Matthew Roberts writes in The Critic Magazine
“If there is one thing which has typified the collapse of confidence of Christian churches in Britain in the last century, it has been the strange assumption that Christian worship is not for children.”
There are a few presumptions in that statement which I’m going to look at in this article. However, I want to first of all pick up on where and how he has gone about developing his argument.
First there’s the where. The Critic Magazine is a monthly journal with political and cultural features. In other words, it is neither a journal or a blog aimed at an Evangelical or even Christian audience. It is aimed at a wider, secular audience. This raises the question as to why Matthew is going outside of God’s family, basically to talk down and to criticise God’s people, the Church?
Then look at what he says. He argues that children are often hustled out of the church service early or right from the start because:
For surely Christian worship is for adults; and children will find it far too boring.”
He then goes on to say:
“Perhaps, in far too many cases, the reason for this is that it is boring. It’s not the children’s fault if they are not grabbed by the twaddle that emanates from the mouths of many of the ordained, a thin layer of spiritual jargon stretched across the content of a standard Guardian article. Nor if they fail to be excited by songs with lyrics, or tunes, or both of astonishingly mediocre content and poetry. But the solution is not to banish the children to a poorly-recreated child-centred play group in a different room or at a different time. The answer is to realise that the adults have themselves lost their grip on what Christian worship, and perhaps what Christianity, actually is.”
Now, perhaps, sometimes Church is “boring” indeed, as my friend Steve Kneale points out, yes we will all end up in a boring service and perhaps being the cause of it at some point. Sometimes that is because of failings on the part of those providing the offering, sometimes it is just that for whatever reason, the person, including the child doesn’t find it interesting. Take the example Matthew offers of the parent taking their child along to watch their team play football. Sometimes your team will manage to serve up gritty, defensive hoof-ball leading to a 0-0 draw. They have managed to make the beautiful game boring and ugly. Sometimes though, your child will simply not yet find the game that exciting. They won’t get it. We will talk more about that shortly.
However, what stands out here is the way that Matthew talks about others. The way he is quick to be dismissive of other churches and other church leaders. This is very different from putting your hand up ad saying “Actually sometimes I preach some boring sermons.” Instead, he and his own church are held up as the model to aspire to.
I’m concerned by an increasing tendency among Christians to rely on trash talking others in order to build up our own case. Surely a strong argument in favour of our own approach doesn’t need us to put others down.
This is a shame because when Matthew argues that Christian worship should be exciting, he is right. The vision he offers of Christian worship is oneI share when he says:
“The biblical story of salvation has more excitement than the best movie and more drama than the greatest of plays; indeed, nearly all the plotlines of both are mere riffs on the Christian original. To hear the creator of the universe address us as his children, to fill our lungs and throats with his praises, to be challenged and transformed by listening to his words of rebuke, command and blessing, to eat at the table of God himself … these are things with a million echoes, but no parallels, in this world. To gather with a Christian church for worship is an experience like no other. It confronts, it elevates, it destroys what is bad and rebuilds good in its place, in ways so profound that those who make it a regular part of their lives often find themselves transformed in ways they (and others) could never have imagined.”
Now, it may be that some churches have lost that vision. However, because Matthew, like me, does not have a helicopter view, it is rather presumptuous to make the claim that this is so and that this is the reason as to why churches provide separate children’s programmes during their Church services. Perhaps that there are some of us who share that vision for Christian worship and indeed have often experienced the joy of worship like that take a different approach would encourage him to ask us “So why do you disagree with me?”
If he did, then the first thing he would find out is that we reject his pejorative description of us hustling the children out of a side door, or his claim that this is based on an assumption that Christian worship is not for children.
Perhaps I could describe for you the kinds of things that happen/have happened in churches where I’ve been involved in Christian leadership. First, of all, because it has always been my view and that of others I’ve led with that worship is for children, we’ve never been in a rush to hustle the children out. Rather children are there and actively involved in much of the gathering. They are encouraged to join in the singing. We are a Charismatic Church and there is open prayer and prophecy as part of our corporate worship. Children are present to hear and also welcome to participate. They are there as we break into small groups to pray together and it is a joy each week to see adults intentionally asking children if they would like to pray.
I’ve also been involved in leading gatherings which children stay in through out. I am not against this. Currently our church do this once a month and this means that we don’t dial back on the prayer, prophecy or praise. Nor do we dial back on the content of preaching/teaching (to keep the alliteration), though we may break things up differently with Bible memory, story telling and discussion. At our previous church, we ran gatherings that were all age, all the time.
Matthew adds dismissively
“Or even for entirely different events, with paint and glue and games, to be put on for the children at different times or on different days.
It is perhaps worth pausing to consider the activities he describes dismissively. At a previous church, we ran an after school club for a while and then developed what has become termed “messy church”, the sort of thing that includes, games and craft. Now, hands up, I’m not that excited about paint and glue. Maybe Matthew isn’t either but guess what, lots and lots of people, children and adults are! So, I got involved in gluing and painting and hammer beading. But this was not about shunting the children out. Indeed, I’m delighted to say that both there and at our current church, the elders saw it as their privilege and duty to be fully involved in working with the children.
Rather, we put on those events as a way of engaging with our community. They weren’t separate activities for bored children of church members. We were seeking to share the good news. So, we saw lots of families from our neighbouring primary school. This meant that our building was often full of tattooed single mums, nipping out for their cigarette break and lots of people from other faith backgrounds listening intently to stories about Jesus. We put these things on at different times, not because we didn’t want people there at our Sunday morning gathering but partly because the building was close to full at that time but also partly because we sought to be available wherever and whenever hungry people were able to meet to hear the Good News. Far from coming from collapsed confidence, our practices there and then came from a place of confidence, not in the church but in the Gospel.
Returning to the question of children being ushered out. We do run separate teaching groups for children and this has been true of most churches I’ve been a member of and involved in leadership. We don’t shoo the children out. They don’t leave. They are not excluded from one part of worship. Rather, we feel that there is a benefit to tailoring Bible teaching around age needs.
This means that no, we don’t send the kids off to some “poorly recreated child centered play group.”. Again, it is a weak argument that depends on such dismissive rhetoric against the gifting and efforts of others. Often we see people putting serious time into preparing for such sessions and we see them using God given gifts to share the good news of Jesus and teach the Bible in an appropriate and engaging way for children.
And it has often been in those children’s groups led by faithful people in Gospel confident churches that many of us heard the Gospel.
So, why do we make those choices. I think the most important reason is because we are allowed. You see, Scripture neither orders us to have children’s groups nor does it forbid us. In fact, the Bible has very little to say about the detail of what should happen when we gather. Indeed, there is very little of what you might expect to see in a modern church service described in the Bible. There again, plenty of what is described, a meal together in a home, different people contributing with songs, prophecy and prayer etc are frequently absent from many a church gathering.
What this means is that Matthew is free to organise church as he desires in line with his preferences and presumably the cultural context he finds himself in, not to add his polity and doctrinal assumptions. If the children stay in all the way through at York Presbyterian Church, that is for him and his congregation to decide. It’s not for me to judge them but nor is it for them to judge us for what we do.
In our context, it is helpful to have children’s groups. I think there are good practical reasons for this. Going back to Matthew’s examples, yes a child does not get everything about football, theatre, cinema, swimming or literature (choose your interest). Of course, they can grow into those things. However, this doesn’t mean that we throw them in at the deep end and expect them to experience everything.
You may want your child to grasp the beauty and wonder of Les Miserable or War and Peace but you actually introduce them to such things gradually. You don’t expect them to sit through a full musical. You take them to see shorter, lighter plays to begin with, you play them some of the songs, you tell them the story. And sometimes you realsie that there are aspects of the story that are too big for them and it isn’t helpful for them to hear yet. So you wait for them to be ready. And yes, there are bits of the Bible that come with age classifications!
Football is a fascinating analogy because dad’s don’t just want their kid to be spectators, they want them to play the game. Yet we don’t throw our kids into a full 90 minute 11 a-side game with the adults. They build up to it.
It is not because we don’t think worship is for kids, its not because we think its boring and it certainly isn’t because of some loss of confidence that we provide children’s groups. It’s because we think that the Gospel and the worship that comes out of it is so wonderful and we want to give them every opportunity to encounter King Jesus as Lord and Saviour, in worship, for themselves.
Faithroots 