Imagine you want to do “something” related to faith and work for your congregation. So you come up with a plan to invite the medical professionals (of which you have a high number in the church) down to the basement to teach them about how to better integrate their daily work of healing and caring with their work. You create this study and lead it, with a group of professionals and not very professionally brewed coffee. You filled their heads with theological content about their work and the Great Physician. Great.  They might remember pieces of what you had to say. They might think about it as they chart records or walk in to draw blood. But let’s imagine a second scenario. 

You have one-on-one conversations with as many medical professionals as you can. Maybe you go to the hospital and buy a few of them lunch. Or at the end of a 12 hour shift, you show up with dinner for the family. You ask them – about their heartbreaks, their joys, their challenges, the unique struggles of their profession. And one Sunday, you invite them to the front of the church, have people lay hands on those whose very calling is to lay healing hands on others – and you pray for them, incorporating what you heard into a very specific prayer just for them. Maybe they continue to feel the weight of the hands on their shoulders as they scrub in for surgery. Maybe they remember the congregant who walked up to them and asked them about their work. But, they will remember that moment forever. 

This might be the moment when you say to yourself “what a lovely idea…..but that would never work in my context.” And it’s true that for many churches, this kind of liturgical moment would be new and possibly very awkward. Isn’t it better to write the physicians into the prayers of the people in vague terms so they know they are seen and prayed over? Of course that’s an option and a good one to make sure your workers are held in prayer.  But, we would like to make the case for embodied blessings as a regular part of congregational worship and prayer for several key reasons. 

1. First, vocational blessings communicate to all in the room something deeply important about the urgency and the unique contributions of workers in the kingdom of God. When we receive a blessing at the end of each service, this blessing is not without consequence or location. We are sent to a specific place for a specific purpose, to live out our calling through our daily work.
2. Second, these blessings recognize that workers can (and must!) do spiritual and theological work for themselves, examining how their work is integral to God’s mission. Rather than being passive listeners to the theological expert, they co-create their vocational theology as they seek to understand how their heartbreaks and triumphs, their temptations and joys, contribute to their particular industry and to God’s work.
3. Third, you remind them that they are part of a spiritual community. In the laying on of hands, this community embodies its love and support. In the prayers, crafted just for them they come to know that this community listens, seeks to understand, and commits to prayer and care. Their God, their pastor, and their community sees them and stands with them. 

As part 2 of our series of blogs on parenthood, we offer several specific ways to bless and commission parents for their unique work. If you haven’t read the first part, we recommend that you do because it lays the groundwork for why we should acknowledge the vocation of parenting in our churches, but also how to do so in a way that is pastorally sensitive and aware. 

The following ideas for parent blessings are broken into three sections. The first, parent interviews, helps you “frame” the vocation for the congregation. Be they mothers or medical professionals, students or software engineers, you are going to have to introduce what it’s like to work in this field–its raw reality, its specificity, its beauty, and its brokenness. The examples given demonstrate that these interviews can be done in corporate worship publicly, or privately ahead of time. 

The second section, parental vows and charges, honors the seriousness and value of this profession. Taking a vow to work in a God glorifying way honors the kingdom importance of their daily labors. We make vows to our God, our spouse, and even our country, because these things matter–they’re important. The same is true for our work.

Finally, we bless parents of all kinds and remind them that God promises to be present with them in their work, and they also have the support and prayers of their spiritual community. This final moment of blessing embodies Psalm 145’s call for One generation to commend your works to the next, declaring God’s mighty acts. 

We hope these ideas fuel your imagination for what a parent blessing might look like in your church in the coming months, maybe even as a way of marking and honoring Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in a new way.

Parent Interviews

Parental interviews are a fantastic way for a congregation to explore the complex joys and challenges of raising and discipling children. Here are a few things to consider as you craft and lead these interviews. 

• Publicly recognize that parenting is a holy calling in the same way as that of any other vocation or profession. To accomplish this you might interview the parents in a similar way as you traditionally interview missionaries, workers, etc.
• Focus on the calling of parenthood, not on the children. Asking only about caring for the kids undermines and ignores a significant portion of what many parents do. 
• Avoid cute cliches or generalizations like I bet you get sick of having dirty dishes, or I bet you can’t wait for kids to go back to school. Statements like this make blanket assumptions about parenthood that might not be true for all parents. 
• Try to ask the parents God-oriented questions. Focus attention less on the parents and more on the Word, work, and power of God that is being revealed in and through the vocation of parenting. How is God showing up? What is God teaching you? How is God growing you? What do your prayers look like?
• Avoid the temptation to glorify busyness, full schedules, and exhaustion. Parenting is work and it takes a lot of effort, but like all work it was never meant to be toil.
• It may be best for the children in question not to be in the room. Can a parent truly express some of the challenges they face when the kids are in the pews? Think about the parents and the children in advance of the interview. 

Here are a few frameworks that might assist in crafting these interviews:

Rose, bud, thorn: This short framework helps both the parent and the congregation think through the vocational calling of parenthood as a complex one that can have many things happening concurrently. It is not beautiful or painful. It can be both at the same time. The language also speaks to the slow and patient work of cultivation and growth. 

• Rose: In your work of parenting, what is God calling you to blossom? Where is God’s beauty showing up? How has God surprised you? What growth do you see?
• Bud: What is not happening yet, but could in the future? What are you praying for? What are you tending in hopes that God causes it to flourish and bloom?
• Thorn: In your work of parenting, what thorns have emerged that are difficult to navigate and painful? When these thorns prick, what do your prayers sound like?

Write and lead a prayer: Being interviewed about your parenting might feel uniquely challenging given some of the dynamics we’ve already mentioned. Consider inviting some of your more seasoned parents to write a congregational “prayer for parents.” Something that speaks to the joys and challenges, but also petitions God to move powerfully in and through the families of the congregation. They could lead the prayer themselves or you could do it for them. Being anonymous might allow them the space they need to speak to some of the harder and more vulnerable realities of the parental calling.

Dislocate from the home: To highlight the fact that parenting is a calling that goes well beyond the walls of the house, consider asking the interviewee to talk about significant places that represent the unique joys and challenges of parenting. Rather than vague questions about what it’s like to parent, ask them to describe one physical place that represents beauty, heartache, and hope. You could also include the visual of three photographs that represent the three places. Here’s an example of what this might look like/sound like. 

• Beauty: The horse stables themselves are nothing beautiful to look at. I always think the horses look somewhat sad as yet another child hops on their back and pretends to be a jockey. But I have witnessed beautiful growth in the arena of this stable. In my daughter, I’ve seen what it is to overcome fear, chase dreams, and fall in love with something tangible –  a progress from week to week which isn’t always visible in the rest of parenting….
• Heartache: Children’s National Hospital presents a weird mix of beauty, heartache, and hope. I am grateful for the gift of medicine, healthcare, and technology. I lament the fact that as a parent I depend on them each and every day to keep my child alive. This facility partners with us to make sure the doses are right and the bloodwork is good, but the responsibility is largely on my/our shoulders to get this right. It’s crushing. It’s relentless…..
• Hope: My car is a place that speaks to hope. It might not feel like it everyday when I’m constantly on the go, grabbing kids, take-out dinner, and buckling yet another carseat. But there is a lot of laughter as we drive. Sometimes there are tears. There’s honest conversations and moments of both comfortable and uncomfortable silence.  I find hope in the fact that these moments where we travel are preparing us for whatever “travels” we face in the future as a family….

Parent Blessings

Parent blessings are a wonderful opportunity to bless hands that spend a great deal of time blessing others in big and small ways.  Just as the student blessings are not meant for the adults in the room, these parent blessings should be focused on the parents, not on a broader blessing for the whole family unit. If the children are in the room, it’s an opportunity for them to recognize and hopefully gain a deeper appreciation for their parent’s calling to this work. Here are several ideas for parent blessings. 

Anointing: In some congregations this will be a familiar practice, and in others it will be new and might need some good theological framing and explanation. Anointing is a practice used throughout Scripture to signify God’s blessing and call on a person’s life. There is nothing magical about the oil or the physical action. It is an embodied way of reminding a worker who, and whose they are. God has anointed them to serve, and through the presence of the Holy Spirit goes with them. Consider a short anointing blessing like the one below. 

I anoint your hands with oil.
With these hands, you love and serve. You care for young and old alike. You welcome others into your home and life. You tend to the sick, you bring order out of chaos. May your hands be blessed with a reminder that the God who calls you to this work blesses you and will continue to equip you with his power and love. 

I anoint your head with oil.
With your mind, you are always looking at the bigger picture. You make plans, appointments, and playdates. You see hurts before they are spoken, you see potential before it bears fruit. You care for the physical, the emotional, the spiritual, and the material. May your mind be blessed with clarity, calm, and abundant joy. For God has marked you and claimed you as His own and promises to work in and through your mind as you serve. 

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Child-led blessings: Invite the children forward to lead a blessing for their parents. This could be done as a call and response, a fill in the blank, or just a written and spoken blessing. Consider giving the parent’s children a template like the one below. Walk them through filling it out and have them offer a blessing on their parent. 

The Lord bless you as you _______
The Lord keep you as you ________
The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you when ______
May the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace. Amen. 

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House blessings: House blessings have been practiced across cultures for centuries. In the early church, they were used to ward off evil spirits and pray for a boundary of spiritual protection around a home. But in more recent years, they are an embodied way to pray for God’s blessing of a home and all who dwell within it. While your congregation can’t go on a field trip to walk around this person’s house, there are ways to say a “house blessing” over a parent that can be meaningful and imaginative. 

With the parent’s advice, pick a few significant rooms of their house. The congregation does not need to see them to know that they exist. You could choose to project a photo if you wish. Write a short blessing over the parent’s presence within that room. You aren’t blessing the room… you are blessing the parent’s work within that room. Examples:

May you be blessed on your front porch. As you welcome visitors, receive groceries, talk to the neighbor who stopped by to chat – may you be blessed and also be a blessing to all who come and go. May you feel safe, and courageous as you step outside each day doing the work God has set before you. 

May you be blessed in your dining room. As you gather others around your table every day, Christ the host, hosts with you. As you feed people’s bodies and souls, may you be fed and nourished. 

This example service comes from the Reformed Worship journal and is used with permission. You could use this on a pastoral visit to physically bless a home. You could project a photo of the parent’s house and pray this blessing for them in worship. You could ask people to imagine their home as this prayer is spoken, trusting that the Spirit doesn’t need an address book to find them.