Changemakers

Lucy Moore

This article is based on a talk I gave at the Bath and Wells conference for children’s leaders, which had the fab title: Changemakers. It made me stop and think about change, why it happens, how it happens and who makes it happen.

People change: it’s a truism. And the change in a person living in God’s kingdom, according to a Biblical pattern of redemption and resurrection, is always ultimately for the good. Change is to be welcomed and expected, just as Martha changed from someone who fussed over trivia into someone who gloried in the bigger picture, even in the very face of death. ‘Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who has come into the world’ (John 11:27 NIV).

Change is a sign of life! If something isn’t alive, of course it won’t change, and we can usefully apply the scientific signs of life to our children’s groups to see if there’s life in them or whether they’re fossilised… alive once, but now set in stone and dead. In fact, FOSSIL makes a useful acronym. If a group is a FOSSIL, it might be
F—Fearful of each other, of the wider church, of making mistakes
O—Obsessively tidy, unable to express itself freely
S—Stagnant, using the same material year after year
S—Self-absorbed, unable to see beyond its own selfish concerns
I—Isolated, cut off from the rest of the body of Christ
L—Loveless, all based on achievement, competition and numbers.

But if the seven scientific signs of life are applied in the acronym of MRS GREN, we see a different sort of children’s group:
M—Movement: does the group learn with their whole body? Are they up and doing?
R—Respiration: is the breath of the Spirit at work in them and through them?
S—Senses: are the children learning holistically or just with their cerebral understanding?
G—Growth: are individuals growing in understanding, compassion, insight?
R—Reproduction: is the group growing numerically? (Ours isn’t.)
E—Excretion: does the group leave a well-processed mess behind it?
N—Nutrition: are you all living off a good diet of God’s Word?

One parable with a great deal of change in it is the organic one of the Sower (Matthew 13:3—8). Let’s assume for the moment that the Sower is a children’s worker, the seed is God’s Word is our teaching and leading, the children are the different parts of the field and of course there is the Owner of the field and the community around the field, and see what we can draw from this parable of relevance to children’s workers.

Firstly, the Owner hasn’t just hoiked in any Tom, Dick or Harry off the street—he’s chosen and equipped a particular person to do the job of sowing in his precious field. With the whole area to choose from, he chose that particular Sower. And with the whole church to choose from, God chose you to work with the children. It doesn’t matter that your calling wasn’t writing on the wall or voices in the night—God usually works much more prosaically than that. But he chose you to work his field.

And knowing that we are chosen to work this field keeps us on a level pegging: if the crop fails, we don’t fall into despair, because we know it is ultimately the responsibility of the Owner, not us. And if there is a bumper crop, we don’t gloat over our own wonderful talents—we give all the praise back to the Owner.

The four different parts of the field might well be like different children in our groups.
Some seed fell on the path… Some children seem so hardened to all we do that the seed just bounces back painfully into our faces. It’s like the proverbial brick wall, hard and hostile.
Other seed fell among rocks… Other children seem OK on the surface, but we know from past experience that underneath there are all sorts of things that stop the message getting through – old hardness, problems and deliberate unreceptiveness.
Other seed fell among thorns… Some children grow up in such a wilderness of unhelpful influences, family difficulties and prone to so much influence from the media that you’re not surprised when they disappear at the age of eleven, apparently having learned nothing.
But some seed fell into good ground where it grew… Some children just take it all in, constantly surprising you with their insight and depth of understanding, their capacity for love and forgiveness, and you are blown away with all they give back to the church and community.

Or, of course, more likely, these four sorts of soil all appear in each child at different times of their life, sometimes all at once. Bless ’em.

Is the Sower wasteful? Why does he waste all this seed on the infertile bits of the field? Well, like the Owner, he is simply profligate, prodigal, open-handed, generous: he can’t keep that seed to himself. Like a guest at a wedding giving gallons of wine to the other partygoers, or a man on a hillside throwing out bread and fish to five thousand people, there is no question of stinting on all the good things he has to pour out on the field, whether it deserves them or not.

It’s interesting to set this parable next to the parable of the lost sheep. I wonder which sort of soil the Owner loves best? Of course the good soil is the most lovable and most attractive, but given that there’s more joy over the one sheep that was lost than over the other ninety-nine, perhaps it’s not too fanciful to say that the Owner might have the softest spot for the sorts of soil that give him most trouble to make fruitful. Perhaps it’s the most frustrating of our off-the-wall youngsters that God longs for, even more than his joy and delight in the well-behaved middle class intelligent clean ones…

So, a parable of change… change in the field as it is transformed by the faithful work of the Sower, change in the Sower as he listens to the Owner and tries to do his job as well as he can, and, most importantly perhaps, change in the community around the farm, as everyone benefits from the wholesome crop grown in the field.

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