I wish I could take credit for this phrase, but I can’t. The “spank offering” is such a perfect complement to the “love offering” (SCL #72) that it makes my teeth hurt a little. What does it mean? I’ll allow author Beth Moore to explain it. Here’s something she tweeted over the weekend:

@bethmoorelpm
Have any of y’all ever wanted to give a spank offering to someone else’s child? Not really but kinda?

It immediately reminded me of two things:

1. I love Beth Moore. In addition to being amazingly kind to my family, she’s got a great sense of humor.
2. This post – “Not knowing what to do about good friends who are raising punk kids.”

And the funny thing is, that at some point, we’ve all been the parents with kids who need to receive a “spank offering.” This concept isn’t limited to “good parents” or “bad parents,” it’s “all parents.”

So, have you ever wanted to give a spank offering?

I want to be honest with you. Prior to moving to Nashville, I never really owned any sort of “skinny jean.” I never owned any pairs of pants that seemed like you were trying to deliberately suffocate your legs in denim.

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Last week, my friend told us something really amazing she was doing to encourage her son’s curiosity in the Bible.

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Last week, the Friendly Atheist, who has been incredibly kind to Stuff Christians Like, thought something I wrote was unintentionally funny. In the Snopes post he thought it was odd that I felt the need to explain what Snopes was. It’s so well known and so obvious that he didn’t think I needed to.

This is how intense life is at the Acuff house.

But when I asked my mom if she had heard of Snopes, she instantly replied, “You mean Snopes Dog?” So with today’s post, in addition to giving you a photo of my four year old McRae throwing up a gang sign she learned from the original movie “Parent Trap,” while wearing Silly Bandz, I thought I better describe them. They’re colored rubber bands that are hot like fire right now. (And is my whole family “street” or what? Mom, Snoop Dog reference, Crae throwing it up. Dang)

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“There are lots of other families who don’t even have televisions.”

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My kids are hilarious. Everybody says that. By law you are required to say that your kids are smart and beautiful and have tremendous vertical leaps, but trust me, my kids are legitimately funny. We work on material. Tuesday night is open mic night and we each stand on the hearth and deliver up to three minutes of new material. My oldest daughter L.E. is thinking about joining little league baseball just for some new joke material similar to how Jerry Seinfeld had a baby so he could tell parenthood jokes. It’s a real scene man.

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“Hey L.E. you ready for Awanas? Oh, that’s right, there’s no ‘s’ on the end of that word. There really should be. People get so upset when you add one, but unless there is only one Awana sitting in a room by themselves, much like my first meet and greet, that should really be pluralized.

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It’s only a matter of time until I get caught and the other night, I almost blew it.

You see, right now my wife and I are “stealing Awanas,” the Bible club class that is kind of like VBS our kids attend once a week. Our church doesn’t offer it. It’s not their thing and I’m cool with that. But in order to have our kids involved in it we had to scout out other churches in the area and then quietly embed ourselves as if we were members. Like some sort of spiritual SWAT team we swing through the windows, grab all the ministries we need and then high tail it out of there.

And we found the perfect church down the street from us. So every Wednesday night we drop our kids off and then buy dinner in the dining hall with all the unsuspecting members of this church, but I almost messed up the whole operation.

The problem was that my wife wasn’t with me. She was at a consignment sale at another church we don’t attend. (We’re a couple of pew pillagers aren’t we?) So after Awanas was over, my daughters and I walked over to the dining hall. Everything was cool until a man walked up to our table and said, “Mind if we join you?”

“Oh snap, ” I thought to myself. “Be cool, Jon, be cool.”

“Sure, go ahead.” What do I say, what do I say to this guy? Make conversation, talk about the traffic, this is Atlanta, that is a fall back, go to topic. Instead I heard my mouth utter the worst possible phrase, “Do you attend here?”

He immediately looked at me with a quizzical expression and said, “Of course.”

Worst is over right, we’ll move on and talk about something else? Wrong. He continued.

“My daughter is in the choir.”

Uh oh.

“My mom is the one serving food right over there.”

Oh no.

“I actually work at this church and have for years.”

Yowza!

“I’m also on the security detail that tasers people who use our facility without attending this church.”

OK, he didn’t say that last one, but I was sitting with the ”President of this Church.” This guy was going to figure out we didn’t belong here. It was only a matter of time, so I did what any mature Christian parent would have done in that situation, I told my daughters to hurry up and finish their chocolate pudding and hustled us out of there like we were the Usain Bolt family. (Topical!)

What mistakes did I make? What things do you need to be aware of if your church is focused on certain things and therefore doesn’t offer some services/ministries you’d like to be part of? How do you pew pillage without blowing it like me?

Here are a few pointers …

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