My blogging hero, Jon Acuff wrote a great post today about scaring people to Jesus.
Since I have made it a regular habit to steal things from him, I will do the same with this post.
He talked about a children's program that had a service where it looked like a guy was getting sawed in half with a chainsaw and "God" was metaphorically removing all the junk from this person. (TV, radio, etc.)
How does anybody think that this might be a good idea? This must be one of those churches where there are no staff meetings or this dude was trying to get fired. My guess is he already had his resume loaded at www.churchstaffing.com. Although he probably didn't reference his Nightmare on Elm Street approach to evangelism on it.
Children are so impressionable and I think we do a number of wrong things that give them a skewed Christology.
Take Zacchaeus for example. We teach little children this song about him being a wee little man, and a wee little man was he. Children love this song, because they love singing and they love saying "wee." But when we get to the part where Jesus sees Zacchaeus we teach them a hand motion that has Jesus wagging his finger at the vertically challenged man and telling him, "You come down..."
Where do we get this idea that Jesus was a "finger wagging Jesus?" I don't believe He wagged His finger at all, because if He did then Luke 19:6 would be different. It says, referring to Zacchaeus, "6 So he quickly came down and welcomed Him joyfully."
Let me tell you something, if somebody wagged their finger at me and embarrassed me in front of all of those people after I put myself out there by climbing a Sycamore, I might come down and I might even come down quickly. But I am not welcoming Him "joyfully." That is for sure.
When we teach that to children, we should put a big smile on our face and welcome Zacchaeus down with open arms. Then we should show them the chainsaw thing just for fun... just kidding.
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