UPCOMING DATES:
Friday, January 12 and Sunday, January 14
HOW DO I SIGN UP:
Child Dedications will take place during services on Friday, January 12 and Sunday, January 14. If you are interested in having your child dedicated, please fill out the registration form.
A member of the Journey Kids team will contact you with more information about the process of child dedication. Or you may choose to meet with a team member in-person after a service on January 5 or 7. This brief orientation will take place in the risers area of the main auditorium.
If you have any questions, email childdedications@journeycom.
About Child Dedication at Journey
At Journey we have 6 key DNA pieces that we believe define us as a community of followers of Jesus. While all 6 could be true of any church, they are significant because we want them to be especially true of us and they have implications on everything we do, including Child Dedications. To that end, here are 3 reasons we encourage you to participate in a child dedication service.
IMAGO DEI: That is Latin for the “image of God”. It comes from the first chapter of the Bible in Genesis 1:27 where we are reminded that we all have been made in the image of our Creator. So when we dedicate our kids to the Lord, we remind our entire faith community that we are not really trying to raise up “mini-me’s” as a community of parents, guardians, and mentors. No, what we actually want is “mini-Thee’s” or the “imago dei” to come shining through. So as we dedicate our kids to the Lord, we say to God and one another that we want to invite our children into the journey of becoming all that God has made them to be.
NO ONE STANDS ALONE: Parenting is a monumental task all by itself. If you add to that the idea that we desire to help our children become young adults who are passionate about following Jesus on their own, then it becomes a whole new level of difficult. To this end, at Journey we believe that No One Stands Alone. Therefore, we use child dedication as one way for us to rally around and support the parenting process. It’s also why we offer parenting seminars and have age appropriate programs that run parallel to our weekend services for all our kids. We yearn to be a community that stands together, especially in raising kids and helping them discover God at their pace alongside peers and mentors. It is worth noting that Jesus was constantly welcoming the little children to himself and having them gather all around him. (Matt 19:14, Mark 10:14) We want to be a community where you gladly bring your kids to a community that supports you in your parenting process and child dedication is one of many ways for us to do that.
CENTER SET: You’ll want to go to First Step to get this concept a little more flushed out, but for the purpose of Child Dedication, having a Center Set mindset means that we remind one another that we want Jesus in the center of everything, especially our kids lives. In the case of a child, we say this on their behalf on faith that one day, they’ll embrace this mindset fully for themselves.
This is one of the reasons we do child dedications and not baptisms. It’s because we try and hold our baptism the way we see it played out in the Scriptures. It’s a public proclamation of our faith that the Bible calls all Christ-Followers to embrace. But for a variety of reasons, the symbolism of baptism is hard for little kids to grasp and we want them to really know and understand what they’re doing when they choose to get baptized. We encourage all our kids to wait at least until they are entering the 6th grade before they get baptized so that they get closer to fully understanding what it means.
But in the meantime, we want to embrace kids and parents and agree together that these are God’s kids and that we yearn for him to do God-only things inside their hearts and lives.
