Comment Hightlights for Week of March 13, 2011

Posted by Alan Knox on Mar 19, 2011 in comment highlights | 1 comment

As I mentioned in the first post in this series, I want to highlight some of the comments that have been left on my blog posts during the past week. Hopefully, this will give more visibility to some of the reasons that I love blogging – dialog and interaction.

There were many, many good comments on my post “Children as Part of the Church Gathering.” I’ll highlight a comment from someone who usually doesn’t comment here. This is Sarah’s comment:

I come from an opposite thinking, and as a parent with young children, I insisted that there should be babysitting provided for them. (at my expense of course.) It was nearly impossible for me to concentrate while worrying that my kids were distracting others, and they certainly were distracting me! I don’t know how differently I would do things now, but I’m certainly less dogmatic about it.

Now that they are older, and want to be part of meetings, there is a new issue. Since they are 11 and 9, I find that some things are not necessarily “appropriate” for them to hear. Say someone needs to talk about the past, or talk about problems. I don’t want my children to cause brothers and sisters to “censor” their sharing. I don’t really know what to do about this. Right now, we are taking them and hoping that we will be able to discuss/explain later.

This may not be a problem in settings that are not as casual as ours.

There were also several very good comments on my follow-up post “Question about children in the church gathering.” Again, here is one of those comments from Jason:

Honestly, as a parent that is one of the biggest questions for our family as we think about migrating into simpler church.

It is truly one of the largest logistical issues for people in our stage of life. When I researched it last year I found just one meaningful article on the entire subject.

The questions I ask are:

– What do you do with them… (they can be distracting occasionally…)
– How are they discipled
– How can a simpler model of church benefit them
– Will they be incorporated into the community or become wall flowers, (or noisy wall flowers)
– and then in our case, how do you meaningfully involve kids with intellectual, developmental and behavioural differences.

I sure wish someone would write a book about it!

Dan (along with many others) wrote a great comment on my post “For I have given you an example“:

It seems that Jesus had a big emphasis on discipleship through shared-life and thus teaching by his own example (his narrative so to speak) so it would make sense that Jesus would want us to follow his example which is set out in the narratives of Scripture.

A lot of times it seems the example teaches us a bigger lesson about selflessness, love, obedience, or whatever else, so the actions are not necessarily required but the heart of the actions. It seems that Jesus taught stuff along these lines in the sermon on the mount about actions and the heart from which they come from.

So, the big question for me would be, does Jesus want us to actually wash people’s feet, or to serve people in whatever ways we can?

There were great comments on all three of those posts. If you can’t read all of the comments, you should.