From An Inquiring Stranger: A Civil Religion Blog by an Episcopal Priest (the Rev. Pamela Dolan)
The first time I held a paying job at a church, it was as Director of Family Ministries. That meant that I was in charge of Sunday school and all other programs for families with children up through fifth grade. When I was offered the job, my husband quipped, “Just don’t tell them that you’re not good at crafts and you don’t really like kids.”Funny guy, that husband of mine. But he was absolutely right that I’m terrible at crafts—I think I flunked basic scissor-work around the time we started making paper snowflakes in grade school. And it’s also true that I’ve never really considered myself a “kid person.”
My preference is to hang out with people who listen to NPR and read The New Yorker, people who like restaurants that don’t serve chicken fingers and who can appreciate 1980s popular culture without referring to is as “the Olden Days.” I don’t instantly idealize and sentimentalize someone just because he or she happens to be younger than most of the clothes in my closet. So it’s not that I don’t like kids, but I do take them one at a time, kind of like every other human I meet.
Still, I learned so much by working with kids in church. I learned that they are the best barometer for whether or not a service is working. If kids are irritable and bored, there are probably other people in your church who are feeling that way but are too polite (or too tuned out) to show it.
On April 18
The Rev. Pamela Dolan was welcomed by Bishop Wayne Smith as new rector at Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd
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Easter 2012
If most of us were to do a word-association game with “Easter” we would probably come up with words like: spring, flowers, bunnies, eggs, and (I hope) Resurrection. My own first memories of Easter have very little to do with church; Easter was about spending the day with relatives, wearing new a frilly new dress and shiny new shoes, and most of all it was about the enormous See’s Candy Rocky Road Easter egg that Aunt Mary always gave to each of the children in the family.
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