Connecting the Christian Faith with Children

I'm making a presentation to the Yorkshire Baptist Ministers next week on where I've got to with the 'Connecting the Christian Faith with Children' project. I thought I'd share some of those thoughts on my blog, and would welcome comments, questions, suggestions, etc.

I am only working three days a month on this Commissioned Ministry, and I’m only part way into my second month. So it’s difficult to give you anything very concrete at this point. Certainly I have no answers or strategies for us (yet). I’m not sure we’ll ever get to that point, actually.

But what I do have is a list of questions, and a set of challenges to the way we connect our faith with the children in our churches.

The Challenge from the Bible

In October 2005, at a ministers conference at Moortown Baptist Church we were presented with this set of Bible passages and asked to imagine, if this was all the Bible we had ever read, what would be our theology of the place of children in our churches: Dt 6.1-9; Ps 78.1-8; Ps 131; Jer 1.4-8; Matt 18.1-6; Mark 5.22-24, 39-43; Mark 9.33-37; Mark 10.13-16; John 6.1-13.

My notes from that day remind me that we were challenged by these thoughts:
- religion in the Bible is family oriented;
- the children were not separated from the adults in biblical worship; they were totally integrated in the ritual life of God’s people;
- therefore the children must be totally a part of the everyday life of the church;
- they ought to be involved not just in learning but also in teaching the rest of us;
- we adults can learn from the behaviours and the attitudes of children;
- in fact, Jesus made the child a model – an example – to those who would follow Him;
- neither age nor youth is a barrier to serving God;
- and we have a duty to value, and encourage, and guide our children;
- Jesus included children at the same level as His disciples
- children should be allowed to serve adults; and adults can be blessed through the childrens’ gifts;
- children need to be listened to / allowed to serve / valued / and made a part of the action
- we adults need to have a childlike attitude;
- children are important for who they are now, not for what they will become
- as Jesus was focussed on the needs of the children he met, so must we;
- the Kingdom of God is not about status or position;
- rather, our church structures must reflect the importance Jesus placed on the least;
- as Jesus put a child ‘in the midst’, He made children central to the Christian faith and thus challenges our whole approach to them

There is another challenge from the Bible, too. And it relates to the way we use the Bible with our children. We have all heard – maybe we have been guilty of telling – versions of the story of Noah and the Ark that focus almost exclusively on the fluffy animals and miss the point of why that story is in our Bibles in the first place!

I met with Nick Harding last month, and he talked to me about the need for us to use the biblical narratives “in all their gory” (especially when we’re talking to boys!). But so often we use sanitised children’s Bibles, or carefully selected and dumbed down version of the stories.

The Challenge from Child Theology

Child Theology has been described as “ a global process working to inform, engage with, and challenge the full range of Christian theology, inspired by Jesus when He placed a little child in the midst.”

Jesus deliberately placed a little child at the centre of a theological discussion about the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven, and then He taught several vital truths while the child was standing there. Children are central to the biblical vision of the Kingdom of God. They are agents of and partners in God’s mission, not simply recipients of the Good News!

There has been an adult bias in every aspect of Christian thinking for the last 2000 years, and our churches are all built around the needs and desires of adults. We have seen children as objects to be educated or protected (adults-in-waiting, human-becomings) rather than as agents and signs of God’s kingdom with unique contributions and insights.

Jesus challenges us adults to become like little children. And yet so much of what we do with children in church is designed to turn them into what we think are mature Christian adults.

I am meeting with Keith White, in a couple of weeks. Keith has written a lot of this material himself. And he finishes one paper with a plea that little children must no longer be “relegated to the stable, but at the very heart of everything that goes on in the inn.”

The Challenge from studies of Children’s Spirituality

A lot of research, in recent years, has looked at the spirituality of children. I wonder how well our Sunday Schools (or whatever we call them) really nurture children’s spirituality? Actually, I wonder how well our churches nurture the spirituality of adults?

Various studies talk about the child’s need for security (safety, protection, covering, the experience of ‘being held’) if they are to be able to experience love, whether giving it or receiving it. Is that not what Christ achieved for us by His death?

Children have a need for significance (the affirmation that they are special). And at the heart of the Gospel is the amazing truth that you and I matter infinitely to God. That’s why He sent His only Son.

Children, of course, need boundaries (rules, discipline, values, norms). Freedom, as you know, is not the absence of boundaries but rather what emerges when there are appropriate boundaries such as those provided for us by God.

Children need community, relationships with others. And one of the great themes of the Bible is the intention of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (the primal, divine community) to create a community of faith.

And creativity is what children are made for (play, fun, humour, learning, and so much more.

I wonder what we would find if we were to analyse what we do with children in our churches according to those categories?

Other studies refer to contexts, conditions, strategies, processes and consequences. Or a child’s stages of consciousness (child-God, child-people, child-world, child-self). Or even just the need for children to use their imaginations, experience wonder, exercise their bodies.

Perhaps we need to ask ourselves what do our children really need from church / Sunday School / Worship? Have we even bothered to ask them?

Many churches have discovered The Essence Course as a fantastic introduction to Christian spirituality for adults. And there is now a children’s version, Kids @ Essence, which is doing the same sort of thing for children’s groups. It might be a very useful resource.

The Challenge from Educational Theory

Educational theorists know that everyone has a preferred learning style. And there are a variety of different learning styles. And it is an acknowledged truth that we all learn more by doing something that just by hearing about it.

Children don’t learn well from 20-30 minutes ‘instruction’. Sit down, sit still, and listen to what I want to tell you. (Neither do adults, actually, although many in our congregations and most of our preachers wouldn’t want to admit it!)

So why is that sort of ‘instruction’ at the heart of all we do as a church? Could it be replaced with something else? If so, we wouldn’t need to ask the children to leave us to do something else during the ‘boring’ bit!

Or, if we think that some sort of differentiated (age-specific?) instruction is important for our children, should we also be giving some attention to the different levels and abilities and learning styles of an adult congregation?

‘Godly Play’, by Jerome Berryman (and others) is one resource that utilises some rather different learning styles than the didactic. And there are others out there, too.

The Challenge from Other Forms of Church

There is a whole set of challenges from some of the new forms of church:

- Messy Church is a multi-sensory, practical and interactive expression of church for all ages, which ends with a shared meal.

- The All Age Church movement, goes far beyond simply the advocation of All Age Worship, with a call for churches to become All Age communities:
“being church together, regardless of age, should be a norm, not an anomaly. In order to nurture people and raise up new leaders we need strong relationships that transcend age divisions”; “we need to start asking ‘what can we not do together?’ rather than allowing the church to operate with a separatist default position”; “the church of all ages is the clearest way to embody kingdom values of welcome and reconciliation in order that the whole world might be saved.”

- Many of the smaller, emerging church groups are also highly inclusive of their children. Admittedly, that may be because so many of them are so small that they cannot afford the resources for a separate children’s work. But we can, and must, learn from them.

But one of the biggest challenges I have discovered in my reading comes from the Eastern Orthodox Church:

“Their approach to children is fundamentally different from other denominations. Children are baptised into the church, receive the sacrament, and become active participants in the Church.”

I don’t think it’s too far from the mark to suggest that what many of our churches do is remove children from the main worship experience (some would say we actively ‘reject’ them from the main worship experience) in order to teach them about it.

Take the Lord Supper as an example. I would be willing to bet that most of the children in most of our Baptist churches have never even witnessed a communion service, let alone been allowed to participate.

But in the Orthodox Church, “the purpose of education … is not to inform children about what will eventually be theirs, but to interpret and deepen understanding of what is already theirs, that is, what children are already experiencing through being the church.” It is this “early exposure to the worship and activity of the church [that] prepares the child for personal and corporate lifelong membership.”

I know that, for these churches, it is Infant Baptism that is the starting point. And we Baptists wouldn’t want to go along with that. But it seems to me that there are things in their approach that we could easily adopt and/or adapt with regard to our own children.

So. A series of challenges to the way we can, and should, connect the Christian faith with our children. A set of challenges that are not just about doing Sunday School better, but more about re-imagining what church could be for our children, perhaps even getting back to what and who the church is really for.

Let me know what YOU think?!?