Connecting the Christian faith with Children - section nine - part six (content)

- What are we Doing?

Instruction

In every single church, instruction takes the largest proportion of time in the children’s activities. There is a lot of truth in the statement that “adults come to church on Sunday in order to worship; children come to Sunday school in order to acquire information.”[1]

But we carve up the Bible into ‘Bible stories’ so that “few children even suspect that the story of God’s people – our story – is not a collection of object lessons or heartwarming anecdotes, but a long story of unbearable loss – and unbearable hope.”[2] We “violate the story … by telling it in snippets, out of order, and treating it chiefly as a source of themes and moral maxims.”[3]

Further, studies of so-called ‘Children’s Bibles’ and Sunday School materials “reveal a substantial problem. They reflect prevailing fashions and worldviews, and an adult gate keeping or selection of what is felt to be suitable for children. One myth is that adults understand the whole Bible whereas children can only understand certain adult-selected parts! … We have sold children short.”[4] Or, as Wolff-Pritchard puts it, “in the midst of a culture bloated on junk food, the church has offered its children only crumbs.”[5]

Nick Harding, children’s officer for the Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham, has made a similar point in his plea that we “don’t sanitise the Bible stories.” He has written a Grove Booklet – shortly to be published – titled ‘Working with Boys’, but which began with the provisional title, ‘Using the Bible in all its Gory”![6] So often we revert to the use of sanitised children’s Bibles, or carefully selected and dumbed down version of the stories.

Dallow, too, challenges us to move beyond just Bible teaching. She says that “telling stories and teaching about their meaning is not enough. Children need to encounter the stories of the Bible as part of their exploration of who God is and how the Christian faith affects life-skills and experience.”[7] Elsewhere she writes: “the church has largely denied children the opportunity to grow in their discipleship, being more concerned with the words of Jesus … than the works of Jesus … children’s ministry [has generally been] a matter of ‘teaching the Bible’ to children, and ‘telling them to be good’. In itself, there is nothing wrong with this, but it is a cerebral, lifeless Christianity.”[8]

Craft

The next highest proportion of time in our churches’ children’s activities is given over to the craft activity. However, Nick Harding has challenged the fact that we do craft in Sunday School at all. He argues that the time would be spent far more constructively doing something else – worship or prayer, perhaps. And Nick said he thinks we do craft so the children can prove to their parents that they haven’t been wasting their time (or so they have something to show to the rest of the church when they come back in).

Worship and Prayer

Worship and prayer play virtually no part in what goes on in our Sunday Schools and children’s groups. In some churches, even less time is given to these elements than the time taken to register the children.

And this is absolutely crucial. “Christian education is no substitute for real, living membership in the community of faith. [But] the church has continued to segregate children from the worshipping community where its own life is most richly lived.”[1]

Our “children will learn to pray more readily the more they are exposed to worship both in the home and at church.”[2] Their prayer life will expand and grow “through inclusion in experiences of faith events, in family, church and community. … seeing and hearing adults at prayer both in the home and at church can be an important nurturing factor in the process of a child’s journey in prayer.”[3] “Children need to see [their] leaders engaging with God in prayer.”[4]

Franke, in the 18th century, placed “great emphasis on praying with and for children. He [encouraged] parents to let children pray in their own words, beginning when they are very young,”[5] and claimed that “it is important for everyone who has contact with children to pray for them.”[6]

Of course, “children do not think in the same way as adults and … their thinking about prayer will change and develop radically during the early years of life.”[7] Children “will pray according to their stage of spiritual development and will not suddenly become adult in their behaviour or understanding.”[8] Of course there will be a huge difference between our children’s prayers and ours, but “they can help us open ourselves to God in a fresh way by reaching a depth of relationship with God far beyond anything we can offer.”[9]

So, Adults must “provide the support and model for children’s own praying, but cannot pray for them.”[10] “Teaching young people to pray may … have significant consequences for their developing lives.”[11] But our main concern “must be to help children pray their own prayers rather than teaching them prayers.”[12]

It has been suggested that “the spirituality of most adult Christians leaves our children without role models.”[13] And there is some significant truth in that suggestion. How can we connect the Christian faith with our children if we are not worshipping and praying with them? If we are not showing and teaching them, by our example, how to worship and pray, how are they ever going to learn? If we want to connect the Christian faith with our children we need to be showing them how to live it, not just teaching them about it.

[1] Wolff Pritchard, Offering the Gospel to Children (1992, Cowley Publications), p.141
[2] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.141
[3] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.141
[4] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.145
[5] Bunge, ‘Education and the Child in Eighteenth-Century German Pietism: Perspectives from the Work of A. H. Franke’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.269
[6] Bunge, ‘Education and the Child in Eighteenth-Century German Pietism: Perspectives from the Work of A. H. Franke’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.269
[7] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.107
[8] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.141
[9] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.143
[10] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.141
[11] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.107
[12] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.143
[13] Andy Goodliffe’s Blog, 16/06/2006 (http://andygoodliff.typepad.com/)
[1] Wolff Pritchard, Offering the Gospel to Children (1992, Cowley Publications), p.140-141
[2] Wolff Pritchard, Offering the Gospel to Children (1992, Cowley Publications), p.4
[3] Wolff Pritchard, Offering the Gospel to Children (1992, Cowley Publications), p.44
[4] White, Continuing the Search (www.childtheology.org)
[5] Wolff Pritchard, Offering the Gospel to Children (1992, Cowley Publications), p.68
[6] from a meeting with Nick Harding, 31/1/07
[7] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.131
[8] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), pp.124-125