Today was Caroline’s first day at church and there was one first during church, one first after church, and one interesting discussion that followed:
One First During Church:
We dropped Caroline off at Little Village, which is the children’s ministry at our church. We put our parent pick-up sticker on her, left some instructions for the lovely ladies in the nursery, and made our way to church. We sat with some friends of ours and the service started. Haley was nervous since this was the first time we’d left our baby with the church nursery. The service began and everything seemed fine, until five minutes later when the nursery paging service illuminated our parent code which meant we needed to check on our baby. Haley left to go see what was going on and when she came back approximately 20 minutes later she told me that Caroline had been hysterically crying and had spit up all over one of the nursery workers. She had gotten her to fall asleep in one of their baby rockers and we held our breaths until the end of the sermon, and then grabbed her and moseyed on our way. Definitely not how we envisioned Caroline’s time in the nursery, but not the worst I’d ever heard either.
One First After Church:
We met with a girl we knew from church about the possibility of her moving into one of our guest rooms for the fall semester. We presented what we thought was a great blessing for her, and she thought it would be great. We’re hoping that this works out and that we can use the gift of our house to bless others. We really wanted our house to be a ministry opportunity for our family and beyond. If this doesn’t work out that’s completely ok, but it would be a great opportunity for us and her. We’ve tried to think through all the possible downfalls of this and really be intentional about making sure we’re above reproach. The major hurdle was the possibility that Haley were to go out of town. The solution we came up with was for me to go to my parent’s house for the evenings Haley is out of town just to make sure there is no way for anyone to call anything into question. Hopefully this won’t be the only time we can use the house God blessed us with as a ministry opportunity.
An Interesting Discussion:
The sermon at church was talking about the local church body and how they are being very intentional about the ways they are encouraging our discipleship. They laid out their plan for every level of church, from children to adults. While most of the age ranges made sense, the issue of youth ministry at our church left Haley and I with a big discussion. Haley grew up with a strong youth group that allowed her to forge lifelong relationships with her friends at school as well as provided adults that consistently loved and discipled her. Our church’s stance is that they don’t use a “program-driven” youth ministry, and they outlined why that is. While Haley and I both understand their point-of-view on the topic, we don’t necessarily agree. Our stance for now is going to be to see how the youth ministry morphs over the next few years and make a decision about youth ministry when Caroline is closer to that age. Haley and I both agree that we love their children’s program as well as the theology of the church, but we want to have other adults than just ourselves pouring wisdom and the gospel into their lives as they grow up. It was a great discussion for the two of us and one that we will have to revisit later.