The Micah Paradigm: Building a Culture of Justice and Mercy in Your Church’s Children and Youth Programs

By Kelly Demo and Barbara McCall

Do you believe in a child's ability to make a difference in their community? Do you see youth as agents of change in the world? We do, too. Micah 6:8 urges us to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. Guided by this mandate and three child development models (cognitive, social, and spiritual), we have created a practical guide for church leaders to develop a culture of mercy and justice in their church. No matter the size of your congregation, this model will help the Christian educator, youth minister, or pastor who wants to empower their community's children and youth. Starting in preschool, our Helpers learn the concept of mercy as helping others. By the time they become Co-Creators in high school, they are engaging in justice work that takes on the powers of the world and walking humbly, in solidarity, with the poor and marginalized of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Sep 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666797121

Kelly Demo

Kelly Demo is the associate rector at St. Thomas the Apostle Episcopal Church in Overland Park, Kansas. In over twenty-five years of ministry, she has served as a diocesan missioner for youth in Kansas and Arkansas, led several parish youth groups, and worked for ten years with international aid organizations. Demo holds a bachelor of general science in theater from the University of Kansas and an MDiv from the Seminary of the Southwest.

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Part One

1

Introduction

During a recent summer, we traveled with twenty-two teens from Kansas to Houston, Texas to help with hurricane rebuilding efforts. One evening during their stay, we introduced them to an innovative and vibrant ministry there called ReVision. The Kansas youth were warmly welcomed into this community of inner-city youth who come together weekly for a gathering that is equal parts frenetic break dancing competition, Christian fellowship, and all-out party.

Behind the church where ReVision has its gatherings is a large soccer field (the most significant green space in west Houston) where a group of young immigrants and refugees from Africa and South and Central America gather daily to practice soccer and build community. In the previous year, this unlikely team had both endured Hurricane Harvey and went on to win the Texas state championship. It's the stuff of Hollywood movies!

Some of the Kansas youth watched them, and as practice ended, they went out on the field and started kicking the ball around with them. Within a few minutes, they were all laughing and playing this international game together. By evening's end, they had exchanged social media contacts, and the Kansas youth invited the soccer team to join them at the beach the next day!

Several months later, we were informed by the soccer team's coach that ReVison's soccer team gets lots and lots of visitors. Many people are intrigued by their story, donors want to watch the team play, and they even get college coaches scouting the players. But, no one had ever gone out and played with these young men and gotten to know them as the kids in the youth group did that night.

Then it hit us; that was the idea. That was the point all along.

The youth in this group had grown up with very intentional teachings about dignity, justice, humility, and servant leadership. Not that they could have articulated this. The youth that night were having a good time with new friends. But they had started in kindergarten Sunday School by pulling up a red wagon filled with donated food to the altar to be blessed. They gathered and donated mittens in the winter for the children of a local school and sang Christmas carols in nursing homes. They had attended the church's summer camps that focused on giving back to the community and getting outside their suburban bubble. They had done family outreach days together and mission trips focused on homelessness and poverty issues. They had learned someone experiencing homelessness is worthy of conversation and a smile. Some of them had begun to create their own projects designed to give back to the church and the world.

But they did not walk onto the soccer field thinking, I am going to live out my faith by engaging in conversation with people different than myself. Instead, it was, They play soccer. WE play soccer. Let's play soccer! That is the essence of solidarity which is the ultimate goal of our children and youth program.

Human connection. Seeing the other as a cherished child of God created in the Divine Image. We may start by letting our kindergarteners choose what food items they want to donate to the food pantry that serves the homeless. But in the end, they must see that, in God's eyes and God's economy, they are no different from those homeless individuals. No different than the refugee. No different than the prisoner. As we strive to raise our children in a broken world, both as parents and as faith communities, that is the endgame; to grow children into adults who will strive to love one another, not as we love ourselves, but as Christ loves us.

In Robert Coles' seminal book, The Spiritual Life of Children, he talks about children as spiritual pilgrims. Often that phrase is reserved for the adult making their way through life with varied experiences of the divine. However, Cole realizes that the journey, struggles, and questions of faith begin at a very young age. Through interviews and conversations with children, he gives voice to the inner thoughts, fears, and dreams as children explore their relationship with God and the world.

In the chapter on children as pilgrims, he recounts a conversation he had with Dorothy Day, who was a journalist and radical social justice advocate in the Roman Catholic Church from 1917 until she died in 1980. She says:

I think my 'pilgrimage' began when I was a child, when I was seven or eight. You ask why then—well, I have a memory, and to me, it's the start of my life, my spiritual journey. I'm sitting with my mother, and she's telling me about some trouble in the world, about children like me who don't have enough food—they're dying. I'm eating a doughnut, I think. I ask my mother why other children don't have doughnuts, and I do. She says it's the way the world is, something like that. I don't remember her words, but I can still see her face; it's the face of someone who is sad and resigned, and perhaps she was embarrassed for the sake of all of us human beings that we keep letting such terrible injustices remain. (I'm putting words and ideas into her mouth now!) Anyway, I remember her face—she was troubled. Maybe she was trying to decide what to tell her bothersome daughter! Most of all, I remember trying to understand what it meant—me eating a doughnut and lots of children with no food at all. Finally, I must have decided to solve the world's problems of hunger on my own because I asked my mother if she'd take my doughnut and send it to some child whose stomach was empty. I don't remember my words. I just remember holding the doughnut up and hoping she'd take it and give it to someone, some child. I also remember her saying no, she couldn't do that because the children she'd been telling me about didn't live nearby. I didn't eat that doughnut! I put it down on the kitchen table, and I can still see my mother's face: she didn't know what to say or do! She was puzzled, and so was I! I must have taken that moment to heart because years later, my mother told me that I kept asking her whether there wasn't someone who needed my morning doughnut or two! I asked her if God knew someone nearby or if He could help us with our modest doughnut plan—to give the hungry some of our abundance! I don't remember asking her that, asking her how we might enlist God in this effort, but she says I kept talking about God and Jesus and feeding the hungry with doughnuts until she told me, please, to stop!

What I do remember is being a little older, maybe ten or eleven, and walking with my father past some beggars on the street and asking him if we could go and buy something for them—some doughnuts! He said no, we were in a hurry. I can see us right now in my mind, so clear! And I can feel my sadness and my disappointment. I remember, after that walking by myself and wondering about the world, wondering why some people had so much, and some people had so little, and wondering what God thought about such matters . . . By the time I was, I think, eleven, twelve, I was having talks with myself. I was wondering about what my life would be like. I was trying to figure out who God was and what He wanted, and what I'd be when I grew up, and whether I should go to college, and what I'd do with my education . . .In many ways, I feel I'm the same person now that I was when I was a girl of nine, maybe or ten, or eleven . . .Jesus kept on telling us we should try to be like children- be more open to life, curious about it, trusting of it and be less cynical and skeptical and full of ourselves, as we so often are as we get older.¹

This passage beautifully illustrates Day's spiritual development and critical moments that developed her into the fierce justice advocate who shaped a generation. Take for instance, Ms. Day's introduction to poverty when she realized that she had a doughnut, but many children her age would go hungry. Using Piaget's developmental model, that was a jump from preoperational thinking to concrete thinking. Piaget, a psychologist living in the 1930s, was the first to study and develop a model of children's cognitive development. His work was groundbreaking, and much of our understanding of human development