WHO IS CAMEL+ NEEDLE?
It is Rich Lambert and Artie Megibben. Two guys out to improve your chances of enjoying effective, fun, God-honoring worship as a family.
INTRODUCING HAPPY CAMEL
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WHAT'S IN A NAME?
What's with the name? Camel + Needle?
We want families to gather around the gospel because the gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ changes us. Following his encounter with a rich young man, Jesus told a parable. He described the young man as a camel–one who stores up for himself more than he needs. The young man never had to worry about going without because he could trust in his surplus. Like a camel trudging through the desert. Jesus invited the young man to stop trusting in himself and place all of his trust in Jesus instead. It’s easy, Jesus suggested. Sell everything. Divest. Liquidate. Leave yourself no options.
This encounter and parable aren’t really about money, the way we’ve always assumed. They are about bigger things like reliance and dependence, salvation, and faith, and peace, and all of it coming NOT through being important and impressive and an A-lister, but through grace. Grace starts as having nowhere else to turn, and eventually it also becomes wanting to turn nowhere else. Jesus helped his disciples understand all of this by posing a RIDDLE–how do you squeeze a camel through a needle? It wasn’t a trick question. There is an answer.
SHRINK THE CAMEL.
The gospel changes the shape of who we are. If we have ears to hear. Family worship is making room in crowded lives to keep hearing. And maybe, to keep shrinking.
OUR STORY
HOW FAMILY WORSHIP WENT FROM A NECESSITY TO OUR PASSION
We started doing family worship at a church plant we were involved with back in the early 2000s. We were meeting in a children’s theatre, which presented a challenge–we didn’t have extra rooms for Christian formation, and a full-blown Sunday School program. What do you do when you can’t do Christian education? Our solution was to send Christian education home. We asked the congregation to try a different approach, to try family worship and see what happened. We taught people how to do it, we produced weekly family worship resources, and people did it! It had its challenges. It didn’t always go well. But hey, Sunday morning worship doesn’t always “go well”, either. People did it, and they trusted Jesus to meet them in the ‘doing of it’, and then they just didn’t stop doing it. It became a habit. It felt like a relief more than a requirement. Many of us in that original group have kids who are grown and have left home, but when they come back for a visit, we gather around for family worship because that’s what we grew up doing. (Some of us who are empty nesters have kept doing a kid-less version of family worship!) Family worship is what we do, because it’s part of who we are.
In the mid 2000s we created for our church a family worship book for Christmas. We hoped it would be a daily devotional keep us rooted in the incarnation of Jesus during all the other holiday busyness and excitement. That first book was so well received, we created a second book for Holy Week and Easter.
We (Artie and Rich and families) have since moved on to other parts of the country, BUT we have felt the need for family worship materials. We even pitched the idea to a publisher (3 different times!) until finally, old friends spoke up and said we should just publish ourselves. So, we did. We started Camel + Needle Press, we rebuilt the Christmas book from top to bottom, and we are doing the same with the Easter book. The next phase in our master plan is to create weekly resources so families can encounter Jesus together at home.