These past couple weeks we’ve been going into several neighborhoods in the area doing a lot of children’s ministry.
I’ve heard that we might be doing a lot of children’s ministry on the World Race, but I never really caught vision of why. To me, children’s ministry just meant playing with kids because they are cute and make for great pictures, that it’s a feel-good opportunity for some sort of “fun ministry,” that it’s not the “real” ministry that I wanted to be doing. I figured that it would just be like doing Christian daycare around the world.
But what we are doing is very different than what I thought, expected, or understood. Back home, it seems like a lot of times children’s ministry is its own subset of the church ministry—reaching out to individual groups like children, youth, college age, single adults, married couples, etc. But here at 6:8 Ministries, in the midst of Latin American culture which highly values their children, we go into neighborhoods to build relationships with the community, and the way we can start building relationships is by inviting the kids out to play.
If someone came into a subdivision back in the States and started inviting the children to come out and play, that person would be seen as being fairly creepy and might just have the police called on them. But here, that’s not an issue in this culture. It is completely normal here to go into a neighborhood and invite the children to come out to play. In these poor communities, this gives the kids something to do to have fun.
Being here kind of reminds me of what it must have been like to grow up in the ‘40s or ‘50s which kids in the States would apparently be out all day playing in the streets without their parents necessarily keeping an eye on them, and they just had to be home when the street lights came on.
By inviting the children out to play, we are building trust and relationships with the families and ultimately the community at large. We can then start a feeding center in that area—setting up a table and serving the children food (the children are the most vulnerable, so they are served first, but of course if there is still food left over after all the children have gotten food, we certainly are not going to turn away anyone else). And ultimately, the hope is to build enough trust with the people to be able to have the right and privilege to share the Gospel with them, speaking into their lives, inviting them to the local church that we are connected with, and ultimately revitalizing the community with the truth of the Gospel of Christ.
I had the opportunity to go with some of the local missionaries here into the squatter homes of the people living here (squatter homes are houses that people build out of scraps that they can find) to inform the families that their child had a sponcership from someone back in the States. That was really great for me, being able to see this side of that. We were able to pray with some of the families, and just really truly minister the Gospel in a very real and practical way.
One of the more difficult times for me was when we were doing a feeding in one of the areas, and I was one of the people actually dishing out the food. The kids kept coming, but at the end, we just ran out of food. We ran out of beans and salad first, but I was still serving the rice. Then, after scraping the very last little bit I could out of the pan, I had to tell these little 5, 6 and 7 year olds that there was no more food. That was heartbreaking. That happened a week ago, but even as I sit here typing this, it breaks my heart all over again to the point of tears.
Before I left for the Race, one of my best friends told me that he saw me working with a lot of kids over this next year. To be honest, at first I was kind of worried about that because I didn’t know how that would be, how I would be at that, etc. But actually being here, yes, it has been very difficult at times, but I know that I am actually being here loving these children, loving the families, serving the community. This isn’t even the end of month one yet, but God has already been changing and molding the way I few ministry.
