The Nurturing Care two day engagement with Northern California pastors reminds us that creativity requires hard work at times. The gathering of 20 ministers across seven churches resulted included people with definite passion and a deep awareness of their context and expressed passion for children.

Opening night included a brief orientation to our work together (using a variation of design thinking/learning as the backdrop), a time of choosing “words” that describe children and naming challenges the congregations face. Throughout the exercise the invitation was to find a problem worth exploring through new ministry strategies, rather than new solutions to apply. While focusing on elementary children’s experience of God remained center to the conversations, the group was also invited to consider how gratitude, giving thanks, could be woven into the projects.

The next morning afforded time to cluster congregations according to similar challenges and then invite those congregations to try to look for the underly theme or flow across those challenges that might provide a way forward. Never an easy task, the three groups began to coalesce around three themes:

The focus on children’s experience during congregational worship,

A concern of the distractions outside the church that often influence children’s Christlike identity and how prayer might respond,

And the simple practice of helping children “be seen” in congregations where children often are not a fully appreciated.

The next phase of the “work” of creativity entailed bringing churches “together” in setting up a working strategy/prototype that might address the varying needs. Much like the our California weather if intermittent sun and rain, there were bright spots and “cloudy moments” as people wrestled to bring general challenges, and myriad activities, into a semblance of a shared strategy or prototype.

Some groups struggled around the process and focus (how to balance distractions by adults with experiences of God and the question of infusing thanksgiving), others worked across language barriers and context (English/Spanish collaborations that entailed different congregational practice and use of space), and still others wrestled with integration of a new concept, prayer partners, alongside well established plans and protocols already in place. Design thinking allows for creativity across partnerships but can be daunting integrating various congregational practices. Often churches had to find the connectors (much like legos) but retain elements true to their worship flow or physical setting. Two examples emerged.

One of the most intriguing concepts was the creation of a children’s “Garden” where children’s could be seen through their expressions of creativity in one setting where the congregation has “space” to engage, while a different worshiping community “rents” from an existing congregation. The partners worked toward a conversation around bridging the gardening experience with worship so that both congregations might find points of intersection.

A second challenge emerged with two congregations seeking to empower children in worship yet one church already includes children in worship throughout the service and the other congregation seeks to introduce children during the entire worship session. Balancing the need to prepare adults alongside empowering children brought different questions, as did wrestling with making gratitude a central focus or merely as secondary theme.

As the Nurturing Care team introduced the guidelines for preparing for the mini-grants, fresh questions arose whether some ideas really require funding or actually might prayer partners be introduced without additional funding? Investment and stewardship raised fresh questions alongside the difficult of partnering across long distances between churches.

Which funded projects will finally emerge will not be known for several weeks. Churches need time to take their final strategy/prototype and determine which activities deserve the greatest attention and which “steps” within those activities require specific funding. During this phase there may be opportunities to coach and even find additional ideas that remained unspoken or unforeseen at first (as happened in Kansas City). I suspect this next phase will include additional “cloudy” moments of parsing through the strategy… but hopefully with some sunshine and even a rainbow of hope at the end.

Overall we hope that grants will empower at least four of the seven churches to find a way forward working together, perhaps more. Time will tell. Still, the retreat itself yielded insights, ideas, and activities that may well be used time and again within each congregation. Hopefully the hard work of these caring pastors will bear fruit for the future.