Evangelicals Now
<< July 2005 >>

Monthly youth leaders column

Children in the way?

Not an original title but one pinched from a report published a few years ago to examine the place of children in church.

Visiting churches can be fun. There you will find a whole variety of ways of what people do with children and young people.

It stretches from those who never have children in a church service (all under 18s go straight to their groups) to the church which insists that all children over 11 sit in church through a full length service. It is quite common to find children attending their groups before or after the morning service and to also be in that service for the whole time. The children get twice as much as the adults.

Common model

The most common model is the first 15 or 20 minutes in church after which the children ‘leave for their groups’ and several church members breathe a sigh of relief that the real service has now started. The style of that initial period also has many forms. Some genuinely believe that it is good for children to ‘see what the adults do’ and make little or no attempt at child friendly activity. The language and style of what they do ignores the fact that there are children about. At the other extreme, the whole time is geared to children; the language and style is child-centred and many adults find it hard to accept.

Unquestionably, attitudes to church are one of the factors influencing the exodus of young people from church. If you sit in a service for week after week and you are not spoken to or even acknowledged, alienation is inevitable. If you sit in a service as an adult and the whole thing is geared to a generation you have no contact with, you will feel alienated. The choruses seem trivial and you haven’t done an action song for 50 years (if they did them in those days).

Family get together

We celebrated a rather special birthday in our family recently. We ended up with our children and grandchildren at Longleat safari park. Our age range spanned from new pensioner to two years old. Inevitably when a family gets together they talk. Family members of a similar age talk to one another — brothers and sisters catch up with recent news. One of the children says: ‘What’s that?’ for the tenth time and you tell them (for the tenth time) that it’s a monkey or a lion (if you know). Somebody wants another ride on the train but someone else wants to play on the slide and we all try to accommodate them if we can. ‘If we all play on the slide together for a bit then we’ll see if the train is available and the queues aren’t too bad’. When we sit down to eat our picnic some of the conversation is adult to adult, some of it is adult to child and vice versa.

Not ignored, not dominating

Does that help us with church? — I think it does. In any family, children cannot be ignored but they must not dominate (that isn’t good for them). We talk to them but they need to learn that there are times to be quiet and listen to what adults are saying. So, if we have a child-friendly (notice not child-centred) 15 minutes in church we should rejoice that we have ‘children in the way’ as part of our congregation — they are part of the church of today — they are not the next church waiting in the wings. The all-age community is well established as a biblical principle — fragmentary age-grouped churches are not healthy. The youth church (often born out of frustration) will, inevitably, lack the quality of biblical wisdom which mature godly men and women can bring to its spiritual life.

I would love to hear from you as to how you deal with this issue and we will attempt to look at this more theologically in a future article. I believe it to be a key issue of our day. Thanks to those who responded to the ‘prodigal’ request. If any more of you have experiences or comments they would still be welcome.

Dave Fenton