Ministry – Melissa Kuipers

Mary mother of Jesus — The Madonna statue in the Mary Garden in the forgotten alley

“The writers of our ancient texts grasped at metaphors and imagery to represent that which we cannot see and cannot fully grasp. They tried to hold the unholdable through word pictures. God is a lion, a lamb, a sun, a friend, a lover, a king, a vine, a potter, a loaf of bread. And the creative Creator, who walked in the garden with Eve and Adam and dwelt in the confines of the tabernacle and grew till snug and tight within a peasant’s womb, allows God’s self to be held within the humble flesh of words. God is willing to be held, chooses to be held, intends to be held, longs to be held, loves to be held.”

You can find my Advent reflection, “Madonna Alley,” in the recent issue of The Christian Courier.

My recent article for The Banner looks at a topic I’ve struggled with in my job as Director of Family ministries: the need for, and lack of, diverse visual representation in children’s ministry, particularly as it pertains to Jesus.

For a while, I thought I was doing enough. I thought, “We have racial diversity in our congregation. The children are building relationships with people who are different from themselves. We have stick figures dressed in clothes from around the world painted in our Sunday school hallways. We are talking about love and acceptance and how we are all, in all our unique ways, made in God’s image.”
But then I observed some things that troubled me. I noticed how all the children, regardless of their own ethnicity, chose peach crayons to color their Bible characters.

Read the whole article here.

For other resources, check out this list of Multicultural Christian children’s books from Here We Read. As well, the article “Why We Must Start Talking About Race in Our Children’s Ministries” by Henry Zonio is an important read.