Anyone who has prepared a youth or children's programme for a church weekend away will know the feeling: your minister is due to chat to the speaker, and once they have, you will have your theme for the weekend.
We try to teach the youth and children the same thing over the weekend as the adults, so this is a big moment - if the theme is Jonah, you're laughing; Lamentations (as we once had) - less so! So you can imagine how I felt when the theme came through as "learning to groan well," looking at three tricky psalms of lament! My initial thoughts were "no thank you, let's do something completely different," but my fantastic team convinced me to think again.
It is so easy to think that it is only adults who go through hard times, but many of those under 18 in our church family (and I'm sure in yours) have gone through some incredibly difficult things. And for those who haven't particularly, it would be great to prepare them for those moments, so that their reaction is always to run to God in times of darkness, rather than away from Him.
Defending the Youth and Children's Worker: it's not just the parents' job!
There has lately been a big push back in youth and children's ministry against leaving the job of discipling young …