful to Crosspoint Church for putting on our Fall Festival for us. We host a Fall Festival each year, but we just couldn't make it happen on our own without help. Our children needed to dress up in costumes and play games and get candy. On the other hand, we had another team that came in and took over the kitchen. That wasn't so bad. That happened pretty often, actually. But one morning that group decided to make breakfast themselves and for our breakfast Bible study group without asking. When the folks who had planned to cook breakfast showed up and were pushed out of their own kitchen, they were understandably upset. All I'm saying is when you go on mission it helps to be a good houseguest.

Above all, know that when you serve people going through a tragedy of a natural disaster, you make an eternal difference. Any act of service, great or small, will never be forgotten and will touch lives in immeasurable ways. To all who helped us then and to all who are now helping after Helene and Milton, to all who do anything to alleviate the suffering in the world---THANK YOU. You shine like stars in a dark world (Phil. 2:15).

 

Bible Questions/Bible Answers

"I believe that the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions and that we need only to ask insistently and with some humility for us to receive the answer from it." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from a letter to Rudiger Schleicher.

During the Reformation and through subsequent centuries, the church was divided about the nature of the sacraments--transubstantiation, consubstantiation, real presence, memorial, and how many sacraments are sacraments. These debates over questions of "what is it?" tore the churches apart. Of course, the debates weren't just about the sacraments, but also about power and who yielded sacramental power. One of the things I love best about my Wesleyan theological heritage is that it shifted the conversation about sacraments from "What is it?" to "What is it doing?" Wesleyanism tends to leave the nature of sacrament to mystery ("musterion") and emphasize that the Trinitarian God is present and working in and through the sacrament. This emphasis is empowering, humbling, and uniting.

The divisive conversation about "What it is" has shifted since the Enlightenment to the question of the nature of Scripture. The fight over the nature of the Bible is even more entrenched because it has even more to do with power. As the authority of the institutional church declined and as human beings increasingly looked to science and observation as a tool to know what we know, scripture was given a new role as a sort of legal authority on the nature of all things. It began to be read as a tool to say "See, the way I think things should be is the way they are because God said so because look here he said exactly what I say in his book and so you have to just swallow it or be against God." And so, now we have debates about the authority of the Bible, inerrancy, infallibility, etc.

What is the Bible for? What does it do? Why did God give it to us? How does it function in our living? Those are better questions. They are uniting questions. They are questions that lead us to listen to God through scripture humbly, to be taught rather than to look for tools to impose our views and ways upon others.

In my experience, I have encountered people with extremely varied views on the nature of the scriptures who humbly yield to the voice of God through it and find a meeting place for a living relationship with God when they read it with open heart. I have also encountered people with all kinds of views of the Bible who use it as a tool to impose their ways and ideas upon others and who never seem to humbly yield before God and seek answers for which they honestly don't know the answers as they listen to God through the Bible.

Provenance

I am a book person, and to book people, the word "provenance" has special meaning. Provenance refers to a book's particular story, its connections to its previous owners and its special relevance as an artifact because of what it meant to the people who have handled it.

For example, I recently read a story about Umberto Eco, the brilliant academic, author, and bibliophile who became famous with has first novel, "The Name of the Rose," in which a monk is murdered by poisoning. The monk had a habit of licking his fingers when he turned the pages in a book, so his murderer put poison on the pages of a book. Eco got the idea for this weird means of murder from a nasty old paperback he bought for 70 cents in a secondhand bookshop. The book had gunky pages that were stuck to one another, and Eco was so disgusted that he had the thought that someone could get sick or die from handling the book. Then the thought occurred to him that a book could be used as a murder weapon. The rest is history. And that little paperback, which was once worthless, is now a valuable and treasured part of literary history. That's provenance.

I suppose one day I will die and someone will cart my many books to the Goodwill. That's fine by me, as long as they get to someone who might read them. At the same time, my books have provenance, too. I wish I could let it be known to whoever makes the decisions about my books one day that these books have stories beyond the ones contained on their pages.

For example, I have my great-grandfather's set of the Harvard Classics, the five-foot shelf of over 50 volumes of the world's greatest literary works. I use them, too. I've read fairy tales to my children from them, my father read the works of a Quaker abolitionist from his grandfather's set when he visited me once, I have little markers from things I've quoted popping out of the tops of the volumes. Frederic Attwood gave them to his son, William Attwood, my grandfather. Long after his death, my grandmother let me have them. They were printed in 1909. My little girl was born over a hundred years later. From time to time she sits on my lap so that I can read the original Cinderella story to her. They are more than books to me.

I also have a set of Brittanica Great Books, the other big collection of the best writing human beings have produced. The family of Rev. Torrence Maxey gave them to me from his library after he passed away. Torrence Maxey was an amazing man--a United Methodist pastor and District Superintendent who had served as a chaplain in combat during the Korean War. During the Civil Rights Movement, Superintendent Torrence Maxey once went uninvited to a church meeting in which the congregation was voting to leave the denomination because they wished to exclude African-Americans. He informed them that they had no authority to make such a choice. They physically threw him out of the meeting. The ensuing legal battle went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which supported what Rev. Maxey said to them in the beginning. That case affirmed that church buildings could not go with a congregation when they left the denomination and held the Methodist Church together through the battles over racial issues. Appropriately, I also have Rev. Maxey's six volume Sandburg biography of Abraham Lincoln.

One day I got a call from the widow of another pastor, Bob Beckley, who had spent most of his career serving a number of roles at Huntingdon College. She told me that he had left quite a few books and that he would have ben pleased if someone would take them who could appreciate them. When I went to her home, she took me to his upstairs study, which was packed with several thousand fine volumes. I didn't want to be greedy, but I also didn't want to disappoint her, so I limited myself to taking about a hundred of the things I found most useful. Only later, I realized that several were signed, including signed copies of books by Reinhold Niebuhr and Harry Emerson Fosdick.

I especially treasure books given to me by perhaps the holiest man I've known closely, Bishop Paul Duffey. He gave me his set of Interpreter's Bible Commentaries. They are underlined and annotated throughout, a sign of his deep engagement with scripture and his sincere life-long efforts to live what the Bible teaches. He also gave me a set of commentaries that were given to him by his student appointment when he graduated from seminary. I had a few others that had belonged to Bishop Duffey's mother, Bible Study books she had used in a class at Montgomery First UMC. I gave those to David Saliba to thank him for officiating my daughter's wedding. I couldn't think of anything more precious to offer him and anything less would have seemed cheap for the gratitude I felt to my brother for being a part of that holy and happy day. That's provenance.

I have books my grandfather gave me, too. When I was a little boy, he would ship me cases of things he had read when he was a little boy himself. Some of them have his name written in the front covers in little boy script. The Penrod books, Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Kidnapped. I learned to love to read from the same books that hooked my beloved grandfather.

I have my mother's Bible. When I was a teenager, she took me out to eat one day. She slid a worn out, underlined, highlighted, falling apart Bible to me. She said, "If I had made different choices in my life, I might have been able to give you things I wasn't able to give you. But because of the choices I made, I am able to give you this instead." I have many Bibles, but this one is the most precious, because this one represents the costly and precious nature of God's Word.

For the last several years, Rev. Al Harbour has been slowly bequeathing major parts of his enormous ministry library to me. His books, too, are ragged, underlined, loved and used. He has given me countless books by modern spiritual gants like Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton. They give testament to his deep connection to God. They encourage me to dig deeper into prayer. They always remind me of Al, our friendship across generations, and the partnership we share in the Gospel that spans decades.

I have books signed by my former professors and others who came through while I was in school--Barbara Brown Taylor, Walter Brueggemann, Gail O'Day, Jaroslav Pelikan, Luke Timothy Johnson, President Jimmy Carter, Roberta Bondi, lots more. I always felt a bit awkward asking my teachers to sign their books, but they were always gracious and usually a little embarrassed to be asked. I'm so glad I got them signed anyway.

I have thousands of books and hundreds of stories. I have Rev. Bob Calvert's 19th century Book of Ritual from the M.E. Church. I have a shelf of books written by my grandfather, my great-grandfather, and my mother. I have the copy of "Black Like Me" my father gave me when I was a teenager, a constant reminder of the family heritage of commitment to racial justice he passed to me and I passed to my children.

I have books whose provenance is about my own life story--for example, my New Interpreter's Bible Commentaries, which I bought semester by semester when I was a dirt poor student pastor. I've used them for teaching and preaching ever since, ever mindful of how much they cost me when I used scholarship money each term to buy one volume at a time. Travel books from life-changing trips. My stacks of tattered and marked Bibles.

Maybe someone will care enough about the books to hear the stories attached to them, and maybe someone will want to preserve them in some way. It's very doubtful. Lord knows, my wife would love to never move them again. What "provenance" really means is that the people, relationships, and stories associated with the objects are the source of true treasure, not the objects themselves. So I take heart knowing that what is truly precious about my books can never be taken away, even when they and I are long gone.

Illegal Alien Separated from Parents Dies in Custody

A small child illegally crossed the border from her homeland as her family sought asylum from political persecution. They lived as strangers in another country without proper documentation for several years and had to hide from the authorities.

Her family was eventually found and arrested in a raid. The children were separated from their parents. She was detained in a facility. She contracted a communicable disease and died in custody.

Her name?

Anne Frank.

The Military Historian and the Soldier

I once had a friend who was a world-renowned military historian, perhaps the most knowledgeable Vietnam War scholar alive.

Interestingly, he had never served in the military himself. He knew more about what soldiers had done in the past than any soldier alive. But he had never been in combat, never followed an order, never taken a pledge, never put on a uniform.

We are all tempted to be experts on the Christian faith rather than disciples of Jesus. We can know all about the Bible without ever being gripped by the living Word of God. We can know all about great saints who have come and gone without letting Christ's glory overtake and overwhelm us. We can easily become people who know all about what God used to do in the world while we never notice the miracles all around. We can become experts in mission strategy who never live with a sense of Gospel call. We can drone on all day about the theology of the cross without ever abandoning our lives in self-sacrificial humble love.

May God deliver me from being a military historian and instead make me a soldier for his peaceable Kingdom.

Christian Celebrity as an Eye of the Needle

Two somewhat prominent evangelical figures have recently announced their apostasy via social media. One, Marty Sampson, has led worship and recorded with Hillsong for decades. The other, Joshua Harris, was a pastor and author of "I Kissed Dating Goodbye," a book with inestimable influence on the courtship habits of two generations of evangelical young people. Both have had successful careers and made enormous amounts of money producing content for evangelical culture since its heyday in the 1990s.

We who follow Jesus should grieve the loss of faith for each of these men. We should earnestly pray for them to find authentic discipleship and to find healing for whatever has caused their need to break with the faith.

It's also wise, as much as possible, for the Christian community to do exit interviews with those who walk away from us. We would do well to not only hope for repentance for those who abandon the faith but also to seek redemption for ourselves for whatever signs of brokenness in our community these apostasies reveal.

Perhaps a good place to begin would be to question whether we should have Christian celebrities at all. From the very beginning of the faith, we have had prominent Christians. But most of history's famous Christians have, at the very least, become famous as an accidental by-product of doing something purely for the Gospel's sake. Many of them have run from celebrity and self-promotion. In the early church, many bishops had to be seized by force and made to serve because their humility caused them to run away and hide rather than be promoted.

Jesus himself continually ran away from celebrity. Jesus was the only person ever worthy of worship, and yet he continually commanded those whom he healed to keep quiet. Whenever he sensed that the crowds wanted to make him king, he would run and hide. He lived his life very carefully in humility with actions that determined that he would die a shameful death and be completely dismissed by the greater culture. Most Christians throughout time have recognized that an attention-seeking Christian leader who actively self-promotes in an effort to build a career in Christian ministry has completely missed the point of what it means to follow Jesus.

I am a pastor, and so I can't help but be a public person. I can't help but earn my living and making a wage through leading others in Christian practices. I have always understood that my vocation is filled with spiritual peril. I've made many intentional choices to undermine my own capacity for building myself as what our culture would call a "brand." Sometimes painful choices to sabotage my career in ministry for the sake of my soul and the integrity of my ministry. But I am always aware that in living as a public Christian, even for a person like me, a mediocre, mainline, traditional, small-town pastor, I am seeking to pass a proverbial camel through the eye of a needle.

Soren Kierkegaard was keenly aware of this danger to his discipleship. He went out of his way to avoid attracting admirers. He wrote under pseudonyms. He would leave his study and allow himself to be seen at the opera so that people would think he was lazy and shallow. When he felt that he needed to break an engagement, he made himself appear to be a jerk to his fiancee so that no one would think him noble and so that his fiancee would have easy closure from the relationship. He would be horrified that so many people would eventually become admirers of him and his work. He tried hard to keep this from happening, because he only wanted his work to inspire others to encounter Christ and never notice himself. Kierkegaard's way is unknown in a world of self-promoting Christian celebrity.

I cannot begin to understand what it would be like to be a famous Christian "influencer" filling an arena of adoring "worshipers" in a massive concert-style "event," dressed in the hippest clothes, projected on a jumbotron, and at the same time be expected to authentically maintain a living relationship with a God who shows his values by becoming a peasant murdered by an illegal lynching. I cannot imagine the pressure put upon the marriage of a man who earns millions of dollars and creates a personal industry around identifying himself with a purity movement. How can people in these circumstances not become victims of this celebrity culture? What relief these men must feel after freeing themselves from such a terrible burden.

I have no judgment towards these two men or the many, many more who have likewise walked away from a faith that was so vapid. They are all victims of a culture, even if they unwittingly helped produce it.

My sincere hope is that these two men have not truly abandoned the faith, even if they think they have. My hope is that they have merely abandoned a brand of Christian culture and pseudo-discipleship that cannot help but be fake. I can't help but think that many, many people who live as Christian celebrities are already apostate without realizing it. My prayer is that these two will encounter the real thing. My prayer is also that we all in this American-individualistic, selfie/insta/Kardashian, cult-of-personality culture will likewise lose faith with Christian fakery and be seized by a true savior who invites us to join him on the lonely but satisfying path to the cross.

Kids Acting Up in Church

From time to time a child makes a scene in church and parents or kids' workers freak out about it, or I see a young mom apologizing for their child's behavior in church on social media, or I visit a church and someone prepares me not to be offended by a particularly rambunctious child. In all of these situations I try to minimize the situation as graciously as possible, sometimes making an affirming comment, sometimes smiling and engaging the little person, sometimes gently coaching a volunteer or nursery worker. Behind closed doors with staff people, I have a number of rants about this subject that I'd like to share more broadly. Oftentimes, I'd very much like to stop a church service and share my rant with the congregation, but that's never appropriate. I feel compelled to share publicly my thoughts of this issue:

All people are loved by God unconditionally and their presence in the house of God is a treasured gift. The church's job is not to make them behave. The church's job is to embody Christ's embrace of his children and make sure that these kids want to be in God's house because they know that they are at home with family.

My conviction about this is grounded in our theology. We believe in Gospel, not law. We believe that trying to get people to act redeemed causes them to be confined and either live in chains or to rebel. We believe that God's true law is the law of love, that a living, righteous law is an expression of the fulfilling of the law to love God and neighbor. We believe that when we are fully loved by God, we will learn to reflect that love toward neighbor and that our behavior will straighten itself out on its own.

Unfortunately, many churches fail to embody our theology in the way they treat children. They act as if the purpose of church is moral training. It's because of this bad theology that many adults don't go to church anymore even though they believe church is great for children--they think children need instruction in good behavior but they believe they learned all they need to know when they were kids in church decades ago.  Church is not a finishing school. Church is about the people of God glorifying God for God's sake and being transformed into the image and likeness of Christ by freely receiving the fulness of the love of Christ.

Many children's activities are designed around getting the kids to sit down and shut up, to act right and be good. Undoubtedly, children need to learn to be kind to one another and they sometimes need to be protected from one another so that church is a safe place for every kid.  But sometimes I see adults treat kids in such a way that the unspoken message is, "We are in charge here and you need to learn to tow the line and act right." That's the spirit of law, not the spirit of Gospel. Gospel always sets people free, never compels, constricts, or oppresses. Gospels only trains our behavior to embody love of neighbor.

So what about the kid who makes a racket in worship? Isn't that kid a distraction from the purpose of worship? What about the kid who doesn't pay attention during the children's minute? What about the kid who squirms or yaks at parents or makes faces at the people in the neighboring pew?

Thank God for those kids! They bring life and vitality and a reason to stay awake to the people all around them. In all actuality, most worship services are improved by the kind of distraction caused by kids acting up. I'd certainly prefer the kind of distraction caused from a little kid acting like a little kid than I would a room full of people who are all acting properly and barely keeping awake.

Those kids are a tremendous gift to us. Everywhere in American Christianity, and especially in the United Methodist Church, we are concerned about losing our children. We are concerned about the aging of the church. Why would kids want to come to a church that treats them like they are pupils in school who need to sit up straight and behave?

No one is making these kids come to church. No one in today's culture is going to force them to come to church. They don't have to be there. The days when young parents make their kids come to church out of habit and good citizenry have come to an end. Parents will not drag their kids to church. But, when properly loved and accepted in a fun and Gospel-drenched manner, many children will drag their parents to church or at least find a way to come whether their parents bring them or not.

Kids acting like kids in church don't ever distract me. Not ever. Never. Not when they get loud. Not if they run into the chancel and mess with the microphone. Not if they break free and run all over the place. Not if they throw stuff from the diaper bag so that it loudly reverberates when it hits the stone or wood floor. Not when they sing or yell during the sermon. Not when they dance in the aisle during a hymn. Never ever.

I believe that parents are always, always, always more concerned about their kids being a distraction than anyone else.

I believe that there is no more terrible sound in a church than the horrific silence of a church with no kids to make little kid noises.

As a practical matter, when I look out on a congregation, I generally find that the kids are almost no distraction, but the adults trying to get the kids to behave a a major distraction.  Oftentimes, no one notices a squirmy toddler until someone tries to quiet down or subdue the little person. If you must be concerned about some kid being a distraction, please don't create a distraction by trying to restrain the kid. No one but you, whoever you are, you uptight grown up, cares about the distraction of the kid until you try to restrain the kid. Let the kid be a kid and no one but you will be distracted. Restrain the kid, and now we are distracted. Let it go. Seriously. It's OK.

If the Gospel is true, then we can love these kids, treasure them, give them a family that wants them to be there, find joy in their energy and enthusiasm, keep them busy and fascinated and engaged. And we can expect that the love that they receive will eventually returned in all kinds of ways, including joyfully and freely growing into cooperation with the church's non-distracting, well-behaved worship culture. I'm not sure if that last bit is entirely a good thing.

So grown ups, young moms, children's workers, and all others, pretty please... When kids act up in church, please don't worry about it. Let them be kids. We want them there. Jesus wants them there and, after all, it's his church, not ours. God is the audience of worship, not us, and he's not distracted by his children acting up in church, he loves it.

Me too.