Sigh…..
Deeply inhale….
Exhale….
Okay. Now I’m ready.
There was a child abducted from the nursery at our church yesterday. The child was found after surveillance videos were reviewed. An email went out shortly after from the executive pastor with the subject line reading “Positive Outcome of Sunday 11:00 situation”. You can read the news report here if you are curious.
I’ve been stewing this whole thing in my head. I’ve read most of the comments people made on related news articles. I’ve reviewed the alleged perp’s Facebook page. I’ve held my wife in tears as she thought, “The child was Samuel’s age.” I’ve made inappropriate sarcastic comments about security at Chuck E. Cheese in my social networking updates. Etc…
Now I’m gonna dump a big fat blog about it.
I’ve got too many thoughts for just one post. If you give a crap what else I might think besides what I write today (and most healthy minded people won’t), then come hang out with me Friday or Saturday night while Angela is on a scrapbooking binge at a bed ‘n breakfast. I’ll settle for one blog post and try to keep it concise.
This situation sucks! For everyone. This is gonna be messy, and there will be some casualties. Church friends: this is gonna be stupid-messy-sucky. Bear with it, and bear it together. There will be a healthy amount of finger pointing and probably a bit a un-healthy finger pointing as we process this situation together. We will work it out. The crummy dialogue has to happen as a healthy way of gassing (expressing) ourselves to one another. Hang in there. Feel free to express your feelings. For example, I would probably say, “I feel disappointed, scared, insecure, overprotective, angry, and unsure.” Now that this whole crappy thing happened, we need to commit to one another and have the kind of uncomfortable conversation that sometimes healthy families have. Just step into it if you need to get something off your chest. For my part, I’m going to spout off on my blog and then shut-up.
I agree with a lot of what I’ve read about the appropriateness of our church’s security system and background checks. We have it down, and that’s all good. Our kids are probably just a little bit less safe at church than they are at school, and that’s safe enough for me. My problem is not with the limitations of our childrens’ ministry’s (editor’s note: notice the rare and highly prized double possessive noun) security system. My problem is that I think the event yesterday exposes a weakness in the way we do church. “Drop the kids off with people I barely know on the way to get coffee to drink while I’m entertained in an hour long service” is not a Sunday morning mission statement I would be proud to admit, but I’ll admit it all the same. What bothers me, and what I think might bother people observing how we do church, is that we claim to have a certain edge in the loving-relationships department when we compare ourselves to your average club or bowling league. After all… this is church… we are a family… we value community… blah, blah, blah. A kidnapping by a background-checked nursery worker brings us in to the light… we have a long way to go.
I hope that my church uses the shock of yesterday’s tragedy to motivate people to get to know one another better. I’ll be taking stock of how well I know the people I leave my kids with on Sunday morning. We could even maybe think about how effective (or not) our small groups are at fostering loving relationships. I’d like to challenge you to consider how committed you are to sticking with it at your church when things get weird or offensive or even *gasp* unbiblical (after all if you bail, then who will correct our hermeneutics). I’m dead serious! If you were thinking about leaving before, its too late now. If you bail out now, I’ll just stand on the corner shout that you’re a cowardly opportunist who left when things got hard. Just kidding. Seriously, KCCers… please stay with us. We need each other (well I need y’all anyway… you’d get along fine w/o me). We need to know one another. We (and I) could stand to know the people that work in the nursery well enough to be comfortable leaving our kids with them. That’s what I’m taking out of this whole thing.
BTW - I’m gonna sign up to work in the nursery. I was a little nervous about passing the background check. As long as they don’t read my blog, I think I’ll be alright.
I love you. I love KCC. You’re stuck with us. I don’t care how bad we F-up this childcare thing. You’ll see Sam in the nursery next week.