First, my review of Stollar’s book, The Kingdom of Children: A Liberation Theology, is published in print and online at TheChristian Century.
Second, the Century was kind enough to interview me about the review and child liberation theology more generally. That is linked here and below at the thumbnail:
Third, I interact with Stollar and Jesus and Rabbi Irving Greenberg and others in Currents in Theology and Mission. Best part: a cameo paragraph by my pre-teen daughter. The article is free to access, linked here. It’s called: “A Burning Child in the Midst: The Promise and Power of R.L. Stollar’s Child Liberation Theology.”
What I’m most excited about in all of the above is my daughter’s writing. What I’m next-most excited about is my realization that Jesus’s healing of a child in Mark 9 directly and literally satisfies Rabbi Greenberg’s halting claim: “No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.” I want to expand on this later.
I have come to see the Kingdom of God anew through the lens of childhood and actual children, which has influenced how I see and interact with the world and people around me. The above three pieces will give you just a taste.
Early in 2023 I re-read the Gospels, paying close attention to how Jesus interacted with children. Going back to how much Jesus loved and honored children in his ministry has been transformative for me.
Now I’m leading a five-session Webinar series: A Little Child Shall Lead Them: A Biblical Theology of Children and the Kingdom of God. It’s free, and I’m offering it in the hopes that all of us might grow in how we understand, love, and advocate for children.
The series uses Accordance Bible Software’s Webinar platform, but you don’t need to have Accordance to participate. Details are in this one-pager; you can go straight to the registration landing page here. First session is this Wednesday (12/20) at 12p Eastern (Christmas-themed!), and then the first four Wednesdays in January.
R.L. Stollar’s new book vaulted into my Top 5 Books Ever before I’d even finished reading it. It’s called The Kingdom of Children: A Liberation Theology. (Publisher product page / $4.99 on Kindle now (affiliate link))
Book review and additional interaction forthcoming. For now: I haven’t stopped thinking about The Kingdom of Children since reading it. It’s already having the same impact on my thinking and pastoral practice as I’ve experienced from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and from the late Sang Hyun Lee’s From a Liminal Place. I wrote more about this here, with—I hope—more to follow.
Pais is the first—and only—theologian to dedicate an entire book to a child liberation theology to date. While various individuals and organizations have explored a theology of childhood or advocated for child theology, the specific topic of child liberation theology has received very little attention. My goal with this book is to change that and bring the vital conversation about child liberation theology forward to a new generation.
Time will tell to what extent Stollar meets his goal, but I’m 100% behind it. And for what it’s worth, both theorizing and practicing child liberation theology are now front and center with me. And for that I am grateful.
Too many to count were the college papers I finished writing at 3:00 a.m. that I knew were brilliant. Just stunning stuff that was going to land me in a peer-reviewed academic journal as an undergraduate.
Not only was I never published as an undergrad, but most of those papers—even as I groggily re-read them while walking to class later in the morning—turned out to be… not as amazing as I’d thought. My twilight assessment had been clouded by lack of sleep, caffeine, adrenaline, and repeat listens to Coldplay’s first album (you know, the good one).
A rare exception is a paper I wrote my senior year in Spanish, an extended review of Paulo Freire’s 1974 essay, “Las iglesias, la educación, y el proceso de liberación humana en la historia” (“Churches, Education, and the Process of Human Liberation in History”).
I titled my essay, “Gritar con los oprimidos: Una teoría de liberación para la juventud en el ministerio,” which in English is, “Shouting with the Oppressed: A Theory of Liberation for Youth in Ministry.” In true liberation theology fashion, I wrote the paper while active in youth ministry. And falling short of liberation theology ideals, I did not quote or amplify actual voices of young people in my essay. But I set out a theoretical framework that, in practice, powerfully shaped my ministry with youth in a well-to-do, predominantly white suburb.
I concluded (grandiosely, or inspired—let the reader decide):
In this model, we do not start with ourselves, but we start with listening to the voice of the oppressed person. In this way, the voice of the oppressed will be heard throughout the world. We use power in the fight with them against the elites and towards a new historical reality, constituted by us, and that reflects the glory of God on earth.
Today Freire’s longer Pedagogy of the Oppressed remains one of books that has most shaped me. I particularly thrilled, a few years ago, to be able to discuss Freire’s work and approach in detail with school educators in my congregation. I like to think that led to all of our teaching—in our respective spheres—shaping a reality more in line with the liberation Jesus longs to bring to the world.
Still, since writing my (real or imagined) pièce de résistance 20+ years ago, I’ve often found myself lulled into accepting the status quo in church settings. Liberation theology has been an afterthought. An after-praxis.
But our God is a liberating God, and that beautiful and powerful reality is brought to bear on God’s people throughout the pages of Scripture. And today, too: God still liberates—and longs to liberate—those who are oppressed and kept from living what Jesus called “life to the fullest.”
Having nearly forgotten my writing (and practice) around “Liberation for Youth,” I recently discovered child liberation theology. It’s awesome, Christocentric, generative, and powerful.
Here are four sources that I’ve loved sitting with as I seek to reintegrate this important framework—liberation theology—into my own life and ministry, with a particular focus on children:
1. The Gospels
Recently I slowly re-read the Gospels with an eye toward how Jesus interacted with children and other vulnerable populations. The read-through has been transformative for me. And not just temporarily so.
This week what’s really sticking out to me are two sayings of Jesus, both of which call for a centering of children in the Kingdom of God and in our own lives:
Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.
— Matthew 19:14 // Mark 10:14 // Luke 18:16
And this gem, which I’ve seen less frequently cited, even in literature talking about Jesus and children:
Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
—Matthew 18:3
Unless you change! This is not just Jesus talking about how he loves children, or about how we adults should love children, but about how we should become like little children. To be faithful to Jesus, we have to stop and ask: How are little children, that we can become like them? In what ways do children know and wonder about and access and experience God, and how can I do the same?
Yes, we are to love children like Jesus does. And we are to love children like we love Jesus. But Matthew 18:3 is saying also: love Jesus like children do. We adults have a long ways to go on this one.
2. R. L. Stollar
I’ve spent hours reading his site already. But perhaps start here, with “Towards a Child Liberation Theology.” Take, for example, just this extraordinary paragraph, that is already beginning to invigorate how I read the Bible:
Child liberation theology thus begins with the Child that is Jesus and the children of all histories and locations who bear God’s image. And it places these children at the center of religious texts. It asks us to consider religious texts from the vantage point of those children — from the vantage point of Jesus as the God Child and all children as God images. Thus we must read our texts from the interpretive lens of these children. Children become the point from which all our exegesis and praxis must begin and end.
He has a great, accessible 8-page PDF called “Child Liberation Theology” that is freely available here.
EDIT: Especially valuable is Dr. Nessan’s summary of the method of liberation theology:
The method of liberation theologies consists of five elements: 1) identification with particular forms of oppression and suffering, 2) prophetic critique of that condition, 3) social analysis of the causes of oppression and suffering, 4) biblical and theological engagement to address that suffering and overcome that oppression, and 5) advocacy of structural change toward a greater approximation of justice.
4. My Children
Perhaps most important of all, I’ve found that as I’ve engaged with child liberation theology recently, I’ve become more likely to be with—and enjoy being with—my own children in an unhurried, unpressured way. How do they know and love God? How do they experience God’s love and talk about it? What insights do they want to share with me? What questions are they asking, and what questions and longings are behind those questions?
Child liberation theology offers hope not just for structures and for the world and for the church, but for individual family relationships. And child liberation theology is a powerful framework—rooted in the words and person of Jesus himself—that God uses to fulfill the glorious promise in Malachi 4:6:
He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse.
I have been thinking more about intentional discipleship. There are the classic questions of scope and sequence to consider. And the end results: if we are seeking to make disciples of Jesus—in this youth ministry, in this church, in this denomination—what does a disciple look like? What does a disciple know, do, and feel? What are the identity and characteristics of one?
Then there are programmatic questions to answer. How do we walk into the future where these disciples exist? How do we get there? In other words, what is the “discipleship pathway” of our ministry/church/denomination? What is the process we hope people will engage in to grow as disciples of Jesus? Here’s one church’s answer.
Thinking through a pathway for the congregation I pastor, I got excited because I came up with (or thought I came up with) a possible sequence that all starts with the same letter: Gather, Grow, Give, Go.
Once a framework is in place, the real fun begins. What opportunities do we provide to just gather? Worship services, parties, meals, etc. And what settings do we create where we invite people to grow? Membership class, life groups, and so on.
I starting thinking about a discipleship pathway again, because I’m reading a book called 8 Virtues of Rapidly Growing Churches. The authors Matt Miofsky and Jason Byassee make a case for the importance of having a specific, articulated discipleship process. Although the Holy Spirit can do anything, anywhere, any-how, discipleship tends not to just randomly happen:
“One thing rapidly growing churches (RGCs) do is they have a clear and effective discipleship process. Some call it connections, some assimilation, others new members orientation—but the purpose is the same—to help a new guest become a deeply committed follower of Christ. They make this discipleship process transparent for what they want people to do. User friendly, accessible, clear. They don’t shower listeners with a thousand options for nice things they might do. They focus: do this, not that. They keep it simple, often linear. Start with this class. Next join a small group. Finally serve here. Think of the difference between sitting down and eating at the Cheesecake Factory, which famously boasts over 250 different menu options made from scratch, or eating at a cozy French bistro with a prix fixe menu. One offers a dizzying amount of choice; the other leads you through one carefully curated, skillfully crafted, and masterfully presented meal. RGCs act more like the prix fixe restaurant. They work on a simple, effective, and clear process that helps new people become disciples of Jesus. Everything and anything that takes away from that focus is cut. As Matt often puts it, rapidly growing churches are like ducks. They look placid on the water. But underneath they’re paddling like crazy! The work is not so much in getting people in the door. It’s in laying out for those people the next obvious steps to take in being a disciple.”
I realized, too, that a tool I used to use in consulting—the Logic Model—can be powerful here. More on that in a future post.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear in the comments how your ministry, church, denomination, and especially how you think your own life might be following some kind of discernible discipleship “pathway”?
Complicating the process is that I’d imagine most of us look back down the road and see lots of zigs and zags… not quite sure how you “program” for that reality!
For any of us who write, curate, or teach curriculum, it’s good to remember that what we usually call “curriculum” is just one of (at least) four kinds of curricula that shape all of us.
In one footnote, authors Gary A. Parrett and S. Steve Kang talk about three kinds of curriculum:
explicit curriculum: this includes documentation around vision, the scope and sequence of teaching curriculum, and what we hope students will be, know, feel, and do.
implicit curriculum: I think of this as not just what’s formally “taught” but what’s “caught.” It’s the ethos or environment that a person feels as they encounter the explicit curriculum. Implicit curriculum includes the actions (culture) that “speak louder than words.”
null curriculum: this is what we don’t teach. Better, it’s: “what a teaching institution chooses not to teach at all” (my emphasis). If what we teach is a choice, so is what we don’t teach. Parrett and Kang quote Elliot W. Eisner: “Ignorance is not simply a neutral void; it has important effects on the kinds of options one is able to consider, the alternatives that one can examine, and the perspectives from which one can view a situation or problems.”
To consider one example of null curriculum: trauma responses may not make sense to someone who is not trauma-informed, so if something like “trauma and its effects” or “where Jesus is present in trauma” are not in a church’s explicit curriculum, they are now null curriculum, and a student may not have robust categories and language to process difficult events.
I’d add a #4 to the above three kinds of curriculum.
The church doesn’t do spiritual formation in a vacuum. So we also want to ask: what is the external curriculum all our people are already being formed by, in their other 160+ hours/week?
There is family, greater society, school, friends, advertising, media, etc. But this “curriculum” is only “external” from the vantage point of the church. These character-shaping forces move from external to internal for all of us. We have an internalized curriculum that has formed and is forming us. And we each bring our formed self to any event, group, gathering, or relationship where explicit curriculum is present. There are no blank slates.
As a full-time vocational minister for 20+ years, knee-deep in the life of a church or Christian community for 40+ hours a week, I’ve tended to focus on #1 and #2—explicit and implicit curriculum.
That’s necessary, but I’m realizing it’s not enough. I want to pay more attention to null curriculum and external curriculum.
Even in strategic planning and documenting discipleship pathways, how can we take into account all four of these kinds of curricula?
As we go about learning and growing in the faith, we can ask: what areas have we missed, glossed over, or refused to engage in (null curriculum)? Are there things we Christians need to un-learn, or re-learn? What other lived contexts do we need to take more seriously as we do spiritual formation (external curriculum)?
And—most important—how does the good news of Jesus speak into all of the contexts that shape us?
Attending to more than just explicit and implicit curriculum requires more creative thinking and deeper work, but the result—more fully formed disciples of Jesus— is worth it.
There is a Bible verse that always stops me in my tracks:
Herod was furious when he realized that the wise men had outwitted him. He sent soldiers to kill all the boys in and around Bethlehem who were two years old and under, based on the wise men’s report of the star’s first appearance.
—Matthew 2:16 (New Living Translation)
This is some of the most heinous evil the Bible reports. Can you imagine?
Herod couldn’t find Jesus, but he knew Jesus was in Bethlehem or nearby, and he knew Jesus was two years old or under. So Herod just took that whole group of people and had them killed. It’s an egregious abuse of power.
The Gospels record attempts on Jesus’s life once he is active in ministry, but it’s a miracle that Jesus even made it to adulthood. He emerged from an entire generation of babies that Herod ordered murdered.
The story of those babies and their families doesn’t stop with their murder. The parents had to live with the death of their children for the rest of their lives. All the birthdays, yearly feasts, and celebrations: gone. Two high school graduations—class of ’13 and class of ’14—cancelled, because no one was there to graduate. A murderous, abusive, vindictive tyrant stole those kids from their parents.
Jesus’s birth was surrounded by child abuse.
“O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie”? Nope. At least not for long. Herod was making that little town a cesspool of death and trauma. There’s no stillness in what Matthew goes on to describe, quoting the prophet Jeremiah:
“A cry was heard in Ramah— weeping and great mourning. Rachel weeps for her children, refusing to be comforted, for they are dead.”
Did Mary and Joseph and Jesus have survivor’s guilt? How awful must Mary and Joseph have felt about all this? And what was Jesus’s reaction when he realized the circumstances surrounding his birth? Surely this did not look like the salvation the angel had promised Jesus would bring—maybe even its opposite.
I’ve started wondering: all this killing of little babies… did this shape Jesus’s passion for ministering to children? Was it a deeply formative experience for how Jesus would live in the world?
More specifically, did the abuse and trauma Jesus learned about inspire him to especially love the abused and traumatized? Did the erasure of children and complete destruction of their rights lead him to become a champion of children?
Reading against such a backdrop, these words of Jesus strike me as even more poignant—and powerful:
“Let the little children come, and do not forbid them, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”
“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
“Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.
And this powerful moment:
And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.
I have to think Jesus carried all the death and grief and trauma that others experienced, not just at the cross, but from the very time he was born. When he looked at the children coming to him, did he remember all the children that would never have a chance to approach him? When he blessed the children, was it a deliberate undoing of the curse Herod had pronounced?
Miraculously, Jesus survived citywide infanticide. He lived through that systemic abuse. Now he would prioritize the well-being of children. He would make sure they could truly live.
This summer we played with PlaSmart’s Watermelon Ball JR, a water toy I thought the kids might play with for a couple minutes and then get bored. But we all found it really fun!
As you can see, it floats! Here the predator stalks its prey:
But it also moves underwater really well. Whether at the beach or (better) in a swimming pool, we had lots of fun passing it to each other and playing keep away by pushing it through the water. Even though it pops up to the surface to float, you can move it around pretty easily underwater.
The ball comes with a mechanism to easily fill it with water from a hose—we filled it to probably about 2/3 full, which ended up working just fine. It hasn’t leaked at all.
Here are a couple of more images from PlaSmart.
The Watermelon Ball is so named because it is:
Designed to look, feel, and behave like a watermelon in water. Real watermelons are nearly neutrally buoyant: first sinking to the bottom then slowly rising to the top, making them ideal for all kinds of water games.
It probably would have been pretty fun to be among the group of people testing out real watermelons to discover that they are “nearly neutrally buoyant” (probably a pool party accident). I didn’t cross-test this toy against a watermelon, so can’t speak to the similarities, but the toy definitely does what it promises.
Here is the product page. You can follow PlaSmart via Twitter and Facebook. And here’s the ball on Amazon.
Helen Ahpornsiri’s Drawn from Nature might be the most beautiful children’s book we’ve ever read. (And we’ve read a lot of them over the years.)
Ahpornsiri uses plants pressed by hand to lead the reader through the four seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. The text itself is informative and lyrical, but the artwork is stunning.
Here are some pictures:
I can’t imagine how long it takes to illustrate a book (let alone do one page!) with hand-pressed plants. This 64-page book invites staring and wonder at the beauty of creation… not just that Ahpornsiri created from pressed plants, but how she did it. The creations that emerge are gorgeous.
My kids have gotten lost in this book already, as have I. It’s really fun to read a section at bedtime, but any child—reader or not—can easily find themselves swept up in these pages.
You can go here to look inside. Find the book at Amazon here, or through its publisher here.
Thanks to the good folks at Candlewick/Big Picture Press for sending the book for review, though that did not influence my opinions.
Words on the Word 