Answer:
Children’s ministry is exceptionally important. I can vouch for that first-hand. I first came to know Christ when I was a child, through the ministry of volunteers who taught the Bible in my school. As I’ve served on various ministry teams, I’ve had the joy of sharing the Bible with children. I’ve also had the privilege of working directly alongside vocational children’s ministers, and had a lot of fun in the process. I’ve seen first-hand how valuable children’s ministry is and how much of a difference it makes, not only to the lives of children themselves (including my own children), but also to the lives of their families (including to my own family as I was growing up), and in fact to the church family as a whole.
To do children’s ministry well, you need great theological depth. As I teach theological students at Moore College, one of the things I often highlight is that children’s ministers need exceptionally good theological training. Why is that? Well, when you’re teaching adults, it’s possible to get away with just regurgitating big words and technical stuff. Adults are polite, and they’ll often at least pretend they know what you’re talking about. But children won’t let you do that. To teach children, you need to understand your theology so well that you can boil it all down to a few simple points that children can process. You also need to understand the wider implications of that theology so well that you can lovingly and rightly apply it to their individual lives. Doing that properly takes great theological depth and skill. Now of course, the same is true in ministry to adults; and of course, it’s possible in children’s ministry to simplify things wrongly, and so teach in a way that’s highly accessible but still wrong. So really, we all need good theology. But still, children’s ministers—those whose task it is to take the great truths of the God of the universe and make them accessible for children—need especially good theological training to do their task well.
In this part of his letter to the Ephesians, Paul the apostle does children’s ministry. There’s a lot we can learn from Paul here, both about the gospel, and about the value and significance of children’s ministry itself:
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honour your father and mother”, which is the first commandment associated with the promise: “so that it may be well with you and you may have a long life on the earth.”
Ephesians and that is my summary why I should obey my parents.
Exposition is the part of the plot structure that introduces the charachters and setting.
Answer:
talk about artificial intelligence and how computers and robots are taking the jobs of humans and putting people out of work.
Explanation:
I honestly have no idea what that is
Answer:
The speaker of the poem is a young boy who's at school in the summer. He can't focus in class because he wants so badly to play outside and enjoy the weather; he feels like a songbird trapped in a cage. Towards the poem's end, the boy wonders how children can grow and thrive if they are not allowed to enjoy the summer.
Explanation:
“The School Boy” is a poem included in William Blake’s collection Songs of Innocence. It is told from the perspective of a young boy going to school on a summer day. The boy loves summer mornings, but to have to go to school when the weather is so nice is a misery to him. He sits at his desk in boredom and cannot pay one iota of attention to the lesson, so desperately does he wish to be playing outside. In the fourth verse, the speaker asks, “How can the bird that is born for joy / Sit in a cage and sing?” Here the poet is comparing young children, so full of energy and happiness, to songbirds, who deserve to tumble free and soar on the winds. But, like songbirds trapped in a cage, children trapped in a classroom cannot express themselves, cannot capitalize on all that excess energy, and therefore their potential is being wasted.
The speaker addresses parents in the final two verses, asking how, “…if buds are nipped / …and if the tender plants are stripped / of their joy...How shall…the summer fruits appear?” That is, if children are stripped of their ability to play and have fun in the summer season, how shall they grow and develop to the fullest extent?
This poem is about allowing children to be children – to run and play outside, to experience the benefits of nature and of the seasons. This practice is equally as beneficial to them as academic learning, and in times such as those in the poem, arguably more so, for on this beautiful summer day the speaker can pay no attention to his lessons – he would rather be outside.
