Encouraging Young Missionary Disciples

‘Envision children and young people in their discipleship. Encourage the outworking of the children’s strategy and the appointment of regional children’s advisors.  Develop a process for recognising and accrediting children’s workers, together with strategies for their training, development, support and deployment.’

Reports from Baptist churches, through their Annual Returns forms between 2000-2004, indicated a loss of contact with almost one third of children under 12.  In response to this startling statistic, BUGB Council commissioned some research, and Baptist churches were encouraged to take part in the On Our Knees prayer days in June 2006 and November 2007.

A national strategic response was presented to BUGB Council in November 2006, and a working group of the Mission Executive has met to continue to work out the children’s strategy.  This group recognised:

• That every child is important to God and we need to find ways for churches to be welcoming, safe and inclusive in all ways.
• The right of children and young people to explore and celebrate their faith and to worship God is throughout scripture.
• That a child is no more of a learner disciple than anyone of any age.  We are all on a journey and none of us has reached perfection. We need to look at whole life discipleship instead of modular faith
• That we need to prepare children, along with disciples of all ages, to build robust and enduring faith based on a relationship with God using frameworks, rather than rules and simple stories.
• Children and young people, in the same way are at different places on their spiritual journey.  As such, although not highlighted in this report, we need to build proper Sowing Reaping Keeping principles in to what we do. (Laurence Singlehurst, 1996, Crossway Books)
• Children have different needs to young people.  In this document we have made no attempt to differentiate between the two, but to highlight many issues, that future work would need to explore.

A further paper was presented to Council in November 2009  EYMD Council Paper Nov09

A task group is continuing to engage in the process of consultation, and encouraging churches of the Union to consider the place and discipleship of children and young people within their community, allowing them to fully participate in the community of Christ’s people.