Kids at House Blend (1)

One of the things we do at Artisan is House Blend - a relatively informal time at someone's house. (It happens to be at our house right now.) At House Blend, people come, eat, fellowship, worship, take communion together and ponder the scriptures. (and George likes to talk ...)

The Artisan folk were pretty brave having it at our house considering we don't really fit the post-modern mold or any church model we've been part of. But years ago when our kids were young, of all the home groups in our church, ours was one of the few (maybe the only one) that always included the kids. The kids usually spent the time playing and growing their relationsips with each other as opposed to staying around and participating, depending on their ages, but they came and they were a part of the group. George and I have been looking for little ways to include the kids and as I was staring at little fingers covered with sticky bread dough in the middle of my living room on Friday night, I realized that I've not blogged about this.

I don't remember which week was which but one week we took communion right after the meal as part of the meal (assuming it was part of the meal centuries ago when it first happened). We served meal sized portions of juice and bread. The kids joined us and George had some questions for them that had to do with the other things we did that night.

Another week, closing our eyes, we pictured ourselves as children receiving something from the Lord and how we would physically do that thinking it would be a good movement intro to lifting our hands. Let it be said that one of the very few who actually did something with their bodies, and the only one who lifted his hands high, was a child.

I only know the old worship songs and I didn't want to do the old worship songs so I decided to try something different. We have a young crew - a musical crew. Some of the kids like to make up songs. So I was thinking that psalm echo songs might be easy to make up and easy to do with the kids. It's scripture. If the song gets stuck in your head you get to meditate on the Word. So, for better or for worse, we used a few sentences from Psalms and made up some tunes and did an echo type deal. Yes, it was a little odd for some (most?) but that's ok. Adults and kids were basically all faced with the same challenge. Younger kids have the advantage of being less self-conscious.