41 Years - The Back Story

My family had been attending a Bible-centered church for several months when my children’s ministry experience was initiated by a tap on the shoulder. Our previous on-and-off churchiness had been in the context of a small mainline denominational congregation of about 50 people in the tiny town where we lived. Mostly, the Sneed kids walked the short block to Sunday School and came back home before the sermon part to one of Mom’s wonderful Sunday dinners. Every summer we faithfully attended Bible School and learned all our memory verses. For a town of 200 people, Greensboro is as well-supplied as some Bible Belt communities, with three churches a stone’s throw apart!



“We heard you can play the piano,” whispered a gentleman I did not yet know. “Our Children’s Church piano player isn’t here this morning. Do you think you could help?” I was 14 years old and young in the Lord, but even in my merely religious mode I had enjoyed being helpful. This was an opportunity to serve in a meaningful way. In the Lord’s kindness, my note-reading skills are supplemented by the ability to “play by ear,” so I managed a few songs the teachers and I had in common. As it turned out, the other young pianist had started attending elsewhere, and I spent the next three years in the church basement accompanying the younger section of Children’s Church in their singing efforts. My unusual name stymied a few of them. One little boy insisted it was “Kneesock.” (In my case, at least, “Necia” rhymes with “Lisa.”) It was a great introduction to children’s ministry!



Now is a long way from then, both in years and in terms of experience and theological maturity, but I still enjoy children as much as I did at 14. There have been Sunday School and VBS and summer camp and Children’s Church experiences with children of all ages along the way, plus umpteen years of homeschooling, but the bulk of my tenure has been in church basements and munchkin chairs with children in the 3-9-year-old range.



For the past ten years, my under-4-feet friends have been the 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds at Tabor Baptist Church near Daleville, Indiana. Our domain is the basement of the older section of our building where we can sing loud and clap with enthusiasm and disturb no one. We can be Wise Men following battery-powered tea light paths. We can hunt for lost sheep until we find them all. We can learn to know God, to know ourselves as sinners who desperately need Him, and to know Jesus, the Good Shepherd who welcomes “anyone who hears his voice and follows after him.”



Between that tap on the shoulder and now, the history of me has wound its way from Greensboro to Chattanooga, hovered in Atlanta, and settled back home again in Indiana. The Celestial City is my future address, and teaching children about the Lord of that City in a winsome way is the desire of my heart.