Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children (part eight)

8. Contemporary Childhood

Children today live in a different world to the one we grew up in.[1] They watch interactive television programmes, they play handheld computer games, they surf from image to image – from video to video – on the internet. They are surrounded by text and sound and moving image, bombarded with subliminal messages, obsessed with minor celebrities and fashions. And while that may be an oversimplification, it does help us to understand why the Christian church has become effectively alien to the vast majority of youngsters and children in the UK today. There are so many other things clamouring for their attention that we should not be surprised that the church regularly loses out to its ‘competition’.

In fact, for many children, the church presents no competition at all. They don’t even know we exist (unless perhaps they are brought by their parents). They have no understanding of the Christian message, no recollection of the stories of the Bible, and no reference point whatsoever with regard to the Christian faith. This is, in (small) part, due to the marginalisation of Religious Education in schools. But the church must take its own (much larger) share of the blame.

Increasingly, families have other priorities than church at weekends. Where both parents work long hours, Sunday may be the only day for the family to be together. In single-parent families, Sunday may be the day children see their other parent. In the busy life of many modern families, Sunday might be the only time available for visiting distant grandparents, playing sport, or even doing the weekly shopping.

Dallow asks all those involved in work with children within a Christian setting to be “aware of the social world in which today’s children find themselves. We also need to understand how children’s thinking develops, so that what we offer children is real and relevant.”[2] Take note of some of the following trends, “characteristic of life in the UK in the 21st century”[3]:
- fall in number of married couples and increase in cohabitation
- rise in divorce rate
- rise in number of lone-parent families (22 per cent with dependent children are lone parent families)
- increased access to leisure-time activities
- increase in fast food and reduction in families who regularly eat meals together
- increase in homes where children have their own televisions and access to a personal computer
- increase in children living in families where the income is below half the contemporary average income (1.4 million in 1979; 4.2 million in 1992/3)
- 100,000 under-16s run away from home each year
- 42 per cent of young people brought before magistrates courts have been excluded from school
- one in six children between 11 and 15 use drugs. They are five times more likely to truant and be excluded from school and be in trouble with the police
- only one in five of all young people feel part of their local community.[4]

However, while the culture of the world outside of church is changing rapidly, our churches have failed to keep pace with that change.

[1] Nick Harding’s book, Kid’s Culture (2003: Scripture Union) is a useful resource for understanding the world that shapes our children.
[2] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.58
[3] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.64
[4] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), pp.64-65

Connecting the Christian faith with Children (part seven)

7. Robert Raikes and the Sunday School Movement

The way many of our churches currently operate their ministry to children owes much to the work of Robert Raikes. During the 1780s, Raikes was “concerned with the plight of individuals – especially children – within society and with the crime to which this led.”[1] So, he began “a school for the poor” with a focus primarily on “teaching reading, writing and … manners; but catechetical instruction, reading the Bible and attendance at church were regarded as central from the outset.”[2]

These Sunday schools were established “more for the benefit of those children of parents who did not attend church or chapel than for the benefit of those children who were brought up in practising families.”[3] But “with the founding of weekday day schools, … from 1830, the Sunday Schools came to concentrate more on Bible reading, the formation of children in Christian belief and their ‘habituation’ to regular worship. This shift to a more exclusively religious emphasis – a focus on Sunday rather than school – was accompanied by a move from professional (or, at least, paid) teachers to voluntary helpers.”[4]

Even so, Sunday school came to be seen as being “linked more closely with the idea of school than with the idea of church. Growing up meant leaving behind both school and Sunday school.”[5] With the result that Sunday school, in this form, was “unable to survive the secularisation of Sunday and unable to compete with the growing body of alternative attractions available to young people.”[6]

During the 19th Century, “as mothers took on more responsibility for the care and the moral and spiritual development of children … religious education itself became ‘feminised’ and was seen as somehow ‘beneath’ the job of the serious systematic theologian.”[7]

By “the second decade of the twentieth century both Sunday School and church membership were in decline … Sunday afternoons – the preferred time for most Sunday schools – became unsustainable and the schools began to meet on Sunday morning, at the same time as ‘adult’ church services.”[8]

This meant, though, that numbers were increasingly “restricted to children whose parents went to church.”[9] Another difficulty was that the children “experienced Christian nurture, worship and prayer in separation from the main act of communal worship and away from their parents.”[10] It has been argued that “excluding children from the main Sunday service (or even a part of it) splits the church and puts a question mark against the Christian identity of children as a full part of the body of Christ.”[11] Not only do children “learn best what it is to be an adult worshipper by seeing and hearing other adults worship,”[12] but “adults also have a lot to learn from children.”[13] And some claim that “the decline of the Sunday School is probably a blessing in disguise!”[14]

[1] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.37
[2] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.36
[3] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.201
[4] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.38
[5] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.201
[6] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.201
[7] Bunge, ‘Introduction’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.12 (footnote 21)
[8] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.38
[9] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.38
[10] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.38
[11] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.39
[12] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.39
[13] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.39
[14] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.40

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children (part six)

6. The Status of Children before God

A ‘blog’ posting by ‘Lynn’[1] manages to distill some of the historical debate on the status of children before God to just a small number of options:

1: all children start life outside the Kingdom of God.
This assumes that children of all ages are in exactly the same position before God as adults i.e. in sin and rebellion and if they die before repentance and faith, they are hell-bound

2: the presence of a Christian parent establishes right standing before God.
This is based on teaching about the covenant; the special agreement between God and his people (Genesis 17, Deut 29, 1 Peter 2:9-10) The children of the people of God also belong to him.

3: the presence of a Christian parent creates privilege, not standing.
This is a softer version of answer 2. To be in a Christian home environment increases the likelihood of future Christian discipleship. It is more likely that he will be nurtured towards faith.

4: the experience of baptism establishes right standing before God.Put simply: if a child is baptised, s/he is acceptable to God. If s/he is not baptised, s/he is not.

5: the experience of baptism enhances privileges.
This is a softer version of answer 4. It assumes that baptism is undertaken seriously as an expression of faith and hope by the parents. It enhances the possibility of future discipleship, like answer 3.

6: All children belong to God.
This answer can lead people into difficulties. Until a child can have a personal experience of sin, and therefore of guilt, s/he is covered by Christ’s saving work. But how do we know when a child stops being a child i.e. when do they move from the “saved” position to the “unsaved” position?[2]

In a later post, Lynn posits a seventh answer to the question of a child’s status before God. She suggests that:

7: All children begin with God
but will drift from that position unless an effective nurturing or evangelistic influence operates in their lives.
Key to this is that the child’s belongingness to God may become rebellion. There is no assumption that the belonging WILL become rebellion. This answer takes account of humanity’s rebellion against God and the child’s potential to be part of that. But it holds that potential in tension with Jesus’ own teaching about children and the Kingdom. Taking that teaching seriously, it holds that all children begin with God, but that they will drift from that safe position unless the drift is halted and reversed. So we need to have a VISION to cater for this; both within the Christian family and amongst the children's team.The answer also makes sense of the fact that the faith of many adults began with Christian nurture in the home and grew into mature Christian discipleship. Some adult Christians have never doubted that they belong to God. They have been nurtured in that sense of belonging; they have agreed with it; they have grown in it. They have never consciously said “no” to Jesus …[3]

[1] http://helpiworkwithchildren.blogspot.com/
[2] Answers 1 to 6 can be found at: http://helpiworkwithchildren.blogspot.com/2007/03/status-of-children-before-god-part-1.html
[3] Answer 7 can be found at: http://helpiworkwithchildren.blogspot.com/2007/04/status-of-children-before-god-part-2.html
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