If you have children, you will remember the various stages in their development which meant so much — a kind of mark that they had made progress. I remember joined up writing when they moved from that very child like way of writing a single letter to a word becoming a continuous line with all the letters joined up.
So much of what we do with our young people looks like writing that hasn’t become joined up. We operate groups essentially in isolation — someone does the crèche, someone else does the young children, someone does the Pathfinders and so on. But we’ve yet to join it up.
Those of us who work in larger churches are often accused of a lack of understanding of the problems of the small church. But even if you have only one child in the 0 to 18 age range, that student will progress through the work year by year. Perhaps that gives us a clue as to how to use joined up thinking in our under 18s ministry. However small your church is there will always be a need to think of the work as a whole.
