The 'Connecting the Christian Faith with Children' project is going well, and I have begun to put some 'proper' thoughts on paper. I'll be presenting some this to the Yorkshire Baptist Association's Mission Executive in July, but here it is for your interest ...
In 1998, The English Church Attendance Survey “pointed to 1,000 under 15s leaving the church in England every week.”[1] Recent analysis of children in UK Baptist churches revealed that we have lost contact with about a third of the number we were in touch with in 2000 (about 36,000) in the space of five years. 30,000 children have left our churches in the last two years!
On 11th June 2006, the UK Baptist Churches were encouraged to take part in a national day of prayer and awareness, to get on our knees in search for God's guidance to address this worrying problem. Following that call to prayer, the Yorkshire Baptist Association has commissioned this research project: ‘Connecting the Christian Faith with Children’. For the first six months of a 2 year commissioned ministry, I have been working for three days a month: conducting a survey of the Yorkshire Baptist Churches, meeting key practitioners, doing background reading and trying to establish some biblical and theological principles for our work with children.
From the very beginning of the project, however, I have found myself more and more convinced that the answer is NOT simply to improve the way we currently do things.
As Mountstephen and Martin comment, “We may be providing such a poor experience of church in the form of Sunday School that by the time children reach the age of 10 (the most common leaving age) they are desperate to escape.”[2]
We can’t “fool ourselves into thinking that we can tinker with and amend adult structures and frameworks in order to make them child-friendly!”[3] It is true that “Children have little awareness of travelling time or the stress of preparing for the journey but they do travel with us and have a unique and dynamic understanding of God’s love … People often say that children are the church of the future. This is wrong. Children belong to the church of today, but will be adults in the church of tomorrow. How children experience their membership of the church now will form their participation in the church in the future.”[4]
Therefore, I suggest that in order to effectively connect the Christian faith with our children, we need to re-imagine the whole way we are and do church. My presentation, then, will try to survey the history and practice of what we do with children, identifying a number of challenges and suggesting some strategies for our churches.
[1] Mountstephen & Martin, The Body Beautiful (2004, Grove Books Ltd.), p.14
[2] Mountstephen & Martin, The Body Beautiful (2004, Grove Books Ltd.), p.15
[3] White, Child Theology is Born (www.childtheology.org)
[4] Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.x
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