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Several years ago, I was watching the Super Bowl and tweeting about it. The year was 2009. The internet was a toddler, and Twitter was an infant. It was right around the same time that some friends and I started tweeting about how kids’ ministry needed a hashtag that would make all kids’ ministry-related content on Twitter easily accessible and turn random thoughts into a stream of conversation. After some debate, we came up with several options. #CM #FAMIN #KIDMIN. CM was unclear, and FAMIN was a little dark. The clear winner, we all agreed, was Kidmin. We started pushing out the new hashtag #KIDMIN on Twitter and in our social media feeds, and within two years, Children’s Ministry had been renamed KIDMIN.
Why did this happen? Was it because my friends and I who thought it up were so brilliant or influential? No. It happened because we used the term ‘Kidmin’ enough that more people started saying it, and eventually the community as a whole adopted it. What we say matters, what do and what we call it, matters.
We need to make a similar shift today. We have to move from a mindset that sees what we do as caring for the physical well-being of kids, or even the spiritual well-being of kids, to becoming those obsessed with the Christlikeness of kids. That is why we need to start calling what we do by its name. We have to move what we do from children’s ministry to child discipleship. We need to move from children’s pastor or director of children’s ministry to director of child discipleship or pastor of child discipleship. Not because a title matters, but because we forget what matters most, and we need to be constantly reminded that we are discipling the next generation in their most formative years. That is our goal, our mission, and Christ’s command.
Cultures are created by words. Words have meaning because of what they proclaim.
The Neccesity of Words
“Preach the gospel and, if necessary, use words.” This saying is most often attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, though there are no records of him actually saying this.
The gospel is good news. It is news that is shared for the joy of all people. The gospel is good because of the truth it proclaims, a truth carried in and accomplished through words.
The book of John does not begin with the Incarnation but instead grounds the Incarnation in the creation of our world. He starts by telling us that our world was formed by words. That the Word that has come to us was present at the creation of our world. Let there be… (Genesis 1). John also tells us that God sent John, the cousin of Jesus, to be a witness to the person of Jesus and to speak sacred words that confirmed for us what heaven already knew.
And this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.”
—John 1:19-20
John the Baptist was gathering a following. The religious leaders asked him if he was the Christ. He “confessed” and said “no.” He used words to clarify that he was not the Christ. John the apostle tells us that the very next day after the priests and Levites asked, Jesus showed up.
The next day, he saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!— John 1:29
Here, John the Baptist proclaims the message and purpose of the Word made flesh. He is the Lamb to be sacrificed for the sins of the world. This message could be understood because of words spoken hundreds of years before, the word spoken of the Word to come:
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
— Isaiah 53:4-6
The message John the Baptist proclaims is identifying Jesus as the Christ. This is the power of words: they allow us to see the past collide with the future in the present. At the moment, John saw Jesus for who he was.
John was mistaken for the Messiah. It was through the sacredness of prophecy. The word of God concerning God’s Word was first realized in the clarity around Jesus. The divine revelation was followed by the prophetic proclamation of Jesus as the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world. These are the required words. What is so powerful in this interchange? Is the revelation by the Spirit of God that John, as the last prophet, was pointing to the first and final prophet?
This is how we are called to lead. We are to stand in a wilderness of words as John stood in a wilderness created by words (Let there be…land). We are only a voice in that wilderness, saying, “Prepare the way of the Lord” (see John 1:23). The role of spiritual writing isn’t writing Scripture. It is, however, using words to paint pictures and build structures composed of consonants and vowels, connected by the Spirit, that echo the words first inspired by the Spirit of God.
After John’s proclamation, Jesus was baptized to fulfill the words proclaimed of Him. Then, He was led by the Spirit of God into the wilderness. There, He fasted and was tempted by the devil to turn stones into bread for His own benefit, to provide for Himself outside of what His Father had ordained. It was a strike against the word of God that proclaimed Jesus’ sonship at His baptism of Jesus his sonship. Jesus responded by saying His identity was not in His ability to perform miraculous things, but in being fully God and fully man, and in being fully submitted to God’s word over His very appropriate human desire for food.
The words we speak in sermons to our kids, in jest to our friends and in the formation of our children matter because words matter. Our words are sacred not because of where they are spoken but because every word finds its home in the place of its first conception in the Word Himself. Every word has meaning because words flow like water through a flooded street searching for a drain. Every word that floods our phones, airways and paper exists because we were created by a God who speaks. He is a God who speaks through a world created by words, a God who speaks His love through a story, a myth fused with history, and a God who finally speaks to us through a God-Man, His final word — the Word in which creation, prophecy, and history all find their voice.
Words are sacred because we borrow from what has been created and use what has been spoken to testify to our generation of a God who said, “Let there be…” and “It is good” (Genesis 1). The quickest and most powerful way to change a culture is through the words we use. Our advocacy for Child Discipleship rather than children’s ministry isn’t semantics, because words draw pictures, focus energy and name reality. The role of a children’s discipleship pastor does include ministry to children, but the core purpose we are called to as pastors and parents is to Make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19).
Kidmin took off not because of a few unknown child discipleship pastors, but because the community embraced and amplified it. It has now become the term that is used instead of Kids ministry or Children’s ministry. Let’s do the same with Child discipleship. Because words matter and because our mission matters more.
Sam Luce is the Director of ChildDiscipleship.com at Awana. He co-authored Forming Faith, writes at samluce.substack.com, and is a frequent speaker. A former pastor of 28 years, Sam holds an M.A.BTS and a M.A.CCS from Knox Seminary. He is a current doctoral candidate at Western Theological Seminary. He and his wife, Sandra, have four children and live in Upstate New York.
