‘Child-friendly’ Churches?

“In a small local restaurant in Bologna my younger daughter noticed the wide age-range of the other diners – some seven decades must have separated the oldest and the youngest. Two young couples occupied a neighbouring table; at another there was a family celebration. Of course, you can see several generations of one family eating out in Britain, too, sometimes in the same restaurant as young couples, but what was different was that all of them were eating the same food. The words ‘child-friendly’ were nowhere to be seen.’

So begins an article by Anne Karpf in Saturday’s Guardian (24/3/07). And it got my mind working overtime about the way we feed children spiritually in our churches. We separate them from the adults, reject them from the main worship event, in order to teach them sanitised Bible stories and get them colouring, cutting and gluing. We offer them a supposedly ‘child-friendly’ experience of church. But what if our child-friendly Sunday Schools (or whatever we call them) are, as Karpf suggests, just “a euphemism for unhealthy ... reconstituted gunk.”

In Western societies (and in Western churches, I suggest) we have “cut children off from the blood supply of adult culture and immured them in a ghetto of children.” We think that we’re doing them a favour, looking out for their interests. We think they will be bored, unstimulated, if we offer them the same menu we give the adults in church. (And perhaps they would be – but then perhaps some of the adults are, too!) But then, when the children are in church for some special service or event, we complain that they don’t know how to behave, that “they don’t know how to get on with all age groups or respect old people.”

Karpf says: “The best advice I ever received about feeding children was to get them eating the same as you as quickly as possible … Instead of cordoning off kids into child-friendly menus and restaurants, we need to induct kids into adult culture, and make it a place for all generations to meet.”

Is it possible that our ‘child-friendly’ Sunday Schools are precisely the reason why we are losing children from our churches? Is it possible that the default separatist position of most of our churches is what is responsible for the decline in numbers of children (and adults)? Can we even imagine church without junior church?

I have a dream … of a church where all are fed together. A church where old and young love and respect one another, and are willing to learn from each other. A place for all generations to meet together and with their God.