Church Planting with Children: Helping Kids Join the Mission
Janet McMahon reflects on the challenges of moving her family to Kansas City to help plant Restore Community Church. She shares how responsibility, relationship, repetition, and results helped her children process the change and grow through the experience.
- Church planting affected every member of the McMahon family, including their children.
- The family helped their children participate through responsibility, honest conversation, repeated truth, and visible results.
- Seeing lives changed helped the children understand the purpose behind the sacrifice.
By Janet McMahon
A look of disappointment, frustration, and surprise came over his face. He cried. We had just told our 13-year-old son we were leaving the only town he had ever known to move to another city and begin a brand-new church.
The days and weeks that followed were full of questions, not just from our 13-year-old, but all three of our children. “Why?” “When?” “How?” “Are you sure?” At the time our kids were 16, 13, and 7, and moving kids attending high school and middle school seemed less than ideal.
No doubt my children are the No. 1 calling of my life. To raise them to be responsible Christ followers who find their purpose and live fully committed to the Jesus mission—that is my dream. So when the direction God seemed to be leading us made my kids unhappy, I felt conflicted—and occasionally even confused and angry. Why would God clearly call me and my husband, Troy, to a plan that would make my children sad?
As the weeks and months passed, it became increasingly clear God was inviting us into this church planting adventure, and to say “no” would almost seem disobedient. But what seemed so clear to Troy and me felt like a slap in the face to our middle son, in particular. What were we to do?
I prayed, probably more than I had ever prayed in my life. And as I prayed, I consulted friends, books, and others who had confronted similar choices. Over time, I began to stand on this ultimate truth: If God was clearly asking Troy and me to move to a new city and plant a church, it was not only the best thing for us, it would be the best thing for our kids. Maybe we couldn’t see then why this move would be good for our kids. In fact, we might never know, but the fact remains that God’s plans for us are for our benefit.
As the prophet wrote, “‘For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future’” (Jeremiah 29:11). So, in spite of our children’s reservations, we decided to jump in fully and lead our children through the process.
Several things along the way helped our kids join the journey, but four seemed most significant in helping our kids not only accept the plan God had laid out, but perhaps even grow in their faith as a result: responsibility, relationship, repetition, and results.
They Chose
We gave our kids responsibility for some of the decisions. We picked the area we were moving to, but we asked the children to pick the school they would attend. There were two high schools in the district. We set up meetings at each school and visited them as a family.
The children all agreed on a high school, and so we narrowed our house search to the neighborhoods served by that school. We didn’t know it at the time, but the children not only picked the high school they would attend, but also the building that would provide meeting space for our church from day one until now.
We also told our kids that if God asked us to move to Kansas City, then he had something in mind for each of them to do. Each child picked a responsibility on the launch team. After each identified a responsibility, he or she had to carry it out.
Our oldest son played keyboard in the worship band, our middle child ran the sound board for the kids’ large group worship time, and our youngest, our daughter, learned the kids’ worship songs, and over time, has begun to lead their worship time.
In church planting, there are many roles and opportunities for hard and concentrated work. However, we protected the kids in some ways. They were not required to do EVERYTHING . . . just ONE thing. One area of serving is a requirement; any more than that is a choice.
We Shared
Although responsibility and serving was compulsory, it didn’t mean they couldn’t share their feelings, grief, sadness, and frustration about all they were going through. I believed, on their behalf, all feelings are worth sharing, and feelings cannot be right or wrong. So this is where the relationship came in.
We chose to work on our relationship with our kids by engaging them in meaningful conversation every day, and peppering them with lots of questions. There were days I knew my kids were grieving the loss of “home.” I went in their room and MADE them talk to me.
At times they were hiding their heads under a pillow, grunting, and pushing me away, but I waited. I said things like, “I know you hurt, and if you don’t get it out by talking, it will come out in other ways, and those other ways are terrible! So talk!” Eventually, not every time, they talked, and cried. I cried many tears that first year with my children as we all openly grieved the loss of “home.”
I Reminded
Then there was the repetition. I found myself repeating two things in order to continue to confidently lead my kids in the direction of the Jesus mission. The first was, “Sometimes the right thing and the hard thing are the same thing.” The children didn’t always like that saying, but they have come to recognize it as true.
The second thing I repeated, mostly in my head, was, “This is not about their happiness, but their holiness.” God is not as interested in my kids’ being happy as in their being holy. And sometimes we forego what makes us temporarily happy in order to pursue a life of holiness.
God Provided
The fourth thing—something we could not control, but God in his grace has provided—was results. We lived in Kansas City seven months before we started weekend services of Restore Community Church (www.restorecc.org) in March 2008. It wasn’t until we started services that my kids got the opportunity to see the reason God brought us here.
They saw people give their lives to Christ and get baptized (82 of them so far). We are reminded, just like our kids, that life change is what the Jesus mission is all about, and seeing lives change has been worth any sacrifices we had to make.
Following the Jesus mission and planting a church has been a gift of faith and sacrifice that our kids might not have learned any other way. Our children, Jake, now 19, Mitch, now 16, and Judiann, now 10, have adjusted quite well.
Jake is a freshman in college pursuing a career in ministry.
The other two are home and still serving at the church (sometimes even by choice). Just last night I asked our middle son, “Do you think our family is where we are supposed to be, doing what we are supposed to be doing?”
He smiled, made a joke as he always does, and then said in all seriousness, “Yes.” It didn’t hurt that his newfound girlfriend was sitting on the couch next to him.
Janet McMahon serves as church planter and community life director with Restore Community Church, Kansas City, Missouri (www.restorecc.org). She and her husband, Troy, helped plant the church in March 2008. The congregation started a second campus, in Liberty, Missouri, in March.
