revmadbull's ravings

Scripture Meme

2007-07-19T12:09:00.000+01:00

Just been 'tagged' by Simon (http://bromleyboy.blogspot.com/) to share a passage of scripture that I inhabit, keep returning to, feel haunted by ...

Simon's was from Jeremiah and, coincidentally, so is mine! Same chapter, even. Just four verses on: "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future" (Jeremiah 29.11)

In the summer of 1990, at the end of the first year of a teacher training course, I wrapped my Morris Marina around a tree and came off worst. I suffered a broken neck, severe head injuries, and a shattered right femur. I was in a coma for ten days.

My church, as soon as they heard the news, set up a 24 hour prayer-vigil, and (mysteriously?) my neck turned out not to be broken after all. One vague memory I have from that summer is finding a neck brace in my bedside locker and asking what it was for! However, the head injuries were still very serious - there was a real risk of brain damage (I'll let you draw your own conclusions on that one) - and my leg was a mess.

After three months in hospital I was discharged in a wheelchair, with metal plates in my leg, and a definite feeling that God had 'saved my life'.

I continued the B.Ed. course, but the following summer began to suffer considerable pain with the leg again. It swelled up, and I was admitted to hospital again - this time with septicaemia. The bone had become infected, and was giving me blood poisoning. I underwent a number of operations that summer - first to remove the metalwork, and then to try to identify and remove the seat of the infection. It seems that a fragment of bone had not reconnected with the blood supply and rotted deep inside the femur. But the surgery had no effect than to provide the infection with a route to the outside, and I was left with a painful sore, oozing smelly green pus. It had to be dressed twice a day, even after I left hospital, and I was taking whole handfuls of antibiotics.

This condition continued for a long, long time. It didn't do much for my dating prospects! And it didn't do much for my relationship with God, either. I began to ask why, if God had saved my life, healed my broken neck and head injuries, etc., I was left with this ongoing and disgusting problem.

That's when the verse from Jeremiah began to be very important to me. I did trust that God had a plan, and that somehow through all this he was working in me and changing me for something. It wasn't always easy to hold onto that, and I went through some really low times. But I kept coming back to that verse.

In 1994 I was referred to a specialist surgeon in London. I underwent some fairly major surgery - I was teaching my now, and took a whole term off work - to remove as much of the infected bone a possible. The operation was not a success.

Six months later I went under the knife again. This time the surgeon literally hollowed out the femur, scraping as much infected stuff out as he possibly could. Then, instead of stitching me back up at the end, he left the wound open, packed it with antiseptic beads (which had to be removed a couple a day using a pair of pliers!) and soaked the whole area with antibiotics. The end result, though, was that the infection looked worse than ever.

So I asked to see my surgeon to ask what was going on. He admitted that the operation had not been a success, and said that we needed to start considering amputation. If I had felt low in the previous few years, I was now at rock bottom.

However, my uncle - an Anglican vicar, and at the time director of the Acorn Healing Trust - came to visit me in hospital. He served me communion at my bedside. He then anointed my head with oil for healing. Finally, he anointed my hands with oil for service, saying, 'God hasn't finished with you yet.'

Visiting time over, the surgeon came back to see me, and to change the antibiotics with which I was being treated.

24 hours later the infection had cleared up. 48 hours later I was discharged from hospital. Within the week I had spoke to my minister about training for the Baptist ministry. It really was as dramatic as that.

And, looking back, I wouldn't want to change anything that happened. No it wasn't pleasant - but God was using my suffering and God was changing me. I have now been a Baptist minister for eight years, and that would never have happened without all I have just described.

Jeremiah 29.11 is an important part of my testimony, and still a very special verse for me. Thanks, Simon, for giving me the chance to share this, and to remind myself ...

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children - section nine - training needs

2007-07-13T08:50:00.001+01:00

9. Training Needs

In all of this, there is an urgent need to support, affirm, encourage and train all those involved in working with children in our churches.

Sunday School teachers / Children’s Workers

The largest area of concern must be for our Sunday School teachers and children’s workers. They are a great resource. They are highly motivated and committed. And yet for too long in many of our churches they have been neglected. We urgently need to give them the support and affirmation, the budget, and the training that they need.

Many of our workers would welcome the opportunity to share resources, to find out what other churches do and what works well for them, to get fresh ideas and creative prayer ideas, to refresh their skills. Perhaps we just need to put on a series of events like that with the main aim of affirming what they do.

Some have asked, too, for some more specific training. How can we understand what faith means for children, and how faith develops in children? How can we get to grips with the needs of modern children who live in a very different world from previous generations? How can we disciple our children? How do we provide pastoral support to children?

Church

It’s not just the children’s workers, though, who need that sort of training. Our church congregations, too, need a better understanding of how children can fit into church family as equal members. How to integrate children and church, and what are the practical implications of that.

I suspect that the attitude of our church members towards children is the single main issue we need to address if we are to effectively reach and keep children in our churches: “In a time of rapid cultural change, older Christians must be prepared for the fact that ways of expressing Christian thought and feeling which they have found meaningful and satisfactory may not be equally meaningful and satisfactory to their children.”[1]

So, the question is not only (perhaps not even), “‘How shall we prepare our young people for Church?” [We must] take with the greatest possible seriousness the question, ‘How shall we prepare the Church for our young people?’”[2]

Ministers and Church Leaders

Our ministers and church leaders need to be challenged, and reminded, that children are enormously significant both in the biblical narratives and in God¹s purposes. A brief survey of the way children were included in the worshipping communities of the Old and New Testaments challenges all of us to rethink the place of children in the activities of God’s people today. “Children are not the church of tomorrow; they are the church of today without whom there will be no church of tomorrow.”[3] Similarly, an examination of the emphasis on children’s ministry by many major figures through church history must challenge our ministers, in particular, to rethink their priorities, and their involvement with children’s ministry in their own context. At the very least, we must be encouraging our church leaders to ask whether their “church budget for children’s ministry expenses include leadership training and adequate materials and resources?”[4]

Passing on the faith to our children is one of the primary activities of any faith community. But I think it needs to be given a much higher profile, again, in the Christian church. And whether or not it is a minister’s specific gifting, it is certainly his or her responsibility to ensure it is happening effectively.

There has been an adult bias in every aspect of Christian thinking for the last 2000 years, and “a lack of training has resulted in poor practice at church level and an inadequate knowledge on the part of church leaders as to the needs of those working with children.”[5] Perhaps there needs to be at least a module on ‘connecting the Christian Faith with Children’ included in the ministerial courses offered at our Baptist colleges, because our churches are all built around the needs and desires of adults, and children have been shockingly marginalised in mainstream Christian theology.

Parents

Perhaps we also need to try to shift the emphasis away from Sunday morning worship being the main focus of Christian activity. In the faith communities of the OT and NT, the main focus of the faith was the household. And there are a number of people arguing that we need to recapture that in today’s church.

“Judaism … is a faith in which family and children play a central part.”[6] The home is “regarded as the focus of religious activity”[7] and “the family plays a role, not only as the basic unit of social life, but also as the primary milieu of ritual expression.”[8] A significant number of the Jewish festivals “were home-based and often involved the participation of children.”[9] “The covenant community was striking for its lack of separate institutions for the education of children.”[10] Rather, “responsibility for the education of children into the covenant community rested with the parents,”[11] “and not with the worshipping community, although the festivals and cycle of the year helped them in their task.”[12] The early Christians, too, regarded the home as “the principal area of Christian nurture and instruction.”[13] And modern Judaism still “places a high priority on family life.”[14]

There is a need to recapture the historical Christian notion that “parenting is a serious calling and a significant spiritual discipline”[15]:

· Chrysostom considered parents to be “‘artists’ who sculpt statues with great precision … helping to restore the image of God in their offspring.”[16] He described parents as “teachers of their children, ”[17] and the family as “a ‘little church’ or a ‘sacred community”[18] wherein “adults and children rehearse for membership in the kingdom of heaven.”[19] He spoke of the obligations of parents to their children, such as “reading the Bible … praying with them, and being good examples.”[20] Chrysostom considered that “in the churches far too little discussion is given over to the vocation of parenthood.”[21] And he claimed that “when and wherever there is a crisis of childhood there is also bound to be a crisis of parenthood.”[22]

· Luther exhorted parents to “baptise their children, expose them to the Word and the sacraments … teach them about the faith, provide them with a good education.”[23] He claimed that “father and mother are apostles, bishops, and priests to their children, for it is they who make them acquainted with the Gospel.”[24]

· Calvin frequently makes the point that “the primary obligation of parents … is to teach godliness … all parents have the duty of communicating what they have learned from the Lord to their children.”[25]

· Menno Simons made the “careful, intentional, aggressive, and vigilant nurturing of children in [the] Christian faith”[26] absolutely imperative, and gave the primary responsibility for such nurturance to the children’s parents. “Christian parents are to be ‘as sharp, pungent salt, a shining light, an unblamable, faithful teacher, each in his own home’.”[27] Anabaptist children were “urged to love one another, bear with one another, do honourable work, not be prideful, flee from evil, fear God, and follow the example set by Christ. Making lifelong commitments of discipleship rather than momentary decisions for personal salvation is what was essential … [and baptism] was construed as a beginning, not an end.”[28]

· In the early 18th century, Franke claimed that “true piety is fostered in children … by reading the Bible and exposing them to the Word through the teachings and practices of the church (learning the catechism, singing hymns, praying, and worshipping),”[29] and he encouraged “parents … to begin this approach right away with young children in the home by reading and discussing the Bible, teaching Luther’s catechism, praying at mealtimes, beginning and ending the day … with a prayer and a hymn, worshipping together, and preparing for worship on Saturday by reading the text for Sunday’s sermon.”[30] He also encouraged families “to read through the whole Bible every two years and Luther’s catechism every four weeks.”[31]

· Most church leaders in Wesley’s day, too, believed that “religious education did play an important role in the training of children, and that parents were important in the process.”[32]

· Jonathan Edwards “was a loving parent who took pains to raise his own children as faithful Christians. … he prayed with them, quizzed them on the Bible and the Westminster Shorter Catechism, and discouraged ‘frolicking’.”[33] He urged the parents in his congregations to do the same, to “lead family prayers every day, and serve as examples of Christian virtue.”[34] He urged them to be “as Carefull About the welfare of [children’s] souls as you are about their bodies.”[35]

· Friedrich Schleiermacher considered the Christian home to be the “first and irreplaceable school of faith, ”[36] “a center of worship and Bible study in which children could … experience the full range of Christian religious affections and come to a living faith in God.”[37] He argued that it was only after such initial nurture that the clergy were able to “properly train young people to think about their faith in doctrinal terms.”[38]

· Horace Bushnell claimed that “the ‘atmosphere’ of a Christian home – the ‘manners, personal views, prejudices, practical motives, and spirit of the house’ – played a determinative role in the child’s religious formation.”[39] He warned parents about “the dangers of ‘ostrich nurture,’ of allowing to forge his or her own way to heaven, ”[40] because, for Bushnell, the family rather than the church was the “primary agent of grace … [and] Christian nurture took its deepest root in the daily routines of family life … as the child absorbed the Christian atmosphere of the home and observed the tender, upright example of Christian parents.”[41]

· Karl Barth gave parents guidelines about their “ambassadorial function … to attest to their children a divine promise,”[42] and to “communicate to children that their lives ‘are under the guardianship and guidance of the One who really undertakes for them.”[43]

· Many contemporary feminist theologians state that “to learn to nurture through the act of parenting is to acquire an essential human virtue and even to perfect one’s own life of faith in Christ. To care for all children, and not simply one’s own child, … becomes key to the good Christian life.”[44] Further, “parenthood is a vocation for both women and men, not an avocation or a pastime.”[45]

However, many people in the church today believe that it is the “programs offered in their congregations [that] provide the primary place for the faith formation of children, and congregational leaders themselves have erred in allowing the focus of faith development to shift away from the family and to become centred in the congregation.”[46]

“Since the biblical model is for children to receive spiritual nurture first and foremost from their prime care givers in their own homes, there is a need for churches today to help and resource Christian parents to carry out their role.”[47] It seems obvious that “the best vehicles for the transmission of faith to children are family rituals, family service projects, and meaningful conversations with children in the home.”[48] So Dallow suggests that all Christian families should, “tell and retell Bible stories and share stories of faith experience; celebrate faith in everyday life; pray together; listen and talk to each other; [and] be involved in acts of service and witness together.”[49]

Others argue that “parents … should work as God works, bringing up children in the ‘nurture and admonition of the Lord’ (Ephesians 6.4) through appropriate caring and nurturing relationships in the discipline of the family.”[50] Such nurture will be primarily “non-verbal, implicit … passing on the Christian character and spirit through living together and parenting.”[51]

Sarah Johnson’s book, Daring to be Different: Being a Faith Family in a Secular World (2004, Darton, Longman & Todd) offers encouragement, practical advice, and suggestions for lively ways to build faith into daily family life.

But if this shift is to take place, the Christian family will need the help “of a supportive, serious, nurturing congregation to offer three things: a wider perspective, a less fraught and forced set of relationships (sometimes), and a Christian context that is more explicitly related to the Jesus story.”[52] Our churches need to be giving “greater attention to parent education, including the psychology of children and the practice of Christian education in the home,”[53] and in this way we can complement and complete “the Christian nurture started in the home, taking the child on to new explorations of discipleship.”[54]

[1] Understanding Christian Nurture (1981, a report of the Consultative Group on Ministry among Children, British Council of Churches), quoted by Sutcliffe (ed.), Tuesday’s Child (2001, Christian Education Publications), p.158
[2] Unfinished Business (1994, CCBI Publications), quoted by Sutcliffe (ed.), Tuesday’s Child (2001, Christian Education Publications), p.206
[3] Mark Russell, interviewed by Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.87
[4] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.1450
[5] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.8
[6] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.3
[7] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.3
[8] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.3
[9] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.3
[10] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.28
[11] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.29
[12] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.30
[13] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.13
[14] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.3
[15] Bunge, ‘Introduction’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.20
[16] Chrysostom, cited by Bunge, ‘Introduction’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.21
[17] Chrysostom, cited by Bunge, ‘Introduction’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.21
[18] Chrysostom, cited by Bunge, ‘Introduction’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.21
[19] Guroian, ‘The Ecclesial Family: John Chrysostom on Parenthood and Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.62
[20] Chrysostom, cited by Bunge, ‘Introduction’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.21
[21] Guroian, ‘The Ecclesial Family: John Chrysostom on Parenthood and Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.62
[22] Guroian, ‘The Ecclesial Family: John Chrysostom on Parenthood and Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.63
[23] Luther, cited by Bunge, ‘Introduction’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.21
[24] Luther, cited by Bunge, ‘Introduction’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.21
[25] Pitkin, ‘“The Heritage of the Lord”: Children in the Theology of John Calvin’ , in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.171
[26] Miller, ‘Complex Innncence, Obligatory Nurturance, and Parental Vigilance: “The Child” in the Work of Menno Simons’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.207
[27] Miller, ‘Complex Innncence, Obligatory Nurturance, and Parental Vigilance: “The Child” in the Work of Menno Simons’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.211
[28] Miller, ‘Complex Innncence, Obligatory Nurturance, and Parental Vigilance: “The Child” in the Work of Menno Simons’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.210
[29] 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.264
[30] 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.264
[31] 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.264
[32] Heitzenrater, ‘John Wesley and Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.280
[33] Brekus, ‘Children of Wrath, Children of Grace: Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan Culture of Child Rearing’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.311
[34] Brekus, ‘Children of Wrath, Children of Grace: Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan Culture of Child Rearing’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.321
[35] Brekus, ‘Children of Wrath, Children of Grace: Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan Culture of Child Rearing’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.321
[36] Schleiermacher, cited by Bunge, ‘Introduction’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.22
[37] DeVries, ‘“Be Converted and Become as Little Children”: Friedrich Schleiermacher on the Religious Significance of Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.333
[38] DeVries, ‘“Be Converted and Become as Little Children”: Friedrich Schleiermacher on the Religious Significance of Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.333
[39] Bendroth, ‘Horace Bushnell’s Christian Nurture’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.354
[40] Bendroth, ‘Horace Bushnell’s Christian Nurture’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.362
[41] Bendroth, ‘Horace Bushnell’s Christian Nurture’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.356
[42] Werpehowski, ‘Reading Karl Barth on Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.398
[43] Werpehowski, ‘Reading Karl Barth on Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.399
[44] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.464
[45] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.470
[46] Bunge, ‘Introduction’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.24
[47] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.107
[48] Bunge, ‘Introduction’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.24
[49] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.110
[50] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.59
[51] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.59
[52] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.208
[53] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.43
[54] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.208

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

2007-07-12T14:59:00.000+01:00

Communion

And, I suggest, nowhere is this more important than when it comes to communion.

Only 32% (7/22) of our churches allow children to participate in communion. 14% (3/22) allow children to be present, but offer them only a blessing or perhaps juice and a biscuit. Which means that 54% of our churches simply do not allow children to be present at communion.

In the Old Testament, “Exodus 16 … the feeding by God of the people in the wilderness … is not communion but it is for all of them, serving the needs of their hunger and the avoidance of the influence of Egypt. God did not pick which members of the community were to receive this food, it was for all.”[1]

The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle recorded by all four Gospels, and “some argue that in John’s Gospel [especially] the story … was a sacramental meal. The language is Eucharistic, and it is carefully located in time as ‘near to Passover’. If they are right then it needs to be noted that it was a boy who offered the bread (and fish) that Christ was to bless, break and distribute.”[2] “It took a small boy to be found and to be prepared to share his small resources with so many.”[3]

For the first Christians, the journey of faith “included everybody; children were present in the earliest Christian communities and were initiated into the faith along with adults. … although there is no explicit mention of children sharing the Eucharist in the New Testament … the Jewish Passover tradition, which would have had a strong influence on Eucharistic sharing, gave children a central role in the ritual. Children were given a place of honour at the Passover meal and often led adults in reliving the Passover experience … By implication, therefore, children were indeed receiving communion from the earliest times of our faith, sharing the worship with adults … Likewise, there is no explicit reference in the post-apostolic era to suggest that children receiving communion was abnormal or problematic.”[4]

Thus, “the only criteria for being fed the Bread of Life are: to come and believe. Children do that just as adults do. In fact, like the boy with the loaves and fishes, they are more likely to be willing and able than many of us will ever be.”[5]

In fact it was not until the 19th Century, and the emphasis brought by the Reformation, that children began to be discouraged from taking communion. “For valuable reasons instruction and understanding were given high priority, but this brought the receiving of communion much more into the adults-only world.”[6]

However, in the modern age, those churches that practise infant baptism believe that such baptism marks a person’s entry into the Church, and there is a growing movement in all these church traditions which argues that, as full members of the church, children must not be rejected from the sacrament. In support of this, “the report of a World Council of Churches consultation, And do not hinder them …, strongly supported the case for children being active participants in the Eucharist.”[7]

“In the Orthodox churches of the East … infant communion is the norm, immediately following baptism. In the East the right and need of children to receive communion remains unquestioned, and they communicate frequently, like the adults, and on equal terms with them.”[8]

In the Roman Catholic Church, “children are admitted to first communion, often in special services, around the age of seven.”[9]

“In 1987 the Methodist Conference in England approved … guidelines which found no inconsistency between admitting children to communion and Wesley’s own practice and teaching … [The] approach of Methodists is that … [children] should be invited to share in the Lord’s Supper if they desire it.”[10]

The Anglican position is varied, but generally moving toward an awareness of the important of admitting children to communion. In the regulations of the General Synod (GS 1696A: Admission of Baptised Children to Holy Communion Regulations 2006) it is stated that where a child has been admitted to Holy Communion (in one church or parish), they shall continue to be “so admitted at any service of Holy Communion … in any place, regardless of whether or not [their new parish has a policy of admitting children to communion].”[11] In other words, once a child has been allowed to receive bread and wine in one place, no other church or minister has the right to refuse them access to the sacrament!

It is only the Baptists who “maintain the … conviction that communion is linked to baptism which follows a mature declaration of faith and commitment.”[12] Clearly, it is our Baptist ecclesiology, which reserves baptism and church membership for those we consider ‘old enough to make up their own minds’, which is, in fact, one of the factors in the marginalisation of children in many of our churches!

One objection, of course, is that “children shouldn’t receive communion because they don’t understand it.”[13] But then not many adults “fully understand … very often … that God’s love is so graciously poured out for me. There’s an element of mystery.”[14] And one author points out “how anomalous it is to insist that children acquire intellectual knowledge of a sacramental act before they are allowed to participate … Sacramental actions work directly on our emotions and imagination; the intellect is only a supplement, important in its turn for full integration of the experience, but secondary in its contribution to our understanding.”[15] Or, as one church leader has remarked: “When people say of children, ‘Will they understand? Will they behave?’ I reply, ‘When you went forward to receive communion on Sunday, did you understand? What were you thinking? Did you feel you were worthy because of your ability to articulate this deep mystery?’”[16]

What we do in church is, most of the time, an entirely “cerebral affair. It’s all words … there’s not a lot of time for silence, there’s not a lot of time for symbolism.”[17] But our children “understand symbols, they understand things they can see and touch … [And] communion is about seeing, touching, tasting and seeing that the Lord is good. That’s … very culturally relevant.”[18] So, “if the primary aim of the Church’s ministry among children is their spiritual development, it is impossible to segregate them from the primary sacramental source of spiritual development for Christians.”[19] It is true, then, that “the Church that does not accept children unconditionally in its fellowship is depriving those children of what is rightfully theirs, but the deprivation such as the Church itself will suffer is far more grave.”[20]

And this is the same issue as above. If we want to connect our children with the Christian faith, we can’t afford to separate them from it and teach them about it; we have to allow them to participate in it. “Communion [is] very much … the nourishing meal of the whole body of Christ and to exclude one part because of their age is wrong.”[21] “You cannot [say], ‘Yes, we welcome you to new life in Christ … but, no, we don’t trust you with the bread of life.’”[22]

As a post-script, Wolff-Pritchard notes that “children who have been fed at the Lord’s table since earliest infancy are like children who have had plenty of hugs and kisses – they hardly need to be taught about God’s love in bread and wine, because they already know all about it; they feel it in their bones.”[23]

[1] Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.21
[2] White, Continuing the Search (www.childtheology.org)
[3] Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.21
[4] Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.4
[5] Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.22
[6] Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.6
[7] Sutcliffe (ed.), Tuesday’s Child (2001, Christian Education Publications), p.127
[8] Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.5
[9] Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.56
[10] Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.56
[11] Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), pp.142-143
[12] Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.57
[13] Mark Russell, interviewed by Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.79
[14] Mark Russell, interviewed by Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.79
[15] Wolff Pritchard, Offering the Gospel to Children (1992, Cowley Publications), p.160
[16] Margaret Withers, interviewed by Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.98
[17] Mark Russell, interviewed by Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.84
[18] Mark Russell, interviewed by Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.84
[19] Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.54
[20] The Child in the Church (1976, British Council of Churches), quoted by Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.14
[21] Mark Russell, interviewed by Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.78
[22] Bishop David Stancliffe, interviewed by Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.69
[23] Wolff Pritchard, Offering the Gospel to Children (1992, Cowley Publications), p.162

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

2007-07-11T08:57:00.001+01:00

- 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

Connecting the Christian faith with Children - section nine - part five (children's workers)

2007-07-11T08:56:00.000+01:00

- How Affirmed are the Workers?

Our children’s workers are overwhelmingly female (many of our Sunday Schools are desperate for men to help and to teach; and, also, the children need Christian male role-models). The vast majority of our children’s workers are the mums of the children in the groups (who know that if they don’t go out with their children no one else is going to do it). I wonder what that says to the children (and to the mums) about the value we place on them?

Very few of our children’s workers have had any training. Some of them admitted that they are not even up to date with child protection stuff. And our churches are relying heavily on the teachers on our congregations. Where teachers have had training, they have generally sought it (and, paid for it?) themselves. There is no evidence that churches are saying to their workers, ‘Here’s a course you might find beneficial, we’d like you to go on it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay your travel expenses and we’ll sort out your childcare.

Only 3 churches said they had enough children’s workers, everyone else is constantly trying to recruit. And virtually all churches are finding it incredibly difficult to persuade members to take on any responsibility for the children.

Only 9 of the churches are able to offer their children’s workers a rota system, so the majority of the workers are out with the children week in week out, with no opportunity for their own spiritual input unless they get the tapes or attend the evening service (difficult for busy mums).

Only 4 churches annually ‘commission’ their children’s workers. Many churches don’t even pray for them regularly or routinely. Some pray for the children and the workers before they go to their classes on a Sunday morning, but one respondent made the entirely valid point that any children’s work beyond a Sunday morning is hardly ever prayed for in services.

Perhaps as a result of all that the vast majority of our children’s workers feel unaffirmed, unappreciated and unacknowledged. They feel that the rest of the church are just glad they don’t have to go out with the children. They feel ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Other members of the church make them feel that their work is of limited value. They feel like a child-minding service, ‘out on a limb’. (Those are all phrases and words that children’s workers wrote on their version of the form.)

Connecting the Christian faith with Children - section nine - part four (ministry)

2007-07-11T08:55:00.001+01:00

- Where’s the Minister?

Many of our ministers have little or no input into the planning of the children's work in their churches. Most never attend the children's groups, and they certainly never teach the children themselves.
Both the minister and the main children's worker were asked to fill in a version of the survey form. And where they did that, it was telling to note how many of their answers disagreed or even conflicted. Some of the ministers couldn't even tell me how many children's workers there are in their church (or they got the number wrong)!

It seems fair, then, to draw the conclusion that many of our ministers have, and show, very little interest in what goes on in Sunday School or their other children's groups. (Some have said to me that it is not their 'gifting'. To which I want to respond: 'What's your gifting got to do with it? Surely you have a responsibility ...?')

As we have read, many of the great figures of the Christian faith made the teaching of children a personal priority (see the excellent set of essays in 'The Child in Christian Thought' edited by Marcia J. Bunge). Charles Spurgeon once said (something like) he would rather have the letters SST (for Sunday School Teacher) after his name than a Ph.D. They all knew the importance of working with children.

Ishmael, speaking at Spring Harvest 2007, talked about how most children's workers are gifted pastorally, and that our children have a desperate need for gifted Bible teachers. So where are the ministers? How can we give children's ministry the same value and recognition as the other ministries in our churches? When will we realise that the children are just as (if not more!) important than the adults? They are the church of today without whom there will be no church of tomorrow!

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children - section nine - part three (budget)

2007-07-11T08:54:00.000+01:00

- What’s the Budget?

Very few churches have a specific or realistic budget for their children's work. And, as we know, the budget of any organisation effectively reflects where its priorities lie!The only churches with any sort of realistic budget were those who employ a youth or children's worker, and then they have to factor in salaries, etc. Most of the rest said that if the children's workers have a bill that needs to be paid, or materials need to be bought for the Sunday School, then the church will pay the bill. But telling your workers to come cap-in-hand to ask for money is a very different sort of relationship than giving them an amount of money at the beginning of the year to be spent on the children! I think we need to do some work here!

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children - section nine - part two (purpose)

2007-07-11T08:53:00.000+01:00

Not everything, though, is quite so encouraging. And I have identified number of trends and significant issues we need to be aware of.

- What’s the Purpose?

2/22 (only 9%) of our churches have any specific mission statement / purpose statement for their children’s work. And the responses from the minister and children’s workers in the same church often contradicted each other with regard to the purpose of the children’s work. I don’t think any of our churches have a clear idea of what they are doing with children or why they are doing it!

When it came to the section of the form giving a list of options, many forms just had all or most of them ticked. And where the minister and the children’s worker had both filled in a copy of the form, they had generally ticked a different set of things.

A significant number of churches didn’t select ‘arm them against the dangers of secular culture’, or ‘nurture their spirituality’ as purpose statements. A number also disliked the phrase ‘convert them to Christianity’ – some saying that this is God’s work, and others objecting on the grounds that it is too strong a phrase, preferring ‘introduce them to Jesus’. Quite a number also added ‘having fun’ to the list.

This is an area of great concern. There seems to be, in our churches, total confusion about what the children’s work / Sunday School / Junior Church is actually for. Very few of our churches have any clear idea of what is the purpose of their work with children.

The Drama of Doctrine

2007-07-10T19:33:00.000+01:00

Today I started reading The Drama of Doctrine (Kevin Vanhoozer).

Vanhoozer follows Paul Tillich in characterising 'cultural history as a series of anxiety attacks: ancient civilisation suffered the anxiety of death; the Middle Ages and Reformation, the anxety of guilt; modernity, the anxiety of meaninglessness ...' (p.2) and postmodernity, the anxiety of truthfulness. He then sets out his thesis that 'sound doctrine - authoritative teaching - is vital for the life of the church, and hence for the life of the world' (p.3). 'What the church uniquely has to say and do cannot be reduced to philosophy or politics [or sociology]. The church's unique responsibility is to proclaim and to practise the gospel, to witness in its speech and life to the reality of God's presence and action in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit ...' (p.3).

I'm already being challenged to preach more doctrine and less sociology (and I'm only sixteen pages in)!

preaching theology or sociology?

2007-07-10T19:27:00.000+01:00

Last Sunday I had an interesting conversation with Jim, from one of the Methodist Churches in our circuit. He was noting that, maybe ten years ago, what he heard in sermons was generally theology. But, these days, we seem to be preaching more sociology. Why is that?

I thought back over my last few months' preaching, and put my hand up. Guilty as charged. In the sermon Jim was referring to I had set out the distinctions between churched, de-churched and unchurcd groups in our communities, and the urgent need for churches to reach the unchurched and not just the de-churched. I think that's an important message. But I'm now asking myself about whether I need to try to strike some sort of balance between pointing out the need for change (lots of fun in a Methodist circuit setting where I am a bit more itinerant) and pointing to the glory of God. Hmm.

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children - section nine - part one (good stories)

2007-07-10T19:25:00.000+01:00

9. 2007 Survey of Yorkshire Baptist Churches

Good Stories

Some would say that we are doing our best. And the responses to the survey sent to the Baptist churches in Yorkshire contain many good stories and positive figures. For instance:
· 82% (18/22) of churches have a Sunday School or Junior Church meeting at the same time as adult worship.
· 55% (12/22) of churches run a midweek children’s activity.
· 50% (11/22) of churches run other children’s activities such as holiday clubs and one-off events.
· 45% (10/22) of churches have AAW at least once a month. A significant number of other churches have AAW bi-monthly or at important Christian festivals (Christmas, Harvest, etc.)
· 73% (16/22) of churches regularly have a children’s address or an all-age time in their services.

Between them, the 22 churches that responded are reaching at least 400 children of church families and at least 500 children from their local communities. That’s something to be encouraged about! There are a lot of exciting and creative things happening across Yorkshire. And we need to share those stories. The survey forms mentioned have not been a very good way of collecting those stories – some responses have just hinted at things – but it would be good to find a way of collecting and sharing stories of some of the really good things that are happening.

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children - presentation

2007-07-10T19:20:00.000+01:00

On Monday I presented some of my thinking / reading / writing on the 'Connecting the Christian Faith with Children' project to the Missions Group of the Yorkshire Baptist Association. The response was very positive and encouraging.

There were a couple of interesting things, though. Some churches are right on board with the need for change and intergenerational stuff, but they just have no children! How do they get children and families into the church? Or are we thinking about this with a completely wrong set of categories? Maybe the answer has something to do with the difference between attractional and missional church. An attractional church will worry about having no children / families / young people coming to its services. A missional church will go to where the children / families / young people already are ... ?

I'll carry on posting the sections of my interim report. I think we're up to section nine!

apologies

2007-07-10T19:19:00.000+01:00

Apologies for the very long 'blog' silence. Lots of stuff going on that I can't go into here. Going to try to be more disciplined (in various ways) from now on.

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children (part eight)

2007-06-05T15:05:00.000+01:00

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)

2007-06-05T15:04:00.000+01:00

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)

2007-06-05T15:02:00.000+01:00

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

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children (part 5)

2007-05-26T15:02:00.000+01:00

5. Children through Church History

Throughout Church history, reflection on and exploration of the narratives and teachings of Scripture has led people to struggle with questions about the true standing of children before God. The theological debate on the nature of humanity has, at its heart, asked the question “are children by nature innocent, good beings, or are children by nature evil depraved beings?”[1]

Augustine (354-430)

Augustine’s reading of Romans 5.12 (‘All had sinned in Adam’) and his conviction that judgement applied even to infants has, for more than 1500 years, “formed and informed, transformed and deformed Christian attitudes toward children.”[2] Augustine argued that, “just as infants gain physical strength as they mature, so they assume greater accountability for their actions.”[3] But all are infected with ‘original sin’, and unbaptised infants are excluded from salvation.

Aquinas (1225-1274)

Thomas Aquinas followed Augustine with a notion of graded responsibility, claiming that “increasing age, grace and virtue order one’s passions and one’s actions, bringing one closer either to perfection or to damnation.”[4] By contrast, though, Aquinas was convinced of the “manifest actual innocence”[5] of those in the first stage of childhood: Infantia: “Babies or young children, lacking reason, are not intentional moral agents … they cannot be held accountable for anything. They are … incapable of actual sin.”[6] However, Aquinas held that, although such infants are “undeserving of damnation, since they are incapable of actual sin, they are also undeserving of salvation, since they still bear the stain of original sin.”[7] Hence, unbaptised infants are consigned to ‘limbo’, “denied intimate union with God but spared the physical, spiritual, and psychological pain of hell.”[8] (This is a doctrine held by the Roman Catholic Church until 2007.)

According to Aquinas, “a second stage of childhood begins with the dawning of rational thought.”[9] At about the age of seven, a child gains the capacity for “formal learning, moral accountability, sin and virtue.”[10] They can “desire and request baptism … receive the Eucharist, and … even make simple vows.”[11] Aquinas seems quite indulgent of the young, making allowances for them as “their minds, spirits and bodies continue to grow.”[12] But he “treats children past the age of puberty as adults in ecclesiastical and moral matters.”[13]

Luther (1483-1546)

Luther, too, recognised developmental stages, and a gradation of responsibility for sin, in the life of the child. Yet he also held “children up in their very neediness and simplicity as the model of faith.”[14]

In addition, Luther wrote a number of catechisms, which “initiated the young in the faith into the believing community’s vision of life … it gave them a clear point of orientation in the world. It provided for them a conceptual vocabulary …”[15] Luther’s catechisms were effective “in sustaining a distinctive piety.”[16]

Luther’s concern for children can be seen in his assertion that “attending to children’s physical welfare, their vocational prospects, their need to learn of God’s grace … human care and affection – this is an essential part of all Christian discipleship. ‘Indeed, for what purpose do we older folk exist, other than to care for, instruct, and bring up the young?’”[17]

Calvin (1509-1564)

John Calvin was another who viewed children as a “metaphor for the religious life of adult Christians,”[18] and his writings “bear witness to the importance of children in church and society.”[19] Adults in Reformation times “were not indifferent to but rather profoundly interested in – and often deeply affectionate toward – children.”[20] And it is clear that Calvin, too, was “intensely interested in children and child rearing.”[21] He was involved, “often quite personally, in the implementation of public policies that had important implications for children”[22] and, like other Protestant preachers, “did not use the doctrine of original sin to underscore the sinful character of children.”[23] While making it clear that children are not exempt from original sin, Calvin dwells less on their sinfulness, and “is more appreciative of the positive character of children … than some of his forebears … or successors.”[24]

Calvin, like his predecessors and contemporaries, held a developmental model of childhood, dividing it into “three stages, each lasting approximately seven years,”[25] and states that “the younger the child, the less he or she manifests the effects of sin.”[26] He argues, too, that “adult believers ought to imitate children’s natural simplicity but not their lack of understanding.”[27]

With the Psalmist (Psalm 8), Calvin views young children as “mature proclaimers of God’s goodness.”[28] And, arguing against “Anabaptists’ insistence that a personal faith precede the sacrament, he suggests that no one can prove that infants themselves do not believe.”[29]

“Calvin … held that the church had an obligation for a program of religious education in order to inspire and guide children to lives of piety,”[30] and he called “for a program of weekly catechetical instruction and for teaching young children to sing psalms so that they might help lead congregational singing.”[31] “Parents were required (and … reminded) to bring their children to lessons”[32] at noon on Sundays. Thus John Calvin was committed to the “spiritual nurture of children.”[33]

Menno Simons (1496-1561)

Menno Simons held a theory of ‘complex innocence’: he recognised the “absence of both faithfulness and sinfulness in children,”[34] but also considered their innocence to be tempered by “an inherited Adamic nature predisposed toward sinning.”[35] He “delineates between a nature predisposed toward sin and actual sinning … identifying only the latter as that for which believers have responsibility before God.”[36] And he further argued that “Christ’s grace is not only for those within the Christian fold but for all children.”[37]

Simons’ perspective “utterly obligated parents and the Christian community to nurture children ‘in the fear of God by teaching, admonishing and chastising them,’ serving also as models of an ‘irreproachable life,’ so that when their children come to the ‘years of discretion,’ they may ‘hear, believe and accept the most holy Gospel of Jesus Christ’.”[38] Yet, perhaps uniquely, Simons held a “concern for spiritual maturity that does not always coincide with chronological maturity.”[39]

Simons’ Anabaptist identity, and the Anabaptist rejection of infant baptism and practice of believer’s baptism, suggests much about his understanding of children. However, Simons’ believed strongly that “all children are covered by God’s grace, whether or not they have made commitment of faith, and that parents and the Christian community together are responsible for nurturing children toward voluntary commitments of faith and discipleship.”[40]

A.H.Franke (1663-1727)

The “German pietism of the early eighteenth century emphasized not only the renewal of the individual believer but also the need to live out this renewal in love of the neighbour.”[41] So it was that Franke, a Lutheran Pastor, became concerned about the large number of children “in tremendous need because of poverty, neglect, and poor educational opportunities.”[42]

Franke began to offer “religious instruction in his church, preaching about child rearing,”[43] and went on to plan (in 1695) “a large complex of charitable and educational institutions, including a school for poor children and an orphanage.”[44] This was unheard of at the time. But by the time of Franke’s death, his schools and orphanages had “served over two thousand boys and girls.”[45]

Franke is “an important example of someone who opened his eyes to the needs of children … and who tirelessly devoted his resources and energy to serving them.”[46]

John Wesley (1703-91)

“From the beginning of the Wesleyan movement at Oxford in the 1720s, children were one of the primary focuses of concern, primarily children of the poor.”[47] The care and education of children, as well as the establishment of schools, was central to Wesley’s activities, and his “educational program … involved changing the whole person – body, mind and spirit.”[48]

“Wesley took his work with children seriously. He was concerned enough about their intellectual and spiritual welfare that he also warned the Methodist preachers under his supervision either to spend regular time with the children in their societies or else to cease being Methodist preachers and go back to their trade.”[49]

“Occasionally revivals broke out among the children in the Methodist Societies.”[50] Certainly, “young people were often at the core of local revivals,”[51] and Wesley believed that “God begins His work in children.”[52] The transformed lives of the children then “became models for the adults.”[53] Wesley often pointed out that “to enter the kingdom of heaven, we must become as little children.”[54] He realised that “children had limits, that they should not bear the burden of being considered the same as adults. And yet he also knew that some children had a capacity for knowledge and love that exceeded that of some adults.”[55]

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)

“Jonathan Edwards viewed children as both sinners and saints: they were indelibly tainted with original sin, and yet also capable of genuine faith … and he took seriously their religious thoughts and questions.”[56] He “clearly believed that children had distinct needs of their own,”[57] and that “their faith had to be carefully nurtured.”[58] And yet he also “thought it was possible for God to choose even the tiniest infants for salvation.”[59]

Edwards “spent much of his life ministering to children ... he watched them play, listened to their questions, and even held religious meetings for them … [gathering] them together to teach them the Gospel.”[60] Edwards also preached “sermons directed explicitly to children,”[61] and children’s sermons eventually became a “popular part of Protestant worship during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”[62]

Edwards also held up children as models for adult Christians, saying that they symbolised “some of the best Christian qualities.”[63] Edwards even “allowed children to be admitted into full communion … By passing the bread and wine to them, he treated them as full spiritual equals.”[64] And he managed to “create a Christian theology that [valued] children’s spiritual needs.[65]

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834)

Schliermacher demonstrated a “persistent interest in the subject of children” in much of his writing. “He saw children as naturally innocent, not encumbered with the supposed inheritance of original sin.”[66] But he did claim that the “evil influences of society … spoiled the natural goodness of children.”[67]

Schliermacher noted that, “in the Incarnation, childhood itself is affirmed as worthy by God.”[68] And a theme throughout his 1818 sermons on the Christian Household was “the wonderful blessing that children represent to the community of faith.”[69] He said that “adults need to recover a childlike ability to be present in the moment if they are to experience the full blessing of Christian faith,”[70] and that the church “neglects children at its own very significant peril.”[71]

Schleiermacher considered the education of children to be one of a pastor’s most important duties, and held such high expectations of the catechising pastor that he claimed that “when children who have been raised in church lose their faith in adulthood, it is often because they have received poor catechetical instruction.”[72] He “never believed the religious instruction of children was a task beneath him. He … [loved] the company of children, and he sought passionately to make the Christian faith accessible and attractive to them.”[73]

Horace Bushnell (1802-1876)

For Congregationalist Horace Bushnell, “a child could not be expected to have an adult faith.”[74] But Bushnell “emphasised the developmental nature of spiritual understanding,”[75] and stated that “Christ was ‘ a Saviour for infants, and children, and youth, as truly as for the adult age’.”[76] Bushnell advocated a special (non-voting) form of church membership for children, in which they were “not subject to church discipline but allowed full access to the Lord’s Supper.”[77] And he admitted that, “had he the chance to begin his career over, he would have preached first to children and only secondly to adults.”[78] He declared, “We call it coming down when we undertake the preaching to children; whereas it is coming up … to speak to the bright day-light creatures of trust and sweet affinities and easy conviction.”[79]

Karl Barth (1886-1968)

Barth spoke of children as “bearers of a promise of God’s grace.”[80] He considered them to be “needy beginners”[81] but ready to learn, “characteristically at play,”[82] and tuly free despite their limitations.[83] Thus, “young people are to be an example to the older in this ever fresh hearing of the divine command.”[84]

Karl Rahner (1904-1984)

Rahner argued that all “human persons – including children – are fundamentally oriented toward God,”[85] and spoke of the “unsurpassable value of childhood.”[86] He challenged the “Christian tendency to subordinate childhood to adult life,”[87] by showing how the child “is intended to be, right from the start, a partner of God.”[88] And he argued that “being a child has value in its own right.”[89]

Rahner reminds us that “for adults to attain the openness of children (which is what the kingdom of heaven requires), conversion is necessary.”[90] And he defines such openness as an “infinite openness to the infinite.”[91] Rahner’s theology reminds us “not only that our obligation is to nurture the children who are given to us and all that belongs to them as children, but that each one of us, again and again, must become that child we were in the beginning.”[92]

Rahner was bold to “address the pastoral needs of the young,”[93] although he did question whether “a catechism is the appropriate medium for the religious initiation of a child.”[94] It was one of Rahner’s contemporaries who observed that, often in Christian education, “instead of going in directly by the open doors of the child’s imagination and sense perception, we waste our time by knocking on the still bolted doors of his understanding and his judgement.”[95]

Feminist Theology

In contemporary times, some feminist theologians have pointed out how, in Western culture since the eighteenth century, “the movement of men out of the home and into the workplace had a powerful impact on … family life.”[96] Fathers began to have “less immediate involvement with domestic life and … children … In matters of education and spiritual formation, children had fewer male role models readily available.”[97]

But in the same period there has been little or no “developed teaching on children by the church itself.”[98] “Doctrines of human nature, salvation, and God remained amazingly adult-centred, forgetting that all people begin their lives as children and that many people spend a large proportion of their adult lives responsible for children in some way. [Such] theological neglect coincided with a broader societal neglect.”[99]

These feminists point to “the historical dilemma which assigns only to women the concern for ministries with women, children and youth.”[100] And they are particularly concerned for the “plight of children outside stable, two-parent families [where] children disappear into a market-driven society where the ultimate measures of value are utility and self-interest.”[101] In this society, the responsibilities of adults for children “assume paramount importance.”[102]

Much contemporary feminist theology “promotes the welfare of children”[103] and supports the “child’s claim as a worthy creation of God.”[104] They “invoke an eschatological image in which all are welcome to the table of God,”[105] and argue that “Christians are obliged to create a world in which ‘every child who wants might learn to dance’.”[106] We need to “be at the forefront of advocating … the protection of all children”[107] and calling for “justice for the ‘least of these’.”[108]

They point to the “utter vulnerability of children before the adults that create and shape their world,”[109] and believe that, while “children may harbour evil thoughts, … the depth and extent of their corrupt behaviour is in direct proportion to the actions of the adults in their midst.”[110] Sin is defined in “strikingly adult ways, as … leanings and control that most children have not yet acquired.”[111] And they claim that “sin is more something to which children fall victim than something they engage in as culprits.”[112]

[1] Heitzenrater, ‘John Wesley and Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.280
[2] Stortz, ‘Where or when was your servant innocent? Augustine on childhood’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.79
[3] Stortz, ‘Where or when was your servant innocent? Augustine on childhood’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.83
[4] Traina, ‘A Person in the Making: Thomas Aquinas on Children and Childhood’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.111
[5] Traina, ‘A Person in the Making: Thomas Aquinas on Children and Childhood’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.113
[6] Traina, ‘A Person in the Making: Thomas Aquinas on Children and Childhood’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), pp.113-114
[7] Traina, ‘A Person in the Making: Thomas Aquinas on Children and Childhood’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.114
[8] Traina, ‘A Person in the Making: Thomas Aquinas on Children and Childhood’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), pp.114-115
[9] Traina, ‘A Person in the Making: Thomas Aquinas on Children and Childhood’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.117
[10] Traina, ‘A Person in the Making: Thomas Aquinas on Children and Childhood’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.117
[11] Traina, ‘A Person in the Making: Thomas Aquinas on Children and Childhood’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.117
[12] Traina, ‘A Person in the Making: Thomas Aquinas on Children and Childhood’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.119
[13] Traina, ‘A Person in the Making: Thomas Aquinas on Children and Childhood’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.119
[14] Strohl, ‘The Child in Luther;s Theology’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.144
[15] Strohl, ‘The Child in Luther;s Theology’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.149
[16] Strohl, ‘The Child in Luther;s Theology’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.149
[17] Strohl, ‘The Child in Luther;s Theology’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.159
[18] Pitkin, ‘“The Heritage of the Lord”: Children in the Theology of John Calvin’ , in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.161
[19] Pitkin, ‘“The Heritage of the Lord”: Children in the Theology of John Calvin’ , in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.161
[20] Pitkin, ‘“The Heritage of the Lord”: Children in the Theology of John Calvin’ , in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), pp.162-3
[21] Pitkin, ‘“The Heritage of the Lord”: Children in the Theology of John Calvin’ , in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.162
[22] Pitkin, ‘“The Heritage of the Lord”: Children in the Theology of John Calvin’ , in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.163
[23] Pitkin, ‘“The Heritage of the Lord”: Children in the Theology of John Calvin’ , in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.163
[24] Pitkin, ‘“The Heritage of the Lord”: Children in the Theology of John Calvin’ , in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.169
[25] Pitkin, ‘“The Heritage of the Lord”: Children in the Theology of John Calvin’ , in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.164
[26] Pitkin, ‘“The Heritage of the Lord”: Children in the Theology of John Calvin’ , in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.165
[27] Pitkin, ‘“The Heritage of the Lord”: Children in the Theology of John Calvin’ , in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.165
[28] Pitkin, ‘“The Heritage of the Lord”: Children in the Theology of John Calvin’ , in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.166
[29] Pitkin, ‘“The Heritage of the Lord”: Children in the Theology of John Calvin’ , in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.183
[30] Pitkin, ‘“The Heritage of the Lord”: Children in the Theology of John Calvin’ , in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.186
[31] Pitkin, ‘“The Heritage of the Lord”: Children in the Theology of John Calvin’ , in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.186
[32] Pitkin, ‘“The Heritage of the Lord”: Children in the Theology of John Calvin’ , in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.187
[33] Pitkin, ‘“The Heritage of the Lord”: Children in the Theology of John Calvin’ , in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.193
[34] Miller, ‘Complex Innocence, Obligatory Nurturance, and Parental Vigilance: “The Child” in the Work of Menno Simons’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.194
[35] Miller, ‘Complex Innocence, Obligatory Nurturance, and Parental Vigilance: “The Child” in the Work of Menno Simons’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.194
[36] Miller, ‘Complex Innocence, Obligatory Nurturance, and Parental Vigilance: “The Child” in the Work of Menno Simons’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.201
[37] Miller, ‘Complex Innocence, Obligatory Nurturance, and Parental Vigilance: “The Child” in the Work of Menno Simons’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.203
[38] Miller, ‘Complex Innocence, Obligatory Nurturance, and Parental Vigilance: “The Child” in the Work of Menno Simons’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), pp. 194-195
[39] Miller, ‘Complex Innocence, Obligatory Nurturance, and Parental Vigilance: “The Child” in the Work of Menno Simons’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.204
[40] Miller, ‘Complex Innocence, Obligatory Nurturance, and Parental Vigilance: “The Child” in the Work of Menno Simons’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.195
[41] 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.247
[42] 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.252
[43] 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.253
[44] 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.247
[45] 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.254
[46] 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.278
[47] Heitzenrater, ‘John Wesley and Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.297
[48] Heitzenrater, ‘John Wesley and Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.292
[49] Heitzenrater, ‘John Wesley and Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.298
[50] Heitzenrater, ‘John Wesley and Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.295
[51] Heitzenrater, ‘John Wesley and Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.295
[52] Heitzenrater, ‘John Wesley and Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.296
[53] Heitzenrater, ‘John Wesley and Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.296
[54] Heitzenrater, ‘John Wesley and Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.296
[55] Heitzenrater, ‘John Wesley and Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.298
[56] Brekus, ‘Children of Wrath, Children of Grace: Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan Culture of Child Rearing’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.301
[57] Brekus, ‘Children of Wrath, Children of Grace: Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan Culture of Child Rearing’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.302
[58] Brekus, ‘Children of Wrath, Children of Grace: Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan Culture of Child Rearing’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.303
[59] Brekus, ‘Children of Wrath, Children of Grace: Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan Culture of Child Rearing’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.311
[60] Brekus, ‘Children of Wrath, Children of Grace: Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan Culture of Child Rearing’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.313
[61] Brekus, ‘Children of Wrath, Children of Grace: Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan Culture of Child Rearing’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.313
[62] Brekus, ‘Children of Wrath, Children of Grace: Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan Culture of Child Rearing’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.313
[63] Brekus, ‘Children of Wrath, Children of Grace: Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan Culture of Child Rearing’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.312
[64] Brekus, ‘Children of Wrath, Children of Grace: Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan Culture of Child Rearing’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.318
[65] Brekus, ‘Children of Wrath, Children of Grace: Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan Culture of Child Rearing’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.328
[66] DeVries, ‘“Be Converted and Become as Little Children”: Friedrich Schleiermacher on the Religious Significance of Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.334
[67] DeVries, ‘“Be Converted and Become as Little Children”: Friedrich Schleiermacher on the Religious Significance of Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.334
[68] DeVries, ‘“Be Converted and Become as Little Children”: Friedrich Schleiermacher on the Religious Significance of Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.338
[69] DeVries, ‘“Be Converted and Become as Little Children”: Friedrich Schleiermacher on the Religious Significance of Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.340
[70] DeVries, ‘“Be Converted and Become as Little Children”: Friedrich Schleiermacher on the Religious Significance of Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.348
[71] DeVries, ‘“Be Converted and Become as Little Children”: Friedrich Schleiermacher on the Religious Significance of Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.348
[72] DeVries, ‘“Be Converted and Become as Little Children”: Friedrich Schleiermacher on the Religious Significance of Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.346
[73] DeVries, ‘“Be Converted and Become as Little Children”: Friedrich Schleiermacher on the Religious Significance of Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.348
[74] Bendroth, ‘Horace Bushnell’s Christian Nurture’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.355
[75] Bendroth, ‘Horace Bushnell’s Christian Nurture’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.355
[76] Bendroth, ‘Horace Bushnell’s Christian Nurture’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.355
[77] Bendroth, ‘Horace Bushnell’s Christian Nurture’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.356
[78] Bendroth, ‘Horace Bushnell’s Christian Nurture’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.359
[79] Bendroth, ‘Horace Bushnell’s Christian Nurture’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.359
[80] Werpehowski, ‘Reading Karl Barth on Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.389
[81] Werpehowski, ‘Reading Karl Barth on Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.392
[82] Werpehowski, ‘Reading Karl Barth on Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.392
[83] Werpehowski, ‘Reading Karl Barth on Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.393
[84] Werpehowski, ‘Reading Karl Barth on Children’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.393
[85] Hinsdale, ‘“Infinite Openness to the Infinite”: Karl Rahner’s Contribution to Modern Catholic Thought on the Child’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.421
[86] Hinsdale, ‘“Infinite Openness to the Infinite”: Karl Rahner’s Contribution to Modern Catholic Thought on the Child’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.421
[87] Hinsdale, ‘“Infinite Openness to the Infinite”: Karl Rahner’s Contribution to Modern Catholic Thought on the Child’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.422
[88] Hinsdale, ‘“Infinite Openness to the Infinite”: Karl Rahner’s Contribution to Modern Catholic Thought on the Child’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.423
[89] Hinsdale, ‘“Infinite Openness to the Infinite”: Karl Rahner’s Contribution to Modern Catholic Thought on the Child’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.443
[90] Hinsdale, ‘“Infinite Openness to the Infinite”: Karl Rahner’s Contribution to Modern Catholic Thought on the Child’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.426
[91] See the title of Hinsdale’s paper, ‘“Infinite Openness to the Infinite”: Karl Rahner’s Contribution to Modern Catholic Thought on the Child’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), pp.406-445
[92] Hinsdale, ‘“Infinite Openness to the Infinite”: Karl Rahner’s Contribution to Modern Catholic Thought on the Child’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.445
[93] Hinsdale, ‘“Infinite Openness to the Infinite”: Karl Rahner’s Contribution to Modern Catholic Thought on the Child’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.439
[94] Hinsdale, ‘“Infinite Openness to the Infinite”: Karl Rahner’s Contribution to Modern Catholic Thought on the Child’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.438
[95] Hinsdale, ‘“Infinite Openness to the Infinite”: Karl Rahner’s Contribution to Modern Catholic Thought on the Child’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.434
[96] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.447
[97] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.447
[98] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.448 (italics in original)
[99] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), pp.472-473
[100] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.452
[101] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.456
[102] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.457
[103] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.459
[104] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.459
[105] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.459
[106] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.459
[107] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), pp.459-460
[108] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.460
[109] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.462
[110] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.462
[111] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.463
[112] Miller-McLemore, ‘“Let the Children Come” Revisited: Contemporary Feminist Theologians on Children, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.464

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children (part four)

2007-05-26T15:01:00.001+01:00

4. Children in the Later New Testament

Where the Gospels are explicit about the place of children the rest of the New Testament is more implicit, but it seems clear that children were present and participated in worship “and there is no mention of them being excluded at any point.”[1] “There were no Sunday Schools, for Christian nurture took place within the home and the worshipping community.”[2]

“The letters to the Colossians and to the Ephesians are unique … because they contain injunctions addressed to children … the fact that children were spoken to and not merely talked about is very significant.”[3] “The expression ‘in the Lord’ which is used by Paul to describe the relation of the Christian to Christ is used of children, who are to obey their parents ‘ in the Lord’ (Ephesians 6.1) and it is continually ‘in the Lord’ that their upbringing is to take place (Ephesians 6.4). The very fact that children are addressed in the ethical sections of the letters along with fathers, mothers, masters and slaves shows that the children were thought of as an accepted part of the church … sharing fully in the life of the congregation.”[4] In other words, “the first Christians took children seriously.”[5]

All of this challenges us to rethink the place of children in the activities of God’s people today, and to “recapture in our own particular contexts the radicalness of Jesus’ teaching on children. Children are not only subordinate but also sharers with adults in the life of faith; they are not only to be formed but to be imitated; they are not only ignorant but capable of receiving spiritual insight; they are not ‘just’ children but representatives of Christ.”[6]

[1] Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.31
[2] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.50
[3] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.12
[4] Understanding Christian Nurture (1981, a report of the Consultative Group on Ministry among Children, British Council of Churches), quoted by Sutcliffe (ed.), Tuesday’s Child (2001, Christian Education Publications), p.158
[5] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.13
[6] Gundry-Volf, ‘The Least and the Greatest’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.60

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children (part three)

2007-05-26T15:00:00.000+01:00

3. Children in the Gospels

The Incarnation of Christ perfectly illustrates all of this. The focus of our modern churches on the culmination of Jesus’ ministry, His death and resurrection, must not be allowed to obscure the “significance that the Bible attaches to His [birth and] childhood”[1]: “The central act of history in Christian terms was God’s unique intervention in coming into the world as a baby … When adult solutions and institutions could do no more, God revealed himself as a newborn infant wrapped in swaddling clothes. The Old Testament motif of God using a child when nothing and no one else was adequate to the task could hardly be more boldly expressed.”[2]

Jesus took up the theme of childhood in His own ministry, and “caring for children was a major part of Jesus’ [work],”[3] something which He “explicitly passed on to His community.”[4]

In the 1st Century world, “strongly influenced by Greek and Roman culture … children had little worth in themselves as individuals except for the continuation of their family line and national identity.”[5] Children “occupied the lowest run on the social ladder, and caring for children was a low-status activity.”[6]

In contrast to this, though, Jesus’ own approach to and relationship with children was very radical. He “did not see children as raw material to be shaped in preparation for life … [He] taught never to regard children on the basis of future worth, but to look at children as full human beings deserving of the care and concern of any adult as accepted members of the community … he reflected Old Testament perspectives but at the same time brought a new focus”[7] which revolved around “their worth both as members of their society and their relationship to God.”[8]

Jesus “held that children have a share in the kingdom of God” (Mark 10.14); “that the kingdom of God was to be received ‘as a child’” (Mark 10.15; Matthew 18.3; Luke 18.17; John 3.3,5); and He “placed special importance on receiving hospitably and with kindness the least important members of society, including the children.”[9]

Jesus redefined “care for children as a mark of greatness.”[10] In His teaching, we find that “what appeared to be an undistinguished activity – care for children, belonging to the domain of women, similarly marginalised people – becomes a prime way for all disciples to demonstrate the greatness that corresponds to the reign of God.”[11]

Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is “a realm of paradox”[12] one aspect of which is that where “children are normally expected to transform into adults … in the kingdom of God adults have to learn to become like children.”[13] And so Jesus “encouraged his followers to recognise, value and learn from the qualities and characteristics present in children.”[14]

In the Gospel tradition, then, children become “a metaphor of discipleship, a way of talking about God and the shared life of faith in the light of Christ.”[15] In the light of which Keith White argues that “the church’s centuries-old concern with issues of boundary, eligibility and membership finds little support in Scripture. Children are an unquestioned part of the Jewish community of faith … In the ministry of Jesus, they are always noticed, welcomed and accepted. What causes concern is anything that comes between them and him. Put another way, the biblical focus on children breaks down some of the compartments the church has built over the years.”[16]

Also, in some contemporary theology, the kingdom is described as both now and not yet. “There could not be a closer parallel with childhood, for there the tension between being and becoming finds its exact counterpart. No wonder Jesus was so insistent on the connection between the two, a connection whose potentially rich implications … theology has not even begun to explore.”[17]

However, precisely because “‘little ones’ are special objects of divine care and protection, … to despise and mistreat them is to put oneself at cross-purposes with the God of the weak and oppressed.”[18] When children were brought to Jesus for a blessing, the disciples tried to keep them away. But Jesus became angry, and suggested that preventing children from coming to him is a sin that “carries the severest punishment.”[19] This passage contains “one of only two references to Jesus’ anger in the New Testament … which fact suggests the seriousness of excluding children.”[20]

Jesus’ last words about children remind us again of Psalm 8. He declares that they are ordained for praise. Their very nature is “to praise God with their entire being … Their inclination, imagination and play will always transcend structures, institutions and boundaries. Were this not so, think how predictable the adult world would have become! Sadly, the image of ageing congregations and formal rites of worship provides an apt illustration of the way that adults turn everything into routine, beyond the possibility of change and renewal.”[21]

[1] White, Small Matters (www.childtheology.org)
[2] White, Small Matters (www.childtheology.org)
[3] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.10
[4] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.10
[5] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.37
[6] Gundry-Volf, ‘The Least and the Greatest’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.43
[7] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.37
[8] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.38
[9] from Barton, ‘Jesus – Friend of Little Children’, in Astley & Day (eds), The Contours of Christian Education (1992, MacCrimmons), quoted by Sutcliffe (ed.), Tuesday’s Child (2001, Christian Education Publications), pp.194-195
[10] Gundry-Volf, ‘The Least and the Greatest’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.43
[11] Gundry-Volf, ‘The Least and the Greatest’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.44
[12] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.11
[13] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.11
[14] Dallow, Touching the Future: A handbook for church-based children’s leaders (2002, The Bible Reading Fellowship), p.40
[15] Barton, ‘Jesus – Friend of Little Children’, in Astley & Day (eds), The Contours of Christian Education (1992, MacCrimmons), quoted by Sutcliffe (ed.), Tuesday’s Child (2001, Christian Education Publications), p.195
[16] White, Small Matters (www.childtheology.org)
[17] White, Small Matters (www.childtheology.org)
[18] Gundry-Volf, ‘The Least and the Greatest’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.42
[19] White, Small Matters (www.childtheology.org)
[20] Gundry-Volf, ‘The Least and the Greatest’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.37
[21] White, Small Matters (www.childtheology.org)

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children (part two)

2007-05-26T14:59:00.000+01:00

2. Children in the Old Testament

The first challenge to the way we connect our faith with children comes from the Bible. From the Old Testament we find that children are enormously significant both in the biblical narratives and in God¹s purposes.

Children had an accepted place within the people of Israel. “Throughout the Old Testament, children are seen as a gift from God and a sign of the covenant relationship with Him. … Children are a part of the family … They are involved in the ritual that expresses the Jewish identity … [they would] also have been seen as part of the covenant relationship with God that made the Jewish people unique. … Children are part of the family, the faith community, and are the hope of the future. They are not second-class; they are part of the whole.”[1]

As “members of God’s covenant with Israel … it was expected that [children] would assume covenantal responsibilities.”[2] Indeed, from Psalm 8.2 we learn that “it is infants and toddlers who are used by God to silence the foe … Calvin [in his commentary] works out the implications of this with typical vigour: if children are relegated to the background of politics, society or religious community, we run the risk of overlooking and thwarting God’s purposes.”[3]

Children are central to the Bible’s understanding of the kingdom of heaven. Isaiah provides a prime example in which a little child will lead the wild animals in peaceful coexistence.

And, again and again, in the narratives of the Old Testament, children are chosen and used by God as His instruments when the institutions and adults among His people had failed, and “it is notable not just that God used children as well as adults but that he did so at moments of extreme crisis.”[4]

[1] Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), pp.16-17
[2] Gundry-Volf, ‘The Least and the Greatest’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.35
[3] White, Small Matters (www.childtheology.org)
[4] White, Small Matters (www.childtheology.org)

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children (part one)

2007-05-26T14:56:00.001+01:00

The 'Connecting the Christian Faith with Children' project is going well, and I have begun to put some 'proper' thoughts on paper. I'll be presenting some this to the Yorkshire Baptist Association's Mission Executive in July, but here it is for your interest ...

In 1998, The English Church Attendance Survey “pointed to 1,000 under 15s leaving the church in England every week.”[1] Recent analysis of children in UK Baptist churches revealed that we have lost contact with about a third of the number we were in touch with in 2000 (about 36,000) in the space of five years. 30,000 children have left our churches in the last two years!

On 11th June 2006, the UK Baptist Churches were encouraged to take part in a national day of prayer and awareness, to get on our knees in search for God's guidance to address this worrying problem. Following that call to prayer, the Yorkshire Baptist Association has commissioned this research project: ‘Connecting the Christian Faith with Children’. For the first six months of a 2 year commissioned ministry, I have been working for three days a month: conducting a survey of the Yorkshire Baptist Churches, meeting key practitioners, doing background reading and trying to establish some biblical and theological principles for our work with children.

From the very beginning of the project, however, I have found myself more and more convinced that the answer is NOT simply to improve the way we currently do things.
As Mountstephen and Martin comment, “We may be providing such a poor experience of church in the form of Sunday School that by the time children reach the age of 10 (the most common leaving age) they are desperate to escape.”[2]

We can’t “fool ourselves into thinking that we can tinker with and amend adult structures and frameworks in order to make them child-friendly!”[3] It is true that “Children have little awareness of travelling time or the stress of preparing for the journey but they do travel with us and have a unique and dynamic understanding of God’s love … People often say that children are the church of the future. This is wrong. Children belong to the church of today, but will be adults in the church of tomorrow. How children experience their membership of the church now will form their participation in the church in the future.”[4]

Therefore, I suggest that in order to effectively connect the Christian faith with our children, we need to re-imagine the whole way we are and do church. My presentation, then, will try to survey the history and practice of what we do with children, identifying a number of challenges and suggesting some strategies for our churches.

[1] Mountstephen & Martin, The Body Beautiful (2004, Grove Books Ltd.), p.14
[2] Mountstephen & Martin, The Body Beautiful (2004, Grove Books Ltd.), p.15
[3] White, Child Theology is Born (www.childtheology.org)
[4] Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.x

baptism

2007-05-26T14:54:00.000+01:00

I've been a bit busy - and it's half-term next week - so I haven't done much blogging and won't do much for a bit. Here's a thrilling piece of news, though: Thomas (8 years old) has decided to be baptised! I was baptised when I was just 9, and Claire and I are both over the moon.

Children's Work: where are the ministers?

2007-05-16T14:17:00.000+01:00

Many of our ministers have little or no input into the planning of the children's work in their churches. Most never attend the children's groups, and they certainly never teach the children themselves.

I asked both the minister and the main children's worker to fill in a version of the survey form. But where they did that, it was frightening to see how many of their answers disagreed or even conflicted. Some of the ministers couldn't even tell me how many children's workers there are in their church (or they got the number wrong)!

It is fair, then, to draw the conclusion that many of our minister have, and show, very little interest in what goes on in Sunday School or their other children's groups. (Some have said to me that it is not their 'gifting'. To which I want to respond: 'What's your gifting got to do with it? Surely you have a responsibility ...?')

Many of the great figures of the Chrisian faith made the teaching of children a personal priority. Chrysostom, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Menno Simons, Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, Schliermacher, Karl Barth, Karl Rahner, etc. (see the excellent set of essays in 'The Child in Christian Thought' edited by Marcia J. Bunge) all wrote about and all were involved in the Christian nurture of children. Charles Spurgeon once said (something like) he would rather have the letters SST (for Sunday School Teacher) after his name than a Ph.D. They all knew the importance of working with children.

I heard Ishmael speak at Spring Harvest a few weeks ago, and he talked about how most of our children's workers are gifted pastorally, and that our children have a desperate need for gifted Bible teachers.

So where are the ministers? How can we give children's ministry the same value and recognition as the other ministries in our churches? When will we realise that the children are just as (if not more!) important than the adults? They are the church of today without whom there will be no church of tomorrow!

Children's Work: what's the budget?

2007-05-16T09:41:00.000+01:00

According to the responses to my survey of Yorkshire Baptist Churches, very few of our churches have a specific or realistic budget for their children's work. And, as we know, the budget of any organisation effectively reflects where its priorities lie!

The only churches with any sort of realistic budget were those who employ a youth or children's worker, and then they have to factor in salaries, etc. Most of the rest said that if the children's workers have a bill that needs to be paid, or materials need to be bought for the Sunday School, then the church will pay the bill.

But telling your workers to come cap-in-hand to ask for money is a very different sort of relationship than giving them an amount of money at the beginning of the year to be spent on the children! I think we need to do some work here!

Sorry it's been a while

2007-05-16T09:40:00.000+01:00

Sorry I haven't posted for a while (nearly two weeks). Life here is busy and stressful at the moment.

Children's Work: what's the purpose?

2007-05-04T13:36:00.000+01:00

I've been analysing some of the responses to the 'Connecting the Christian Faith with Children' survey, ready for a steering group meeting next week. I'll post here some of the trends and significant issues that have come up.

Bear in mind that any figures relate only to those churches that have responded to my questionnaire!

Only 9% of churches have any specific mission statement / purpose statement for their children's work! And the responses from the minister and children's workers in the same church often contradicted one another with regard to the purpose of the children's work.

When it came to the section of the form giving a list of options (Is the purpose of your children's work to: Teach children the Bible? Develop their faith? Instruct them in the faith and traditions of the church? Help them to see their daily lives in the light of the Gospel? Incorporate them into the worship life of the church? Arm them against the dangers of secular culture? Nurture their sense of spirituality? Nurture their personal and social development? Convert them to Christianity? Or something else?) many forms just had all of the options ticked.

Where both the minister and the children's worker had filled in a copy of the form, they had generally ticked a different set of things!

A significant number of churches didn't select 'arm them against the dangers of secular culture', or 'nurture their spirituality' as purpose statements. I wonder why?

A number also disliked the phrase 'convert them to Christianity' - some saying that this is God's work not ours, and others objecting on the grounds that it is too strong a phrase, preferring 'introduce them to Jesus'. Quite a number also added the item 'having fun' to the list.

It seems that we are totally confused about what the children's work / Sunday School / Junior Church is actually for. Very few of our churches have any clear idea of what is the purpose of their work with children. This all really concerns me.

Children, Communion and Baptists

2007-04-27T17:50:00.000+01:00

In the last week or so I have been involved in planning an All Age Communion for the Yorkshire Baptist Association’s Assembly in June. A little birdie told me that the same idea (All Age Communion) was proposed for the Joint BUGB and BMS assemblies in Brighton, but it was quickly vetoed.

What is it with us Baptists? Most of us (not all, I know) want to prevent children from taking the bread and the wine because they ‘don’t understand’. But, if we rigorously applied such a criteria to all who come to a service of the Lord’s Supper, how many of us actually would be allowed to participate? I wonder!

Most of us (again, not all) have an entirely open table. Anyone who comes into our churches would be allowed to receive bread and wine without question or objection. But we withhold it from the believing children of families already in membership with us.

Our policies are totally inconsistent. And we can’t even see it. Jesus must weep.

Walk through the Old Testament

2007-04-21T18:16:00.000+01:00

Mant thanks to Wayne, from 'Walk through the Bible Ministries' for a totally outstanding 'Walk Through the Old Testament' seminar today. I don't think I've ever heard such an engaging and inspiring explanation of how the story of the Bible fits together: Creation ... Fall ... Flood ... Nations ... ... Four Hundred Years Silence ... Christ! I can't recommend it highly enough!!

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children: some initial observations from my survey

2007-04-20T10:49:00.000+01:00

So far I have only analysed 10 of the survey forms sent out by the Yorkshire Baptist Asociation to our churches to find out how they connect the Christian faith with their children. There are more forms to be looked at in my 'to do pile', and I know that it's not easy to come to any firm conclusions from a sample of 10. But some of the 'trends' are certainly interesting.

- 70% of our churches run a Sunday School / Junior Church on Sunday morning. 30% run midweek children’s clubs of various sorts. But that means that 30% of our churches have no contact with and no provision for children at all.

- In the children's activities offered by our churches, there seems to be a huge emphasis on instruction (most spending at least 50% of their time on it) and craft activities (up to 80% of the time). Prayer (maximum 10% of the time) and worship (maximum 20% of the time) are conspicuous by their relative absence!

- I deliberately asked each church to fill in two sets of forms: one for the minister and one for the main children's worker. And the differences between the answers on the two forms are telling! Most ministers don’t actually know what happens in Junior Church or how much time is spent on anything (although they did try to ‘guess’, most got it wrong)!

- In 20% of our churches there is no link between what the children and the adults do on a Sunday morning. Only 30% (?!) say they try to maintain a link at Christmas and Easter. Only 20% of our churches follow the same theme for children as well as adults in all services.

- Only 50% of our churches have a regular children’s address or a time for the youngsters in the service.

- Only 20% of our churches allow children to participate in communion. Another 30% do not allow children to attend communion services. That means 50% of our churches allow children to be present but do not serve them with bread and wine: they may get a blessing, or orange-juice and a biscuit.

- Only 30% of our churches have a regular (monthly) All Age service. Another 40% have family services at Harvest, Christmas and other Christian Festivals.

- None (that's right ... none) of the churches who have so far responded have any clear idea of the purpose of their work with children (although only 10% are willing to admit that to be the case). In many cases, the children’s workers and the minister disagree about the purpose of the work! And (worryingly?) only 20% of the churches even mentioned ‘Safe to Grow’!

- 90% of our churches rely heavily on the children’s own parents to teach them in Sunday School. 7 out of the 10 churches who have so far responded say that at least 30% of their Sunday School teachers are the parents of the children in the Sunday School. For some churches, that figure is as high as 66%! (I wonder what that says to our families about how welcoming we really are to children? "We love to see the children in church, but we expect their mums to look after them in Sunday School.")

- The vast majority of adults who teach in Sunday school are female. (I think that is also worrying.)

- At least 50% of our churches also rely, for Sunday School, on members of the congregation who are also teachers. (Are they thereby abdicating any responsibility for providing appropriate training?) 100% of churches have had little or no training at all for their children’s workers.

- Only 40% of our churches are able to offer a rota system so the teachers can sometimes attend worship.

- 100% of our churches have little or nothing in the budget for children’s work or all age work. Although they did say that anything the teachers need is paid for. (What does that say about the churches' priorities? We don't actually have any money in the budget for you, but if you come to the finance committe cap in hand we'll pay your bills.) In 10% of churches, the teachers themselves pay for a lot of the materials (and the minister is not even aware of it).

- In only 30% of churches do the children’s workers feel sufficiently affirmed. In only 20% of churches are the workers annually commissioned. And in only 20% of the churches are the children and teachers prayed for before they go to their classes. When asked what further support and affirmation they would like, the overwhelming answer was simply that the teachers would like people in the church to say ‘thank you.’

- Only 20% of our ministers participate in planning meetings for the children’s work. Only 20% of them ever attend the children’s groups (and only the mid-week groups at that). And even fewer ministers ever teach in those groups.

I hope the remaining forms prove some of these trends to be false. But if the above really is an accurate assessment of where our churches are with regard to children, is it any wonder we're in a mess?

Children and God: the seventh option!

2007-04-20T10:44:00.000+01:00

Earlier, I pasted here Lynn's post (http://helpiworkwithchildren.blogspot.com/) on six possible positions on the status of children before God. She said she would post a seventh option later. And here it is!

"Answer 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………

"I sometimes feel that we inadvertantly devalue the testimonies of people who grew up knowing Jesus, unable to put an exact time and date on when they were converted to Christ. In guest services and in evangelistic events we favour the dramatic and sudden turnaround conversion stories. I must stress that these are great stories to hear and real faith-builders! But I have now come to a point where I celebrate amongst the children I work with the fact that they love Jesus. They cite their earliest memories of being "Jesus' friend". I encourage them to continue on in that, encouraging them to "keep saying yes to Jesus". This makes sense of Westerhoff's theory of faith development. A child begins their faith journey on an experiential basis - if they experience the love of God from kind and caring adults who nurture them, then they will accept Jesus at that level. (so put your best child care workers in the creche!)

"The next stage; the affiliative stage is where a child will take on their faith because of who they are affiliated to i.e. who are their friends and what do they believe in? This leads to the searching faith period - where a child/young adult asks questions; tests us to see if what we talk about is true in our own lives; wrestles with big issues perhaps; looks for reality in what they see in the church around them. As an aside, many adults have not left this stage!

"The final stage is owned faith - where the individual makes their faith their own; to the point of being willing to lay themselves down for their faith.

"And so I hold that children are on a journey that starts with God but may not end with him. They are part of fallen humanity and will revert to that default position - hellbound and lost without God - without a twin strategy of nurture and evangelism. Incidentally - and for another post I throw this controversial comment out - many church-going parents may not be fulfilling their God given role of nurturing their children in their faith (see Barna's important research on this topic in the USA; where the USA go, we usually follow......)"

Thanks, Lynn, for such a helpful outline.

It’s not easy being a pastor.

2007-04-07T17:20:00.000+01:00

This post (http://jesustheradicalpastor.blogspot.com/2007/04/people-formerly-known-as-pastor.html) is part of a blog-conversation I’ve been following.

Look at http://www.kinnon.tv/2007/03/the_people_form.html and http://emergentvoyageurs.blog.com/1664695/?page=last&msgsuccess=1#cmts for some earlier contributions.

As a pastor myself, though, I really resonate with some of this (I’ve adapted and anglicised it just slightly) …

The People Formerly Known As "The Pastor"
There are thousands of us … We started with idealism about being voices for the kingdom of God and soon realized we became mutated forms of … business leaders. Even Jesus became a CEO. We traded immersion in the Bible for hyped-up seminars and books about good management, strong leadership and slick public relations. We learned that the size of our church car-park mattered more than the size of your hearts for God. Be Thou My Vision got altered to "What is your vision statement?"

The People Formerly Known As The Pastor discovered somewhere in "doing church" that they were being paid as surrogates for the congregation's spirituality. You know, the old saying, "Pastors are paid to be good; the people are good for nothing." People seem to tell others more about their pastor(s) than about Jesus, their Savior. Of course, this made pastors feel good and loved and valued. Then it dawned on us, we were feeling good for all the wrong reasons. We were dynamic communicators, we awed people with exegetical biblical wonders, we spoke notebooks full of outlines with cute stories and precise principles and timely applications. We "rightly handled the word of truth" as a magician handles his tricks. What a one-man show. Little did we realize that all our song-and-dance additions overshadowed the eternal Word itself. For all our proclamation about the "sufficiency of Scripture," we communicated as if that Word needed help. And our razzle-dazzle knowledge of Hebrew and Greek helped us create messages that made you feel totally inadequate to do serious Bible study on your own. So, you either read a fluffy devotional snippet each day or ran off to Bible Study Fellowship to really learn the Word.

The People Formerly Known As The Pastor wrestled with conflicting ego issues. Some felt the rush of power over people. Some even said that in order to get to God, you had to go through us. We were your covering (a term never used in pastoral ministry until the 1970s). We were "the Lord's anointed." Don't touch us. Being charged with the eternal well-being of souls is heady stuff. And, sadly, it went to our heads. We became commanders rather than servants. We liked the feeling of bossing people around...in the name of the Lord, of course. When you confronted us with our spiritual abuse of you, we were quick and smooth, savvy and cunning, and we made you feel like it was all your fault. On the other hand, others of us were scared to death of you. You gave us our paycheck. You gave us benefits. Unknown to us, you called us to your church in order to get your way. We thought we were authentically praying to God, "Your will be done...," but it became apparent that the will of God was the will of those who had the money. We became people-pleasers at the cost of our own dreams. Eventually the commanders among us got kicked out of the church and the fearful among us got scared out. Selling shoes looked mighty appealing.

The People Formerly Known As The Pastor ran up school bills, too, going to college and seminary. It's costly learning Hebrew and Greek these days. Our peers in the "market place" were making twice, sometimes 3 and 4 times the salary we were offered. We were told to live by faith. We saw the rampant materialism permeate the church and we baptized it with "being relevant with the culture." We officiated at very high-priced weddings and worried how we would get our own kids married. Summer holidays meant Disney-World for you and your kids and a trip to see relatives for us. We tried to remember the thing about "treasures laid up in heaven" while realizing that tithing was the rich person's easy way out. Yes, we made you give to our grandiose building projects, our need for bigger this and newer that "for the Lord." We made you pledge to this idea and that effort. All the while we told you, "You can't serve both God and money." When some of us ventured to speak about simplicity, you thought we were anti-capitalist.

The People Formerly Known As The Pastor loved the idea of spiritual gifts and gift inventory tools. Now we could recruit you with the line, "You will find your deepest joy when you become a Sunday School teacher, a financial council member, an evangelistic campaign organizer." We loved the idea of "recruiting." We could build our religious empire footnoted with Bible verses. More people serving possibly meant a bigger church. We could go to Pastors Conferences armed and ready to shoot off our mouths about "the hand of God's blessing on my church." Note that many pastors really do say,"My church." Our worries at night about problems and struggles in "my church" were the signal that we truly had taken ownership of what is God's. When we overlooked 20 compliments and ruminated angrily over one negative comment, we knew it was "all about us." Some of us needed counseling.The People Formerly Known As The Pastor were angry people. Not that you would know it. Our spouses and children knew it. We lived in glass houses. Our kids had to be angels while yours were taking drugs and having sex. And, God forbid, that anyone in the church say anything negative about your kid(s). When you "dedicated" them to God on that Sunday morning, the church committed to helping you raise your child. But, watch out if someone corrected your child while at church. You lost it. You left. You were living under some crazy belief that being born a sinner didn't apply to your children. You wanted to drop them off in a very safe environment with very safe people and then you could forget all about them and do your church thing. You would listen to "Focus on the Family" and then pay church staff to focus on your kids. It was really a crazy environment.

The People Formerly Known As The Pastor began to smell something rotting in the whole "church" thing. Only once in the New Testament is the term for the service of pastor used as a noun (Ephesians 4:11-12). All the rest of the times "pastoring/shepherding" is used as a verbal form, except when used of Jesus. Having accepted a corrupted image and Christendom model of "the pastor," we finally began to see that corruption infiltrating the church. Apostles and prophets and deacons and elders/overseers are mentioned far more than "the pastor." Why did this one term and office (!) gain supremacy? In its current expression, "the pastor" certainly isn't biblical. And don't get some of us started on the injustice of limiting the equal status of women in ministry.

The People Formerly Known As The Pastor are still serving in the places once populated by The People Formerly Known As The Congregation. At least some of us are. We are not seeking to command and control. We are not jittery about what people think. We are not afraid of the seismic shift caused by TPFKATC. We sense that something magnificent is afoot. We are intrigued by the chaos. We, TPFKATP, are willing to risk significant change with TPFKATC in order to recover or even create local expressions of the kingdom of God that first of all are burning with missional passion and practice. We want to explore with you the meaning of the chaos, the vision of a preferred future, the challenge of being "church." We dream of kingdom outposts that are guided by the biblical text in its storied form, shaped by the community of the Trinitarian God, and devoted to the equality of all who are in the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. What does this mean for "the pastor"? Who knows? That's the adventure we all are in!

The Penguins Formerly Known as the Waddle

2007-04-05T10:07:00.000+01:00

Fascinating post from http://emerginggrace.blogspot.com/2007/04/underlying-issues.html. Go there to read it in its entirety + comments, etc.!

“… Many of us are headed down a path where we will no longer fit in with church as usual. There is a path of detox and deconstruction that leads to an understanding of the underlying problems in the system of church that Christianity has functioned in for many years …

Passivity: We are convinced that a church system which allows believers to fulfill their weekly spiritual obligation by listening to a sermon creates a consumerist audience who have not been encouraged to step into the responsibility of being a disciple and discipling others.-

Clergy/Laity: We have seen that the false distinction between clergy and laity has led to a professionalization of ministry which contributes to the passivity of congregants.

Tithing: We believe that tithing has been taught as a method of obligatory giving in order to create a permanent source of funding for institutions. We believe that we are to develop a relationship of obedience to the Holy Spirit concerning our giving rather than simply paying our dues to a religious system.

Buildings: We are convicted that the millions of dollars spent on buildings for churches has not been wise stewardship of the resources that have been entrusted to church leaders.

Attractional methods: We understand from Scripture that it is our duty and mission to go to the lost rather than to expect them to come to us.

Programs: We are convinced that becoming busy with programs within the church removes us from developing relationships with those who aren't involved in church. We no longer equate service in church programs with faithful commitment and service to God.

Dualism: We no longer see a Sunday morning service as the complete expression of our sacred lives. We have developed an understanding of our role as the people of God that requires being the church in all that we do.

Incarnational living: We purpose to minister in the opportunities that our daily lives present, and we are intentional about involving ourselves in the lives of others in deeper ways than a Sunday service allows or requires.

Following the Spirit: We are convicted that dependence on the Holy Spirit is required to move forward into becoming the people we were created to be. We are also convinced that the Holy Spirit is leading us away from the systems and structures that provide a comfortable complacency rather than the challenging mission we are called to.

Servant leadership: Lastly, we see clearly that the hierarchical structures of leadership that have been taught through tradition are not scriptural. We know that the methods of leadership that are so often defended as biblical are at odds with the type of relationships that Jesus intended for us to have with one another.

We have not come to these convictions carelessly or casually. They will shape and inform our spiritual journey whether we continue in the traditional system or find another expression of church. Whether or not we ourselves are written off as reactionary, the church will eventually have to address the validity of these issues.”

A Maundy Thursday Liturgy

2007-04-05T10:04:00.000+01:00

from http://markjberry.blogs.com/way_out_west/2007/04/scraping_off_th.html

jesus washes the feet of the disciples

reading - john 13v3-17

scraping off the shit where we walk, we walk in the crap left by others, by ourselves, the mess of human lives, the comings and goings of a wasteful, corrupt and selfish world, we wallow in the dirt and the hurt, oblivious to the stink and the stains that we carry with us. God stripped off all finery, stepped in our shit, knelt in it, touched it, held our ugliest bits in the very hands that made us and washed them clean.

hands which formed matter, pulse which set the rhythm of the planets, breath which stirred life into being, mind which dreamt the diversity of the species, eyes which bore deep into the heart of humanity, heart which yearns for us to choose peace, feet that walk each step with us, mouth which chides and comforts, arms which embrace the hurting, strength which sustains the weak, life which was given up for love, creator who scrapes the shit off my feet, God who serves.

wash me clean

where I judge others
where I dismiss others
where I abuse others
where I ignore others
where I ridicule others
where I use others

wash me clean

where I elevate myself
where I think only of myself
where I want only for myself
where I gather to myself
where I hold to myself
where I value only myself

wash me clean

where I seek for power
where I seek for control
where I seek for praise
where I seek for status
where I seek for fame
where I seek for wealth

wash me clean

we begin this story of service and servant-hood by washing the feet of each other; we are a community of service, we serve each other, we serve the people we meet on the road, we serve the town in which we live, we serve the servant God, who as the God who became flesh and blood and lived amongst us chose to get right down and dirty in the shit and stink of human life to wash the feet of those he lived with. so we wash each others feet.

[washing of each others feet]

reading - micah 6v6-8

the challenge for us is that instead of pointing to the rubbish others have accumulated from a place of “holier than thou” judgment, calling them to lift themselves out of the mire, we like Jesus bend and kneel amongst the dirt and the hurt, we get right amongst it, see it up close, feel it, smell it, risk its contamination… and wash the feet of those we serve.

may we be at all times,
both now and forever
a protector for those without protection
a guide for those who have lost their way
a ship for those with oceans to cross
a bridge for those with rivers to cross
a sanctuary for those in danger
a lamp for those without light
a place of refuge for those who lack shelter
and a servant to all in need.
- a buddhist prayer of peace

in that moment at the table Jesus was host and servant, head of the table and willing slave, honoured guest and lowest member of staff, holy and humble one. stripping himself of all status and authority he calls us to a humility that flies in the face of modern culture and human logic, to a holiness that follows his pattern… to love in the name of the servant God.

What is the Place of Children before God?

2007-04-02T09:45:00.002+01:00

Many thanks to Lynn at http://helpiworkwithchildren.blogspot.com/2007/03/status-of-children-before-god-part-1.html for these thoughts.

“Children are not mere ignoramuses in terms of spiritual insight in the Gospel tradition. They know Jesus’ true identity. They praise Him as the Son of David (Matthew 21:14-16). They have this knowledge from God and not from themselves and because they do, they are living manifestos to the source of all true knowledge about Christ as from God”

- Gundry-Volf, J. (2000) “To Such As These Belongs the Reign of God: Jesus and Children”: in Theology Today, Jan 2000: 479 – 480

Six different views … Two of them (numbers 1 and 6) are diametrically opposed and three of them are broadly similar and concentrate on areas of faith development and nurture.

Possible Answer 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

So……….What did Jesus mean when he said: “the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these?”And yet note the reality of rebellion and sin, even in quite small children.

Possible Answer 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.

If this possible answer was true, would we not see urgent evangelism amongst parents?

Possible Answer 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.

Possible Answer 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. So we must get children to baptism as soon as possible.

Possible Answer 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.

Possible Answer 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?

Lynn is posting a 7th possible answer soon. Can’t wait!

Mediated Discipleship

2007-04-02T09:45:00.001+01:00

Mediated Discipleship
Great quote here from http://emergentvoyageurs.blog.com/1655629/
"For me, the basic idea behind mediated discipleship is that millions of Christians relate to Jesus through the writings, teachings, and experiences of someone else, usually someone with whom they have no direct relationship. Quite often, these middlemen and women, these mediators we employ, enjoy a certain amount of celebrity within the Christian subculture..."I’m just wondering if it’s gone too far. As Christianity becomes increasingly commercialized, is it even possible for us to know Jesus apart from the Christianized media we consume?... When discipleship to Jesus becomes dependent, as it so often does, on the writings, teachings, and experiences of someone else, I’ve got to stop and ask myself a question: 'Is this what Jesus had in mind when he invited us to follow him?'"
For a long time the church has not been good at encouraging personal discipleship. We foster among those in our congregations a dependence on the ‘sermon’ – week by week we present our members with information about the God we worship – rather than encouraging them to connect with and develop their relationship with that God.

It seems to me that this ‘mediated discipleship’ / ‘spiritual celebrity’ is just an extension of the way we Christian leaders have abdicated our responsibilities, and an example of the laziness (can I say that?) of many of our members.

Anyway. I’m off to Spring Harvest next week for a bit of mediated discipleship of my own!!

Palm Sunday sermon on children

2007-04-01T18:55:00.000+01:00

Here's the full text of the sermon I preached this morning (Palm Sunday, 1st April 2007). My text was Matthew 16 - 21 (!) and the subject was children and the kingdom.

Introduction

So, the children have left us. They have gone to their activities, while we’re going to stay in here and get on with the proper business of worshipping God. They don’t understand the things that we understand. They can’t participate in the same way we do. So we have removed them – we have rejected them – from the main worship experience … with the best of intentions. We want to teach them about worshipping God, so that when they are old enough to leave the Sunday School and join us adult worshippers, they will understand what is going on.

Except that is not what will happen. Because as soon as they are old enough to leave the Sunday School, in here is the last place we will see them.

I am absolutely serious. The English Church Attendance Survey of 1998 pointed to 1,000 under 15s leaving the church in England every week. Do you know what? We may be providing such a poor experience of church for our youngsters that by the time children reach the age of 10 (the most common leaving age) they are desperate to escape.

So, yes, the children have left us. But let me suggest that they – and maybe more significantly we – are poorer because of it.

I want to take you for a walk this morning. We are going to follow Jesus – take a pilgrimage – from Mount Hermon to Mount Zion. From Caesarea Philippi to Jerusalem. From the very north of the area in which Jesus ministered to near the south. From a centre of pagan worship to the heart of Jewish celebration and sacrifice. From Matthew chapter 16 to Matthew chapter 21.

It’s difficult to keep track of Jesus’ life story when we focus on single verses or short passages of Scripture. And it’s easy to miss the trends, or links, or themes that run through the story when we read the Bible that way in Church. So, this morning we are going to be thinking about six whole chapters. Don’t worry, I’m not going to read all 200 verses. But I am going to be pulling out some themes that we would almost certainly miss if we didn’t look at them all together.

Caesarea Philippi is (was) on the slopes of Mount Hermon, North of the Sea of Galilee, not far from present-day Damascus. And it is in Caesarea Philippi that Jesus’ ministry gains a new urgency and a new focus. Yes, Jesus is still announcing and revealing the Kingdom of Heaven. But the unforgettable truth of Peter’s declaration: “You (Jesus) are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God,” marks – quite literally – a new direction for Jesus. He turns south, heading for the place where a cross awaits Him.

Things, of course, are different now. Jesus’ followers, at last, have realised who He is. And, at last, Jesus can begin to explain to them what is going to happen to Him in the not too distant future. He shares with His disciples the heart of the Gospel: that He, the Christ, must suffer and be killed before being raised to life; and that God’s Kingdom is completely and utterly different to the kingdoms on earth.

Peter’s unforgettable declaration is confirmed on the top of Mount Hermon – the Mount of Transfiguration. A stunning spiritual high point, that is immediately followed by what must have been, for Jesus’ disciples, the lowest humiliation yet. While Jesus and Peter and James and John were up the mountain, the rest of His followers had been busy attempting to exorcise (that’s exorcise spelt with an ‘o’ – nothing like exercising a dog) … they had unsuccessfully (it has to be said) attempting to exorcise … a small child.

One of the themes – perhaps the main theme – running through this climactic period in the ministry of Jesus is children and childhood. Every that Jesus says from here on in – everything that happens to Him – is compared and contrasted with childlikeness.

1. Faith and Prayer

In Matthew 17.14, the father of the child brings his son to Jesus. And in the shadow of the snow-capped peak, Jesus heals the boy. Have you ever stopped to think about just how many of Jesus’ healing miracles involve children? Our journey – our pilgrimage – begins with Jesus’ love, His compassion, His healing care, for a small child. (And yet we have sent ours away.)

The disciples, who hadn’t been able to do it themselves, ask Jesus why they couldn’t rebuke and drive out the demon. And Jesus told them (Matthew 17.20) it was because of their lack of faith. Mark, when he records the same story, puts the disciples’ failure down to a lack of prayer (Mark 9.29). Faith and prayer. Prayer and faith.

2. Become like Children

Having showed His followers – through the healing of the boy with epilepsy – the overwhelming importance of prayer and faith. Jesus heads south, and arrives at Capernaum, on the shores of Lake Galilee. Peter’s home was here, and much of Jesus’ ministry took place in and around this town.

And it is at this point in our story, we find the disciples arguing. And they are arguing about greatness. Even after the Sermon on the Mount, in which their categories must have been flipped on their heads and everything was turned upside down, they were arguing about greatness. Even after Jesus had blessed the poor, the hungry, and the persecuted, the disciples were still fixated on greatness.

So, Jesus called to Himself a child – the essence of one who is powerless, dependent, needy, little and poor. He placed the child ‘in the midst of them,’ as a concrete, visible sacrament of how the Kingdom looks. And He said, “Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18.3).

But we so often misunderstand what Jesus said. Usually, people make a list of the attributes of children. For example: they are trusting, they are questioning, they are reliant and dependent upon others. And then we try to apply those things to adults. But, if we do that, we have be very careful that we don’t just read our own adult and cultural preferences back into children.

So what did Jesus really say? Well, first of all, he said we (adult Christians) have to change. So, are we prepared to change or not? If we’re not, then we are unlikely ever to be able to enter into God’s way of doing things. We have to ask ourselves whether we are allowing Jesus to change us. That is primary.

But what about ‘becoming like children’? I am not really sure I know exactly what that means. I know – I’ve heard it, you’ve heard it – people say that when Jesus told us to become childlike He didn’t tell us to be childish. But knowing what it doesn’t mean doesn’t help us to understand what Jesus did mean. (And, anyway, we have sent them away. We don’t want to be like children. We want to get on with the business of grown-up worship.)

Perhaps becoming like children has something to do with having open and enquiring minds? Perhaps it’s about being ready to learn, to obey, to grow, to change, to wonder? Or perhaps it’s more about being ready and willing to pray the Lord’s Prayer. You know: ‘Our Father in Heaven … may Your way of doing things take precedence … may Your will be done …’ ‘You are the Potter; I am the clay’

3. Welcome Children

Let’s move on. We’re still in Capernaum, though, with the fishing boats moving silently across the waters of Galilee clearly visible as Jesus speaks: “Whoever welcomes a child in my name welcomes me” (Matthew 18.5).

What are our relationships like with the children in our churches? Do we really welcome them in the name of Jesus?

In many of our modern, sophisticated congregations, children are viewed as distractions. We tolerate children only to the extent they promise to become ‘adults’ like us. Adult members sometimes complain that they cannot pay attention to the sermon, they cannot listen to the beautiful music, when fidgety children are beside them in the pews. ‘Send them away,’ many adults say. Create ‘Children’s Church’ so these distracting children can be removed in order that we adults can pay attention.

But Jesus put a child in the centre of His disciples, ‘in the midst of them,’ in order to help them pay attention. The child, in Jesus’ mind, was not an annoying distraction. The child was a last-ditch effort by God to help the disciples pay attention to the odd nature of God’s kingdom. Few acts of Jesus are more radical, more counter-cultural.

And yet there has been an adult bias in every aspect of Christian thinking for the last 2000 years. Children have been all but invisible in much of the process and content of mainstream Christian theology, 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. We have developed a blind spot with regard to the place of children in the ministry of Jesus, and the place of children in the life of the community of God.

Jesus himself deliberately placed a little child at the centre of a theological discussion about the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven and then taught several vital truths while the child was standing there. Not while the child was standing in the background, in the shadows, at the margins, or in the Sunday School room, but ‘in the midst’! Listen: 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!

And when we welcome them into our churches, into our services – when we are really, joyfully open to them – then we will find that we have welcomed Jesus!

And how about this? What if it is precisely in receiving and welcoming children that we become like them? (But we haven’t received and welcomed them; we have sent them away.)

4. God Hates Child Abuse

Let’s move on again. And with barely a pause Jesus dramatically changes mood. Jesus’ next words are probably His most angry and condemnatory. These are words that it is so hard to read, and to hear, that most of the time we just omit them.

Matthew 18.6-9: “If any of you cause one of these little ones who trusts in me to fall into sin, it would be better for you to have a large millstone tied around your neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea. What sorrow awaits the world, because it tempts people to sin. Temptations are inevitable, but what sorrow awaits the person who does the tempting. So if your hand or foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It’s better to enter eternal life with only one hand or one foot than to be thrown into eternal fire with both of your hands and feet. And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It’s better to enter eternal life with only one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.”

Don’t you shudder when you hear stories of priests (and it isn’t just Roman Catholics) involved in child abuse? And if it makes you shudder, how does Jesus feel? How does that Graham Kendrick song go? ‘Who can sound the depths of sorrow in the Father heart of God?’

But, hey, this isn’t just about priests. It’s about everything that might cause children (‘little ones’) to sin. Just look around you at the world we have allowed to be created around us for 21st century children. Child soldiers steal, murder and rape in their hundreds of thousands. There are tens of millions of child prostitutes. What about the children of the rich who grow up to envy the possessions and wealth of others and long to have it? What about those who are targeted and branded by transnational corporations and advertising and marketing machines? Think about corporate and institutional paedophilia. In all these examples, and many, many more, children are being led into sin.

We – adults – we must kneel down and ask God’s forgiveness not only for the sins we know we have committed, but also for the systems and institutions that, by doing nothing, we continue to allow to be created. By not challenging these things – by most of the time not even thinking about them – we cause little ones to sin.

It’s a sobering thought isn’t it?

5. Value Each Child

Let’s return to our story – our pilgrimage. The water of Galilee is still lapping near the feet of Jesus. The afternoon turns to dusk, and the hills in the east grow richer in colour and texture as the sun drops towards the horizon.

Jesus is still telling stories. Right now, it’s the parable of the lost sheep. Isn’t that a wonderful tale? God sees each one of us as of eternal value. God sent Jesus as the Shepherd to search for us and bring us to our Heavenly Home on His shoulders.

But I wonder if you have ever noticed that the story is about children. Jesus is still on the subject of ‘little ones’. He introduces the parable with a reference to the fact that each child has a guardian angel! (Now there’s a neglected teaching!) Jesus’ story of the one lost sheep is set in the context of Jesus’ teaching about the value and dignity and worth of children. And there is a moral to it: “see that you don’t look down on these little ones.” (So why have we sent them away?)

So perhaps the meaning of Jesus’ parable is not simply that God cares for us all as individuals. Perhaps the story is addressed to us – adults – as a call to be Good Shepherds, joining in the search for the lost sheep, restructuring our lives (our churches even?) so that each individual child is loved unconditionally.

6. Allow Children and their Families and Friends to Come to Jesus

Jesus leaves Capernaum, and wends His way south along the eastern shore of the River Jordan. He must have passed the place where He was baptised by His cousin John. It’s not too fanciful to imagine that the next incident on our pilgrimage took place at or near to the exact spot.

Perhaps Jesus was tired from His journey (and all the talking). Perhaps He had settled himself on a boulder to catch His breath. Perhaps he stopped for a bite to eat, or to lap at the water in the river beside Him.

The crowds were still following. But Jesus’ disciples decided that He needed some privacy. Enough was enough for one day. So when some of the parents in the crowd started bringing their children to Jesus so He could pray for them, the disciples (symbolic, perhaps, of the church) tried to keep them at a distance.

It’s a familiar story isn’t it? We’ve all heard it. But have you heard it like this? After everything Jesus has just taught them about little ones, His disciples actually tried to prevent people from bringing their children to Jesus for a blessing!

But, sadly, it’s not difficult to find examples of churches and Christians who have, intentionally or not, done exactly the same down through the centuries. We – adults – have tended to overestimate our own importance, and we have tended to underestimate the significance of the direct relationship between children and their Saviour. And don’t think your church isn’t guilty. And don’t think my church isn’t guilty.

Even the way we tend to use the Bible with our children does it. 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! 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 heart-warming anecdotes, but a long story of unbearable loss – and unbearable hope. We violate the story by telling it in snippets, out of order, and treating it chiefly as a source of themes and moral maxims.

‘Children’s Bibles’ are one of my pet hates! Because they reflect prevailing fashions and worldviews, and an adult gate-keeping or selection of what is felt to be suitable for children. It’s a myth that adults understand the whole Bible whereas children can only understand certain adult-selected parts! We have sold our children short. In a culture bloated on junk food, the church has offered its children only crumbs. We can and must do much more to offer our children the nourishment of a rich variety of scriptural images. We can and must do much more to allow our children to come to Jesus.

I said this earlier: we may be providing such a poor experience of church for our youngsters that by the time children reach the age of 10 (the most common leaving age) they are desperate to escape. And what is that if it’s not preventing them from coming to Jesus?

7. Children are Signs of the Kingdom of Heaven

We are still following the River Jordan, but Jesus’ final destination is near. And Jesus has more to share with His followers on this whole subject of little ones. Matthew 19.14: Jesus says that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to children!

You see, when Jesus teaches about the Kingdom of Heaven, we learn that greatness in His kingdom has nothing to do with status, power, strength, influence, wealth, or the normal assumptions in society. We have to change (to repent) to enter the kingdom. You have to become like little children if we are to enter the kingdom of
Heaven. When we welcome a little child we welcome the Lord of the Kingdom!
The Kingdom belongs to the childlike. In other words, Jesus’ Kingdom is not like an earthly kingdom at all. It is a whole new way of living. It’s an upside-down, inside-out and back-to-front world. And it operates on almost exactly the opposite principles of the political kingdoms we know from personal experience and history worldwide.

The other great paradox of the Kingdom of Heaven is that it has already started, but it is not yet fully realised, or when it started. It is ‘now’, but also ‘not yet’. And children can help us to understand that paradox. Because children are both fully human (now) and also not fully developed (not yet). Childhood and the Kingdom illuminate one another.

So whenever you see children playing, watch them refusing to be fixed and finalised, open to exploration and revelation and change. Remind yourself about God’s way of doing things, because there is no better sign of the Kingdom. (But we can’t see them because we’ve sent them away.)

James and John, though, (like lots of us and our churches) are still fixated on the ‘greatness’ question, and persuade their mother to ask Jesus who would sit at His right hand and His left hand in heaven. Jesus’ disciples still didn’t get it!

8. Children’s Worship: God’s Way of Doing Things

At last, Jesus arrives at Jerusalem. He rides His donkey from the Mount of Olives, over the coats and branches laid before Him in the road, and into the heart of the city.

He enters the Temple courtyards, and upsets the Ministers there by overturning the bookshelves and the fair-trade stall, by emptying out the collecting plates and scattering the change, sending pound coins skipping and rolling down the stone staircase.

And still the crowds came to him. Blind people were made to see again. Cripples threw away their zimmer frames. This is what church is supposed to be: come to Jesus and find life!

And the children, the children who had started the football chant …
Hosanna to the Son of David!
Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!
… they were all there too. Still singing and chanting and crying out.

But how did they know? Where did those words come from? Why was Jesus letting them say those things? The Temple ministers were angry. Livid, in fact. The behaviour of the young people, the singing and the shouting, was wholly inappropriate! Not the sort of thing that goes on in our church! Shut them up!! Give them an ASBO!!!

Sometimes children think playing is more important than formal education. Perhaps that’s the way God sees things too. And when our children don’t do exactly what we think they ought to in church, and we disapprove, or glare, or ‘tut’, or make their parents feel so uncomfortable that they don’t ever come back … is our disapproval representative of God and the way He feels?

I love to see children worshipping. I love to lead children in worship. Because their worship is more real than that of many adults. And they are much more in tune with God’s way of doing things than we are.

Jesus knew that. He saw the singing and shouting of the children in the temple in a completely different way. He knew that they were doing exactly what God had intended.

So Jesus quoted the Scriptures back at those Temple Ministers. Psalm 8, in fact. Verse 2, in fact. ‘Have you never read the Bible?’ asks Jesus. ‘From the lips of children and [even] infants God has ordained praise!’ Luke’s version of the story has Jesus adding these words: ‘Try to keep them quiet, and the very stones of this place will cry out in praise.’

Maybe we, too, need to listen more carefully to what our children have to say to us. 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. Maybe, rather than us teaching them, we need to give them the opportunity to teach us. You might be surprised!

Conclusion

And so we come to the end of our journey, our walk with Jesus. But we have just raced through six chapters in the life of Christ which are of considerable importance in understanding the Kingdom of Heaven, and children, and how they relate to each other.

The journey from Mount Hermon to Mount Zion was an epic one for Jesus. And to all those whose eyes and ears and hearts are open, the heart of the Kingdom and the Gospel that has been revealed is momentous. The whole journey is framed by the cries of an epileptic boy and the shouts of bunch of rowdy young people!

And if we were to take this stuff - these words and this example of Jesus - seriously it would change our churches and our whole lives.

(Many thanks to Keith White on whose devotion on Matthew 16-21 - published as an appendix to the report of the Cambridge Consultation on Child Theology, 20 February 2006 - this sermon is extensively based, and from which it has been adapted! All the good bits are his!!)

Sunday Schools

2007-03-26T16:57:00.001+01:00

It’s not easy to find out how and when Sunday Schools as we know them began. What is clear, though, is that as long ago as the mid 1700s, British innovators began to teach poor working children to read and write on their only free day, Sunday. “Robert Raikes (1735-1811) is traditionally credited as pioneering Sunday Schools … 'in fact teaching Bible reading and basic skills on a Sunday was an established activity in a number of eighteenth century Puritan and evangelical congregations'. … The idea of the Sunday School caught the imagination of a number involved in evangelical churches and groupings.” (http://www.infed.org/walking/wa-raikes.htm)

Here are some random examples from a quick internet search:

“There are places of worship in the parish for Baptists, independents, the primitive, Wesleyan, and new connexion of methodists, and the Roman Catholics - all of which have Sunday schools attached. There are, besides, a national school, and a free grammar school for a limited number of boys. [From: Pigot & Co's 1841 Directory of Staffordshire]” (http://www.thepotteries.org/church/history_burslem.htm)

“In the late nineteenth century when the Rector started to take up residence, a Sunday school was begun.” (From a history of St. .Mary’s Church, Hardwick, at http://www.hardwick-cambs.org.uk/church/history.htm)

“The first Pastor of the Chapel was the Rev. Joseph Walker, who was appointed in 1797. In 1798 he drew up rules and articles for the conduct of the Chapel and its members. In the same year Rev. Walker founded a Sunday School.” (From a history of Peppard Congregational Church, Henley-on-Thames, at http://www.alan.thomas30.btinternet.co.uk/Church_History/church_history.html)

“In 1808 the first church was built on that site and served a thriving cause until 1870. Part of the work of this fellowship was concerned with running a large and flourishing Sunday School. In those far off days it was customary for the Sunday School to organise classes in reading on other days of the week too and so it was that the church extended their grounds westward by buying a bit of land from Messrs. T. & E. Ricketts. In 1858 a schoolroom to be used for both Sunday School and day school was built.” (From a history of Eastington Methodist Church at http://www.pikelock.co.uk/emchurch/history.html)

“Mr. John Thompson started a Sunday school in his own house, in the High Street, Wetherby on Sunday 23rd August 1833 … at a later date the Sunday school was held on the Church premises … at one time as many as 230 children regularly attended the Sunday School. The Sunday school met at 9:30am and again at 2:00pm every Sunday. The morning session was usually in the form of a bible study, and then the children would proceed into Chapel for the morning service. After many years, they were permitted to leave just before the sermon.” (From a history of Wetherby Methodist Church at http://www.wetherbymethodist.org.uk/history/index.html.)

That last quotation is telling, as it shows how, over time, Sunday school evolved from rudimentary education of children to a way for churches to teach children (and adults) about the Bible and denominational beliefs through standardised lessons.

Perhaps this is speculation but …

What if, by creating separate classes for children at the same time as adult worship, the churches (unknowingly) began to create a culture that expected adults and children to be separated?

What if the creation of Sunday Schools led to children no longer being welcomed or accommodated in ‘adult’ church?

What if, as a result of the children no longer being present, adult worship evolved into something
much more cerebral and ‘wordy’ than it had been?

What if we adults have become so ‘comfortable’ with a form of worship that excludes children that we can’t imagine them worshipping with us, or us worshipping with them?

What if we all scrapped our Sunday Schools and learned to worship together?

‘Child-friendly’ Churches?

2007-03-26T10:29:00.000+01:00

“In a small local restaurant in Bologna my younger daughter noticed the wide age-range of the other diners – some seven decades must have separated the oldest and the youngest. Two young couples occupied a neighbouring table; at another there was a family celebration. Of course, you can see several generations of one family eating out in Britain, too, sometimes in the same restaurant as young couples, but what was different was that all of them were eating the same food. The words ‘child-friendly’ were nowhere to be seen.’

So begins an article by Anne Karpf in Saturday’s Guardian (24/3/07). And it got my mind working overtime about the way we feed children spiritually in our churches. We separate them from the adults, reject them from the main worship event, in order to teach them sanitised Bible stories and get them colouring, cutting and gluing. We offer them a supposedly ‘child-friendly’ experience of church. But what if our child-friendly Sunday Schools (or whatever we call them) are, as Karpf suggests, just “a euphemism for unhealthy ... reconstituted gunk.”

In Western societies (and in Western churches, I suggest) we have “cut children off from the blood supply of adult culture and immured them in a ghetto of children.” We think that we’re doing them a favour, looking out for their interests. We think they will be bored, unstimulated, if we offer them the same menu we give the adults in church. (And perhaps they would be – but then perhaps some of the adults are, too!) But then, when the children are in church for some special service or event, we complain that they don’t know how to behave, that “they don’t know how to get on with all age groups or respect old people.”

Karpf says: “The best advice I ever received about feeding children was to get them eating the same as you as quickly as possible … Instead of cordoning off kids into child-friendly menus and restaurants, we need to induct kids into adult culture, and make it a place for all generations to meet.”

Is it possible that our ‘child-friendly’ Sunday Schools are precisely the reason why we are losing children from our churches? Is it possible that the default separatist position of most of our churches is what is responsible for the decline in numbers of children (and adults)? Can we even imagine church without junior church?

I have a dream … of a church where all are fed together. A church where old and young love and respect one another, and are willing to learn from each other. A place for all generations to meet together and with their God.

children and faith

2007-03-15T13:28:00.000Z

“Children have little awareness of travelling time or the stress of preparing for the journey but they do travel with us and have a unique and dynamic understanding of God’s love … People often say that children are the church of the future. This is wrong. Children belong to the church of today, but will be adults in the church of tomorrow. How children experience their membership of the church now will form their participation in the church in the future.”

- Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.x

children and church: more quotes

2007-03-14T11:53:00.000Z

“There are those who … argue that in order for there to be any teaching of substance separate age groups are a necessity. Usually the assumption behind this attitude is that ‘proper’ teaching takes the format of a traditional sermon and that this is the most effective way for adults to engage with Scripture. Those unable to sit still for the duration of a twenty-five minute exposition are removed to activities that are supposedly more appropriate for their age.”
- Mountstephen & Martin, The Body Beautiful (2004, Grove Books Ltd.), p.23-24

More often than not, on a Sunday morning, “the children are in a classroom, not a sacred space – a classroom, moreover, that is likely to be small, unattractive, and untidy … Even the most basic act of worship, participation in the eucharist, is usually closed to children … [We] operate on the unspoken assumption that children must learn how to be Christians, in an academic setting, before they can actually begin to do any of the things that Christians normally do together in the community of faith: pray together, celebrate the sacraments, share their faith and their lives, cherish the hope of things unseen, and bear witness in love and service in the world. … the usual time for Sunday School is during the time of the main worship service. Adults come to church on Sunday in order to worship; children come to Sunday School to acquire information.”
- Wolff Pritchard, Offering the Gospel to Children (1992, Cowley Publications), p.140-141

“A procedure for Christian education which consists only or mainly of formal instruction by way of an address from the front, the audience remaining at best receptive, at worst passive, heavily stresses the transfer of information at the cost of a failure to develop aesthetic or any other feelings or value commitments. It …fails to feed the emotional or other dimensions of personality, or to represent a biblical and Christian understanding of human nature. Such a method is therefore at fault on theological and social as well as on educational grounds.”
- Being God’s people (1987, Methodist Division of Education and Youth and the National Christian Education Council), quoted by Sutcliffe (ed.), Tuesday’s Child (2001, Christian Education Publications), p.168

Children's Bibles?

2007-03-13T10:06:00.000Z

“Studies of so-called ‘Children’s Bibles’ or ‘Bibles for Children’ 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.”
- White, Continuing the Search (www.childtheology.org)

“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.”

- Wolff Pritchard, Offering the Gospel to Children (1992, Cowley Publications), p.4

We “violate the story … by telling it in snippets, out of order, and treating it chiefly as a source of themes and moral maxims.”

- Wolff Pritchard, Offering the Gospel to Children (1992, Cowley Publications), p.44

Sunday School?

2007-03-13T10:05:00.000Z

“… the task of Christian education should not and cannot be left to a few individuals who are identified as teachers. All are teachers, whether they recognise it or not, and equally all are learners, whether they recognise it or not. … those churches which devolve their educational responsibility for the young as a burden on a few individuals not only neglect their responsibility but also fail to appreciate that church life itself is an effective educational medium.”

- Being God’s people (1987, Methodist Division of Education and Youth and the National Christian Education Council),

quoted by Sutcliffe (ed.), Tuesday’s Child (2001, Christian Education Publications), p.167

children and the church: more quotes

2007-03-12T16:42:00.000Z

Here are another couple of good quotes. And one of these is from 1943

“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.”

- Wolff Pritchard, Offering the Gospel to Children (1992, Cowley Publications), p.141

“Christian teaching is so often a predominantly intellectual lesson, a matter of words, not of experience embodied in the relationships of a group … the young are not being nurtured in a community which expresses right through its whole life a common set of true values …”

- from Reeves, Children of the Future (1943, The Kingsbury Press),

quoted by Sutcliffe (ed.), Tuesday’s Child (2001, Christian Education Publications), pp.34-35

all age church

2007-03-12T16:39:00.000Z

Look at the date on this quotation! 1974! Why was no one listening?

“It has yet to be demonstrated that adults learn and perceive in ways which are decisively different from those in which children learn. … The generalisation that a person notices twenty per cent of what he hears, thirty per cent of what he sees, fifty per cent of what he both hears and sees, seventy per cent of what he himself says and ninety per cent of what he himself does is true, irrespective of the age of the person …

"The challenge to the church is that in its dealings with adults it will have to find the courage to move away … from an educational approach derived from ancient Greece and to develop the use of an experiential approach which has validity for both children and adults …

"The involvement of children in the total community life of the church might cause church leaders to take seriously how people of all ages learn … This could set in motion profound changes in church life."

- from Sutcliffe, Learning Community (1974, NCEC), quoted by Sutcliffe (ed.), Tuesday’s Child (2001, Christian Education Publications), pp.36-37

Children and Faith - a quotation

2007-03-09T09:42:00.000Z

“The disciples (church) continued to argue about greatness. Even after the Sermon on the Mount, in which all our categories are flipped on their heads and everything is turned upside down, they were arguing over greatness. Even after Jesus had blessed the poor, the hungry, and the persecuted, the disciples were still fixated on greatness. Worldiness is a hard habit to break.
In response, Jesus called to Himself a child – the essence of one who is powerless, dependent, needy, little and poor. He placed the child ‘in the midst of them,’ as a concrete, visible sacrament of how the Kingdom looks. Jesus’ act with the child is interesting. In many of our modern, sophisticated congregations, children are often viewed as distractions. We tolerate children only to the extent they promise to become ‘adults’ like us. Adult members sometimes complain that they cannot pay attention to the sermon, they cannot listen to the beautiful music, when fidgety children are beside them in the pews. ‘Send them away,’ many adults say. Create ‘Children’s Church’ so these distracting children can be removed in order that we adults can pay attention.
Interestingly, Jesus put a child in the centre of His disciples, ‘in the midst of them,’ in order to help them pay attention. The child, in Jesus’ mind, was not an annoying distraction. The child was a last-ditch effort by God to help the disciples pay attention to the odd nature of God’s kingdom. Few acts of Jesus are more radical, more counter-cultural, than His blessing of children.”

Hauerwas & Willimon, Resident Aliens (1989, Abingdon Press), p.96

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children

2007-02-22T19:33:00.000Z

My presentation on ‘Connecting the Faith with Children’ at the ministers’ conference seemed to go well. There was some creative feedback, and some encouraging comments from individuals afterwards.

However, I had used the issue of children and communion to illustrate a wider principle. That is, we must fully involve our children in the worship experience/event, rather than remove (reject?) them from it in order to teach them about it so that when they are deemed old enough to access it they will understand what is going on. But the group got so bogged down in the specific issue (children and communion) that we forgot about the underlying principle and automatically reverted to the separatist default position I was attempting to demolish.

How do other churches / denominations handle the children and communion question? Does it work in an all age context? Or do we reserve the sacrament for adult worship? I’d be interested to hear from others. Thanks.

My own position is that the higher your understanding of the eucharist the less exclusive you can be. If all we are doing when we share bread and wine is ‘remembering’ what Jesus did, then we can make our club as exclusive as we want. But if, at the table of the Lord, we meet with the risen Christ (the real presence) then we surely cannot turn anyone away?
The other stumbling block with this group of Baptist ministers (I suspect) will be an unwillingness to move away from expository preaching. In other words, we need a Sunday School because otherwise the children will be bored. Your comments on that would also be warmly received. Thanks again.

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children

2007-02-09T16:27:00.001Z

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?!?

Last Dawkins Comment (for now)

2007-02-06T09:39:00.000Z

I have just finished The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. And, I have to say, I have thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a good read, very well-written, and extremely stimulating. Many of Dawkins' criticisms of religion I agree with whole-heartedly.

However, the last bit I wanted to comment on was what Dawkins has to say about death. "Polls suggest that approximately 95% of the population of the United States believe they will survive their own death." But "how many people who claim such a belief really, in their heart of hearts, hold it?" (p.356)

Dawkins has questions to ask about the way religious people talk when in the presence of the dying, and he asks why th most vocal opposition to euthanasia and assisted suicide comes from religious people. "Wouldn't you expect that religious people would be the least likely to cling unbecomingly to earthly life?" (p.356)

And why is it that those people who seem most afraid of death are the religious ones? "It doesn't ... speak strongly of religion's power to comfort the dying." (p.358)

Food for thought for those of us in pastoral ministry!?

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children - Survey (Section 8)

2007-02-06T09:36:00.000Z

WHAT DO THE CHILDREN THINK?

please ask the children (or a representative cross-section of them) who attend your children’s / all age activities these two questions. It would be helpful if you would not prompt them in any way, and write down their responses ’verbatim’:

1. What do you need from church / all age worship?

2. What would make church / all age worship better for you?

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children - Survey (Section 7)

2007-02-06T09:35:00.000Z

WHAT TRAINING / DEVELOPMENT NEEDS DO YOU HAVE?

1. Please comment on any training of development needs you feel your church may have in the area of connecting the faith with children.

2. Do you have any other comments on this form or this process that you have not already been able to make?

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children - Survey (Section 6)

2007-02-06T09:33:00.000Z

WHAT SUPPORT DO YOU GET?

1. What proportion of the church budget is allocated to:
a - children’s work?
b - All Age work?

2. How affirmed / valued do your children’s workers feel by the rest of the church?

3. Are the children’s workers regularly (perhaps annually) ‘commissioned’ for their work?

4. Are the children’s workers (and the children) regularly prayed for in services?

5. How is the minister involved in planning the children’s work?

6. How often does the minister attend any of the children’s groups?

7. How often does the minister teach in any of the children’s groups?

8. Do your children’s workers feel they need more support and affirmation? How could this happen?

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children - Survey (Section 5)

2007-02-06T09:31:00.000Z

WHAT HELPS YOU TO DO THIS AND KEEPS YOU GOING?

1. Does your children’s work follow a curriculum or use graded work?

2. What resources or printed materials do you use?

3. Please comment on how you rate these resources / materials in terms of:
a - Effectiveness?
b - Ease of use and preparation?
c - Other comments on the materials / resources you use?

4. What motivates your children’s workers to work with the children?

5. How do you ensure that the children’s workers receive some spiritual input themselves?

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children - Survey (section 4)

2007-02-06T09:30:00.000Z

WHO DO YOU REACH?

1. Who are the children / families who attend your children’s work? (Please give approximate numbers.)
a - Children of church members / attenders?
b - Children from the local community?
c - Others (please state)?

2. How would you gauge the effectiveness or ‘success’ of these activities? What difference do they make?

3. What criteria have you used to make your judgement?

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children - Survey (Section 3)

2007-02-06T09:28:00.000Z

WHO DOES THE WORK?

1. How many children’s workers do you have?
2. How many are volunteers?
3. How many are paid workers?
4. How many male and how many female workers do you have?
5. Do you have enough children’s workers?
6. How easy do you find it to recruit new children’s workers (and why do you think that is)?
7. What training have your children’s workers had?

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children - Survey (Section 2)

2007-02-01T13:19:00.000Z

1. Do you have a specific mission statement / purpose statement for your children’s work? If so, what is it?

2. Is there a separate section in your Church Mission Statement or Aims and Objectives that relates to your work with children? If so, what is it?

3. Is the purpose of your activit(ies) made specific anywhere else?

4. Do all the children’s workers (and the rest of the church) understand and agree with the
purpose? Or is it just ‘understood’ or ‘assumed’?

5. What is the purpose of your children’s / all age work?

a. Teach children the Bible

b. Develop their faith

c. Instruct them in the faith and traditions of the church

d. Help them to see their daily lives in the light of the Gospel

e. Incorporate them into the worship life of the church

f. Arm them against the dangers of secular culture

g. Nurture their sense of spirituality

h. Other purpose (please state)

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children - Survey (Section One)

2007-02-01T13:11:00.000Z

After three days of this 'Commissioned Ministry' I have come up with a draft survey which will 'officially' go to a number of Baptist Churches here in Yorkshire.

However, it would be fascinating to get some feedback from others on the questions I want to ask, so I'll blog the surveya section at a time. I look forward to your responses (thanks) ...

1. How do children fit into the life of your church? How integrated are they?

2. Do the adults in the congregation know what happens in your children’s groups and activities?

3. How are they informed?

4. Is there a link between the service or sermon theme and the children’s activities?

5. Do you have a children’s address before the youngsters leave for their activities?

6. What are your church’s arrangements for children when there is a communion service?

7. What children’s work / activities do you offer in your church? Please give details.
a. Sunday School or Junior Church?
b. Mothers and Toddlers Groups?
c. Midweek Clubs?
d. Other (please state)

8. For each activity mentioned above, what proportion of time is spent on:
a. Worship?
b. Instruction?
c. Prayer?
d. Craft Activities?
e. Play?
f. Other (please state)?

9. Do you have All Age Services?
a. How often?
b. At what times?
c. Who attends these services?
d. Who plans and leads these services?
e. What resources / materials are used?

Dawkins on Hell (and Children)

2007-01-30T19:49:00.003Z

And, surprise surprise, that’s pretty much what Dawkins goes on to say. I’m a step ahead of him here! First of all:

“The extreme horribleness of hell … is inflated to compensate for its implausibility. If hell were plausible, it would only have to be moderately so in order to deter. Given that it is unlikely to be true, it has to be advertised as very very scarey indeed, to balance its implausibility and retain some deterrence value” (p.321).

Dawkins then describes an interview with the American comic actor Julia Sweeney:

“ ‘If you were to compare the abuse of bringing a child up really to believe in hell … how do you think that would compare in trauma terms with sexual abuse?’ She replied: ‘That’s a very difficult question … I think there are lots of similarities actually, because it is about an abuse of trust; it is about denying the child the right to feel free and open and relate to the world in the normal way … it’s a form of denigration; it’s a form of denial of the true self in both cases” (p.325).

- pause for thought -

As I have blogged earlier, I am currently working on a project for the Yorkshire Baptist Association on how to connect the Christian faith with children …

… and it has just occurred to me … there’s a lot said in our churches and denominations about Child Protection, about Criminal Records Checks, about safeguards and proper procedures for dealing with children who want to ‘disclose’ physical or sexual abuse they may be enduring …

… but how much of what we teach in church, or Sunday School … about (heaven and) hell … about God seeing and knowing all the bad things you do … how much of that is actually abusive?

Dawkins again: “If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet there would be no suicide bombers …” (p.308).

Hmmmm …..

How can Christians say and do such horrible things

2007-01-30T19:49:00.001Z

If Richard Dawkins exposure to religion has been primarily like this, then he has every right to hold the angry opinions he does:

“Pastor Keenan Roberts … particular form of nuttiness takes the form of what he calls Hell Houses. A Hell House is a place where children are brought, by their parents or their Christian schools, to be scared witless over what might happen to them after they die. Actors play out fearsome tableaux of particular ‘sins’ like abortion and homosexuality, with a scarlet-clad devil in gloating attendance. These are a prelude to the piece de resistance, Hell Itself, complete realistic sulphurous smell of burning brimstone and the agonized screams of the forever damned” (pp.319-20).

And here’s what Pastor Roberts has to say about it:

“I would rather for them to understand that Hell is a place that they absolutely do not want to go. I would rather reach them with that message at twelve than not to reach them with that message and have them live a life of sin and to never find the Lord Jesus Christ. And if they end up having nightmares, as a result of experiencing this, I think there’s a higher good that would ultimately be achieved and accomplished in their life than simply having nightmares” (p.320).

Does anyone else feel sick? Forget allegations of priests fondling small children. Surely Pastor Robert’s form of child abuse is worse?

Dawkins’ ‘Delusion’

2007-01-30T19:48:00.002Z

So why is Richard Dawkins so hostile toward religion?

In his own words, he is hostile to fundamentalist religion: “because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect” (p. 284). It is “hell bent on ruining the scientific education of countless thousands of innocent, well-meaning, eager young minds” (p.286).

And “non-fundamentalist, ‘sensible’ religion” is to be pilloried in just the same way because “it is making the world safe for fundamentalism by teaching children, from their earliest years, that unquestioning faith is a virtue” (p.286).

When I consider that almost all of the evidence Dawkins cites to support this conclusion concerns Suicide Bombers and American Creationists, I am almost inclined to agree with him! In fact, as I have read The God Delusion, I have found myself agreeing with much of what Richard Dawkins has to say about religion. I’ve not got much time for religion myself.

But, in a phrase borrowed from one of the characters in Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian: religion isn’t the saviour; church is not the saviour; Christianity is not the saviour. Jesus is.

The ‘Street Evangelist’ Story

2007-01-30T19:48:00.001Z

It was a few years back now. I was studying at Spurgeon’s College, and Claire and I had gone into London for the evening. We walked across Leicester Square, and saw that a large crowd had gathered around one particular ‘entertainer’. As we got closer , we realised that the crowd was mostly Asian, and that the ‘entertainer’ was attempting to tell them about Jesus in King James’ language!

However, as we walked past – Claire with her head down and her hands over her ears (she knows what I’m like) I hear this preacher speak the amazing line: “Verily, Jesus said, many who call themselves Muslims and Hindus will not be entering the kingdom of heaven!”

I’m afraid that I couldn’t let that go. Claire disappeared to the other side of the Square, totally embarrassed, while I asked the man to show me, in his Bible, exactly where Jesus had uttered that line. The crowd started cheering me, and the ‘Street Evangelist’ was left with no option but to pack up and go home.

And I still think that was a job well done!

Dawkins’ ‘Delusion’

2007-01-30T19:47:00.000Z

I love this quote from the beginning of Chapter 8 (“What’s wrong with religion? Why be so hostile?”) of Dawkin’s book:

Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man – living in the sky – who watched everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ‘til the end of time … But He loves you! (GEORGE CARLIN)

It reminds me a bit of the google video I managed to download a while ago (can’t find or remember the link, but if anyone out there can please let me know). Two evangelists dressed in black knock at a third man’s door. In an effort to convert him, the two evangelists tell him something like: “Kiss Hanks *** and he’ll give you $1000 when you leave town. Don’t kiss Hank’s *** and he’ll kick the **** out of you!”

How can anyone think that the Carlin quote or Hank’s pals are offering Good News? They so obviously are not. So why do Christians persist in ‘sharing the Gospel’ in ways that are so very, very similar to the parodies above?

Something inside me wants to curl up and die every time I pass a ‘street evangelist’, because I really truly believe they are doing more damage to the Christian cause that good. There was, of course, the time that I argued with a preacher in Leicester Square, but that’s another story …

Charitable Status?

2007-01-23T18:07:00.000Z

Here's another off-the-wall thought ...

So many of our churches and denominations are bending over themselves backwards to comply with the new charity law - appointing Trustees, etc. But for what purpose?

I suspect the main reason is that if we lose charitable status we can no longer claim back the tax on our giving. But is it not true that a large number of churches (possible the majority) spend the money they receive on maintaining their own buildings and paying their own clergy. In other words, our efforts and finances are directed entirely toward our own benefit. How can that be called charitable?

Community?

2007-01-23T18:01:00.000Z

A bit of an off-the-wall one this - but it's something I've been wondering for a little while ...

Where is the Christian community in our churches? Where, specifically, is the fellowship when we worship? Our worship gatherings seem to be about something else other than fellowship. And that's why so many churches tag the 'fellowship' bit on the end: "Come and have fellowship over a cup of coffee".

I fought for nearly four years to persuade my church that it would be good to have coffee after every service - for a long time we only had it once a month. And it strikes me that what goes on over coffee after the service is at least as important as what has happened for the previous sixty minutes. But why do we need to tag it onto the end?

How can we make our worship gatherings - the sixty minutes in the sanctuary AS WELL AS the thirty minutes over coffee - true fellowship and community?

Connecting the Faith with Children

2007-01-19T11:12:00.000Z

I have done a couple of days reading on my Commissioned Ministry project - and I'm just mulling over some stuff to see where I get. I think there are some massive challenges to the way churches currently work with children:

1. There is a challenge from the whole witness of Scripture - time and time again it is children who provide the turning point for God's people, the Bible affirms childhood, and the biblical festivals (e.g. Passover) assume the presence of children. Sending them away so that we adults can listen to a sermon (which none of us will remember or apply) seems contrary to the way children are treated in the Old and New Testaments. I think the children (and their Sunday School teacher - generally their mothers) are seriously undervalued, neglected, sidelined in our worship practices. "Children are created to praise God; they have a special role in silencing e enemies of God; they are at the heart of God's kingdom; they give unique insights into the natire of the kingdom of heaven; they are signs of God's future reign" (Keith White). How can we include and affirm children more effectively?

2. There is a challenge from the field of Child Theology - which reminds us that, in the context of a discussion of greatness in the kingdom of God, Jesus took a child, placed him/her in the centre of the gathering, and challenged His followers to become like the child. In our churches, we seem more concerned with the children growing up to be like us! How can we turn that round?

3. I have been fascinated by some of the work done on children's spirituality, and I wonder how much of the children's sunday school materials out there take it seriously. What would happen, for instance, if we all analysed our children's work according to how far it fulfils the spiritual categories of God-consciousness, people-consciousness, world-consciousness, and self-consciousness (Hay & Nye's categories). Or what about the child's need for significance, boundaries, community, and creativity (Keith White). How well do you think we do?

4. There are many challenges from the emerging churches, who are doing very bodld, creative things that are inclusive of children. "Messy Church" is one example. Do you know any others?

The God Delusion ... again

2007-01-19T10:58:00.000Z

... and again I find myself agreeing with Richard Dawkins:
"... If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed ... If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape and murder', you reveal yourself as an immoral person ..." (The God Delusion, pp.226-7).

Dawkins goes on to summarise the Old Testament, and asks what moral messages can possibly be found in the tales to be found there of (e.g.) God drowning all of humanity apart from one family, God turning Lot's wife into salt, God asking Abraham to sacrice Isaac, God demanding the slaughter of all Israel's enemies ...

Then he turns his attention to the New Testament and, after acknowledging that Jesus' moral teaching was rather more palatable than that of His ancestors, Dawkins lambasts the masochism and injustice of such doctrines as Original Sin and Penal Substitution.

So far so good. But the Christianity he describes is almost medieval. I know very few Christians who behave or believe as Dawkins has stereotyped us.

I think maybe one of the differences is that I am reading Dawkins because I want to understand him, and others like him. I am interested in his opinions, and I find them stimulating, even challenging. I might even learn something from them. But Dawkin's own 'religion' - Darwinism - seems to lead him to believe that he because he is right, therefore anyone who disagrees with him must be wrong. (Some fundamentalism Christians - the very ones criticised by Dawkins -are just like that!)

... and more ...

2007-01-12T10:27:00.000Z

I'm struggling a bit with Dawkin's explanation of the 'Anthropic Principle' (The God Delusion, pp.134ff). The appearance of the first hereditary molecule is extremely improbable, as is the origin of the eucaryotic cell with a nucleus and mitochondria. But since these things do exist, their appearance and origin obviously did happen, and we must live on one of the intensely rare planets where such things are possible. It seems like a circular argument to me, and not a convincing argument against the possibility that our cosmos has a Designer.

And More Delusions!

2007-01-11T09:39:00.000Z

Dawkins is "continually astonished by those theists who ... rejoice in natural selection as 'God's way of achieving his creation'. They note that evolution by natural selection would be a very easy and neat way to achieve a world full of life. God wouldn't need to do anything at all ... Peter Atkins postulates a hypothetically lazy God who tries to get away with as little as possible in order to make a universe containing life ... literally God at leisure, unoccupied, unemployed, superfluous, useless." (p.118)

Reading those words almost made me feel some fleeting sympathy with the creationist position!

But then I remembered something Brian McClaren put in the mouth of one of the characters in 'The Story We Find Ourselves In:
"There’s a popular story that says the universe came into being by itself, and that everything that has happened since has happened by accident. In this particular story, which arose most forcefully in modern Western civilisation, there is no God, no Being beyond our beings, no Creator. In this story we can be at the top of the food chain and every other chain; no one else is around – as far as we know – to challenge our claim to be the Supreme Beings. There is much in this story to flatter our pride, and it’s the story that has fuelled technological advances more than any other. It seems to explain so much. In fact, you could say that this story explains everything about everything … except ... human experience – joy, sorrow, outrage, grief, hope, longing, wonder, love – the awareness that you’re alive and that you’re going to die and that both of those facts matter to you and mean something to you. And, certainly, you’d have to include overtly spiritual human experiences as well.
So, even though it explains so much, this secular story marginalizes so much of human experience, and in the end, I think that this secular version can become a dangerous perversion of the true story. But, again, it does take seriously how … how real creation is. And as a result, people who follow this story have excelled in seeking to understand creation, to learn its language and discover its deep structures and potentials for development.
There’s another story that says this universe is all an illusion, that Being didn’t actually create beings, but that Being simply dreams or imagines beings. In this version of the story, when beings realise their true situation – they aren’t beings at all, but dreams or emanations of Being; they don’t actually exist outside God’s mind at all, but rather are illusions or thoughts inside the mind of Being – they achieve enlightenment by releasing their distinctiveness as beings into the fullness of Being.
There’s a lot about this ancient Eastern story that we need to hear. These days, it often serves as a corrective to the previous modern Western story, I think, by saying the very opposite. The previous story says there is no God or spirit, and this one says there is nothing but God and spirit. And if I was going to be mistaken, I would rather make the latter mistake than the former, because the former story, that God does not exist, was never true, but the latter story, that nothing but God exists, at least used to be true. In other words, according to the ancient Jewish story, it was true before God created anything. This Eastern version reminds us that we beings cannot exist apart from Being, that we are ultimately connected to God and to all that exists in profound ways, ways that are easy to forget in our modern Western world, where the first story often predominates. This Eastern version of the story is, I believe, one of humanity’s most lofty creations.
For me, the ancient Jewish story lies in between the other two, or maybe it arches over both, you know? The ancient Jewish story embraces both the modern Western story and the ancient Eastern story. It acknowledges the modern Western assertion that the universe is real. The ground we are standing on really exists; it’s not just an illusion or a dream, and nor are we. It acknowledge the modern Western belief that the universe operates on many levels according to patterns we call ‘laws of nature’ – a better metaphor that ‘laws’ would perhaps be ‘language’ or ‘music’ of creation. It treats the stuff of the universe as real stuff, and encourages us to study it, to analyse it scientifically, and to do amazing things with it.
And the ancient Jewish story also acknowledges the ancient Eastern assertion that this universe is not independent, that it depends on the Creator so it can come into existence and stay in existence. It also acknowledges that because of our common connection to the Creator, all that exists is interconnected, related, interwoven. It agrees with the Eastern belief that the universe pulsates with meaning, as one would expect of any universe that was spoken by Being into being. And it sees the universe as an expression of the mind and heart of God, in which God’s breath breathes, and God’s language sings, and God’s fingerprints are detected and felt, and God’s signature is read.

More Delusions!

2007-01-11T09:23:00.000Z

In just six pages (pp. 92-97) Richard Dawkins manages to completely dismiss 'The Argument From Scripture'. He does point out some significant differences (difficulties) with, for instance, Matthew's and Luke's versions of Jesus birth. He points out that the census under Governor Quirinius was a local one (not for the whole empire) and that it took place long after Herod was already dead and gone.

He sets out some questions to ask when interpreting the Bible with which I think I agree (many Christians would not, but then perhaps they are the literalists with whom Dawkins has such a problem):
"Who wrote it, and when? How did they know what to write? Did they, in their time, really mean what we, in out time, understand them to be saying? Were they unbiased observers, or did they have an agenda that coloured their writing?" (p.92)

But, to me, Dawkin's argument falls apart when he asserts that the biblical text was "copied and recopied, through many different 'Chinese Whispers generations' by fallible scribes who, in any case, had their own religious agenda." Modern textual criticism (which informs all modern translations of the Bible) takes the copyists' errors very seriously and does its best to identify what is most likely to be the original version. It's true, some small errors have crept into the biblical texts over the years. But what is remarkable is just how few!

The God Delusion

2007-01-06T13:13:00.000Z

I got Richard Dawkins' 'The God Delusion' for Christmas. Started reading it last night and I'm really enjoying it! The quality of the writing is superb, and he really knows how to engage a reader.

I've read a variety of Christian 'rebuttals' of Dawkins' hypothesis, but thought I'd like to read it for myself and perhaps blog comments on some of the specifics. But I'm part way through chapter 3 and struggling to find anything I really disagree with. The religious activities Dawkins describes I find equally abhorrent! And I agree that many of the ways we present and promote our religion leave us open to criticism and ridicule. This quotation from early in chapter one struck quite a chord with me:

"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophet said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?' Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths." (Carl Sagan, in Pale Blue Dot, quoted by Dawkins on p.12)

Just an observation. When Sagan writes 'god' the first letter is lower case. But he capitalises 'Universe'. Dawkins claims to have no respect for 'religion'; he asks whether 'theology' can even be considered a legitimate subject. Yet he always writes 'God' with a capital 'G'!

Connecting the Faith with Children

2007-01-03T13:28:00.000Z

The numbers of children in UK Baptist churches are falling at a dramatic rate. Recent analysis of the contact with under-12s revealed that we have lost contact with about a third of the number we were in touch with in 2000 (about 36,000) in the space of five years. 30,000 children have left in the last two years! On Sunday 11th June 2006, Baptist Churches were encouraged to take part in a national day of prayer and awareness, to get on our knees in search for God's guidance to address this worrying problem.

In response, the Yorkshire Baptist Association have commissioned a research project: ‘Connecting the Christian Faith with Children’. For the next two years, I will be working for three days a month on the project: conducting a survey of the Yorkshire Baptist Churches, meeting key practitioners, doing background reading and trying to establish some biblical and theological principles for our work with children. I hope perhaps to share some of my thoughts and conclusions via this blog, and welcome your comments!

As I start this significant piece of work, I find myself more and more convinced that the answer is NOT simply to do Sunday School better. Nor do I have much sympathy with the ‘convert them before they’re eight’ approach. Rather, we need to focus on nurturing a sense of spirituality and numinousness (great word!) in the children AND adults in our churches. I’ve no idea how to do that, but I‘ve got two years to find out!

Christian Community

2006-12-21T10:46:00.000Z

Thanks to Wiggy and Julie for your recent comments. I do - increasingly - believe that was is desperately needed in our churches is a new sense of community. We need a body of Christ who actually like each other and want to spend time together, and I agree that the community life of the other faiths around us puts us to shame!

I loved Wiggy's idea of upending the church and tipping us all out into the community (where we should be), so that we can find new ways of coming together rather than trying to discover new ways of doing mission.

There was a report in the Guardian last Saturday about why people go to the gym. And a study has suggested they do it because they find community there. When even the local gym is offering a better sense of community than the church, we really have got it very wrong indeed.

Left Behind

2006-12-21T10:34:00.000Z

A complete set of the 'Left Behind' novels suddenly appeared on the church bookshelf. I have quietly removed them (not because I want to control what people read in their own homes, but because their presence on a church bookshelf indicates our - and my - condoning of the contents) and I'm waiting for someone to claim them. (Although leaving them there might have been the best way to be sure no one would read them!)

I did read the first one in the series - a couple of years ago - to see what all the fuss was about. I concluded that the God portrayed therein bears little relation to the God I worship. But just because Tim La Haye quotes the Bible, people believe what he writes!

I might now read the rest and let you know how I feel about them.

Viv Lassetter (of the BUGB) made this comment in the Baptist Ministers' Journal (July 2002):

"In his 'Left Behind' series La Haye is so sure, so uncompromising. The good are godly and go to be with the Lord, the bad are wicked and will go to hell to be tortured forever. What are Christians in our congregations reading? Who or what is influencing them? ..."

Consumer Christianity: or what do I want from a church?

2006-12-16T10:17:00.000Z

John Smulo (http://johnsmulo.com/) has written a challenging post on Consumer Christianity, and there are loads of interesting comments. Thanks, mate.

In response, I am increasingly of the opinion that by looking for (or by providing) great worship music, comfortable seating, a good children's programme, etc., we have lost touch with what being the church is all about. We need to find new ways of connecting faith with our children than simply 'doing Sunday School better. We need to find better ways of worshipping God than just singing the latest Matt Redman (or whoever's trendy now) songs. We need to rediscover a way of being church than takes us out of our comfort zones, pushes us beyond the four walls of our institutions, and takes the Good News to the not-yet-believers in our communities. I don't know how we do it - but I might try to think of what I might be looking for in a new church myself (or what I might be aspiring for my current church to be like). Watch this space!

Jesus' (step-)grandfather?

2006-12-14T16:15:00.000Z

Luke 3 vv 23-24: Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his public ministry. Jesus was known as the son of Joseph. Joseph was the son of Heli. Heli was the son of Matthat. Matthat was the son of Levi. Levi was the son of Melki. Melki was the son of Jannai. Jannai was the son of Joseph.

While preparing for a carol service this coming Sunday, I was looking at Jesus' 'family tree', and noticed the name of Heli. Heli was the father of Joseph, and presumably prepared the way for Jesus himself by passing on the story of faith to his children. Heli is as important in this genealogy as king David!

Perhaps it's more important simply to pass on what we know about God than it is to do something impressive. If Heli had not passed on his faith to his son, Joseph would not have had the faith to trust that God was doing something new and wonderful. And if we do not pass on our faith, our Christian family tree will die with us …

Those of us in the established churches who look for something new to emerge could do worse than take Heli as a model and example ... or Matthat, or Levi, or Melki, or Jannai ...

Advent Blog

2006-12-13T16:48:00.000Z

I’ve been invited to contribute to this Advent ‘group blog’
(http://hopefulimagination.blogspot.com),
and will be doing so (indirectly) on 19th and 21st December.

I’d be doing it directly if I could get Blogger to do what I’m reliably informed I should be able to get it to do!

Anyway. Check it out!

Blog Silence

2006-12-13T16:47:00.000Z

Sorry about the blog silence! I've been trying to get nativity and carol services prepared. Normal service should be resumed shortly!

Tough God Questions

2006-12-03T15:25:00.000Z

Some really tough God Questions from http://www.emergentkiwi.org.nz/

Why do kids suffer?
Why did God invent cancer?
What about Buhddists, they seem ok to me?
Why do you priests fiddle with kids?
Does God have an ego problem?
Why do Christians fight each other?
Would God forgive Hitler?
What about all the killing in the Old Testament?
In the same sense that a heroin addict only has an illusion of choice over taking some heroin that is in front of him, does a child born to Fundamentalist Muslims in Saudi Arabia ever really have a choice to follow Jesus?
If we really have free will, how come it's impossible for us to choose to not sin at all tomorrow?
If a devout Christian gets true amnesia and forgets who they are and stop being a Christian, then was he ever saved? And which begs the question of, if our soul is clearly not attached to memory, for memory is an aspect of the brain, what knowledge will we take to Heaven?
Does a Christian still go to heaven if he/she commits suicide?
If a Christian converts to another religion, are they still saved?
What happened to people before Jesus? Did they all go to hell? If not, where did they go?
Did God create life in the universe outside of earth (i.e. aliens)?
Who made God?
Why does God chose to condem some people to hell?
When Jesus died for your sins, so that your sins were removed, when you backslid away from God, did Jesus "undie" for your sins?

Any Answers?

The Annunciation

2006-12-03T15:15:00.000Z

Another great post. This one’s from http://www.sanctus1.co.uk/blog/:

"In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary.

The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you." Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favour with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end."

"Sorry, you lost me at the 'highly favoured' bit," Mary said.The angel repeated, "Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favour with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end."

"No hold on," said Mary. "What happens first? I get pregnant. Then what?"

"You are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High--"

Mary replied, "You haven't got this in the Message version, have you? That's all a bit NIV to me, and that's so seventies, it's wack."

"Okay then," frowned Gabriel. "Ahem... Mary, you have nothing to fear. God has a surprise for you. You will become pregnant and give birth to a son and call his name Jesus. He will be great, be called 'Son of the Highest.' The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David; He will rule Jacob's house forever — no end, ever, to his kingdom."

"Nah, I prefered the first one."

"Oh shut up and wear something blue, we need you to pose for a luminous statuette."

(Luke, chapter1)"

Time to ‘come out’: I am not straight!

2006-12-03T15:13:00.000Z

Great post from http://hopefulamphibian.blogs.com/:

"… it is time for all Christians to cease to refer to themselves as 'straight'.

Why?

Because to describe oneself as straight, in light of the dominant discourse of our culture and the history of the use of that term, carries with it the implication that 'I am normal' (whereas others are not), 'I am sorted' (whereas others are not), 'I have got it right'.

And I'm not, no I'm not, and I haven't.

I am not straight. Nor, I would suggest, is any Christian I know.

My sexuality has a brokenness to it, a part of that going back to childhood, a lot of that discovered or accumulated along the way. My sexuality contains veins of selfishness, of wilfulness, of the capacity to hurt another. When I bring my sexuality out of the dark and into the light of God's presence these things become apparent, alongside the capacity to give and receive delight, to make love... And by the grace of God, who is transforming me into the likeness of Christ, I am (being) made a new creation (sanctified).

Not straight. Broken - but being restored - like all my brothers and sisters in Christ.

That has to be the starting place for any discussion. I will not claim to possess a superior sexuality to any of my brothers or sisters - I will not speak with them under the illusion that they are broken and I am not. And I will trust that the Lord can heal and transform them as he is healing and transforming me.

Now the difficult part - because what I am about to say may sound as though it contradicts all that has gone before. Believe me, I hope and pray that it doesn't.

I believe that to hear the word of God, the safest and best place to stand is within scripture (with all the care for context and literary form and openness to the Holy Spirit which must accompany that).

And as I do so, I have to say that boundaries are set for my sexuality - I do not have unlimited freedom in its expression. There are boundaries which all of us, without exception, with all the varying degrees of fluidity in our sexuality, find difficult at different times and in different ways. (Maybe not now, but in the past or in the future.)

And one of those boundaries is this - and there seems to be no way around this - that the given place for sexual expression at its fullest is within a lifelong marriage partnership between a man and a woman.

But I think that those who share this viewpoint should cease to pretend that any of us find this easy. (Such pretence has caused untold damage in the church.) If none of us are straight, if all of us are broken, then how could we?

To pretend otherwise is not only to do an injustice to my brothers and sisters who discover within themselves a sexual desire for the same sex, it is to do an injustice to those who never have (and maybe never will) discover a marriage partner, to those whose wife or husband is unable to have full sexual relations due to illness or disability, to the bereaved aching for the touch of their beloved, to the teenager whose sexual desire seems to consume their every waking thought, to the abused for whom sexual contact reawakens nightmares, to those called by the Lord to serve him in ways that actively prevent any hope of marriage - and to many others besides.

So, no pretence that this is easy, no pretence that this is something with which we can live without the help and support of the body of Christ, no pretence that any of us are straight.

Connecting the Christian Faith with Children

2006-11-30T14:06:00.000Z

From 1st January 2007 I will be spending three days a month on a research project for the Yokshire Baptist Association and the Baptist Union of Great Britain: Connecting the Christian Faith with Children. (Many thanks to the people of Trinity Church, Rawdon, who are willing to second me to the YBA for that time.)

The whole subject fascinates me. I'm not sure we often do a very good job at connecting with the children in our churches. I'm looking forward to some sustained thinking about how we can improve. But here are some initial thoughts ...

The whole culture of our churches - even the layout of seats/pews and lectern/pulpit - suggests that the primary activity of worship is listening and learning. The fact that we send our children out to Sunday School 'classes' with others their age reinforces that. But is learning really what worship is all about? Perhaps we should be doing other things in church? If so, what? Perhaps the children's parents could be encouraged to do the 'teaching about God' stuff?

What about visitors to our churches? In what other walk of life would it be considered 'welcoming' to separate the children from the parents and send them off with a total stranger for the duration of the service (even if the 'stranger' has been CRB-checked)?

In a society where families increasingly see very little of each other during the week, does the church not have a responsibility to be providing oportunities for families to worship together.

Let me know what you think. I'll keep blogging my thoughts as I get them (although I don't officially start thinking until 2007)!

What's my theological worldview?

2006-11-25T15:14:00.000Z

Thanks to http://hopefulamphibian.blogs.com/ I took this theological worldview quiz (http://quizfarm.com/test.php?q_id=43870). I've taken it before, and I note that I'm now slightly less fundamentalist than I was. But I'm still worried by that 4%.

Here's my profile (not sure I agree with it all, though) ...

You scored as Emergent/Postmodern.

You are Emergent/Postmodern in your theology. You feel alienated from older forms of church, you don't think they connect to modern culture very well. No one knows the whole truth about God, and we have much to learn from each other, and so learning takes place in dialogue. Evangelism should take place in relationships rather than through crusades and altar-calls. People are interested in spirituality and want to ask questions, so the church should help them to do this.

Emergent/Postmodern ... 96%
Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan ... 79%
Neo orthodox ... 79%
Roman Catholic ... 50%
Modern Liberal ... 36%
Charismatic/Pentecostal ... 32%
Classical Liberal ... 29%
Reformed Evangelical ... 14%
Fundamentalist ... 4%

2006-11-24T16:52:00.000Z

I got an e-mail today from Julie, asking if I think an evangelical can be a universalist (could someone be an evangelical Christian and also believe that one day all people will be saved?), along with a link to an article on the generous orthodoxy website: http://www.generousorthodoxy.net/thinktank/2006/11/gregory_macdona.html

I sent her back this quotation (below) which has given me much cause to think. Go figure …

"To believe in God is to believe in the salvation of the world. The paradox of our time is that those who believe in God do not believe in the salvation of the world, and those who believe in the future of the world do not believe in God.
"Christians belive in 'the end of the world,' they expect the final catastrophe, the punishment of others.
"Atheists in their turn ... refuse to believe in God because Christians believe in Him and take no interest in the world ...
"Which is the more culpable ignorance?
"I often say to myself that, in our religion, God must feel very much alone: for is there anyone besides God who believes in the salvation of the world? God seeks among us sons and daughters who resemble Him enough, who love the world enough so that He could send them into the world to save it."
- Louis Every, In the Christian Spirit (Image, 1975)

Authentic Christianity

2006-11-20T20:41:00.000Z

Heathrow check-in worker Nadia Eweida has lost her appeal against British Airways. She wants to wear a cross outside her uniform as an expression of her faith; her bosses object.

So what is all this about? Can wearing a cross (brooch? necklace? badge?) seriously be considered an authentic expression of the Christian faith? When was it that Christ's followers began wearing tiny model instruments of torture around their necks? Where was it commanded by our Lord?

I've just found a great quote on the subject by Austen Ivereigh, a Catholic writer and journalist: "There are a lot of ways to demonstrate your faith. The true Christian witness is the love you show people that makes people wonder where you got that from, and you can tell them. A crucifix has become a fashion item worn by rap artists."

Absolutely!! Surely, a person's lifestyle marks them as a Christian, not the jewellery they wear?

Towards a Greener Church

2006-11-16T08:41:00.000Z

Andy Goodliffe's church have been discussing ways in which they can help the church take more responsibility for the ways in which they use energy and dispose of waste. They came up with 10 initial proposals for the church:

1. The church to work towards becoming an eco-congregation

2. The church to explore spray-on double glazing for windows of church buildings as a form of insulation. I didn't know about this, but apparently its fairly cheap and sounds useful for churches where its difficult to double-glaze.

3. The church to organise a list of those people within the congregation who grow their food. The idea here is can find ways of encouraging more people to grow food in their gardens and share it among the congregation.

4. The church to ensure that all light bulbs where possible are low-energy.

5. The church to recycle all paper it produces and has recycling bins in the church office and the main church building. This to include plastic bottles (i.e. milk bottles) and any cardboard packaging.

6. The church to encourage small groups to be collection points for those who are unable to recycle their waste – cardboard packaging, paper, plastic bottles, glass, tins/cans, etc.

7. The church to produce meeting agendas on A5 paper where possible. Often there is no need to waste a whole A4 page.

8. The church to encourage Twinklers (their church toddler group) to only use bio-degradable emergency nappies.

9. The church to have a ‘Green’ tip of the week in the weekly notices.

10. The church to only use recycled toilet roll and environmentally friendly cleaning products (e.g. the Ecover range).

Thomas' Parents' Consultation Evening

2006-11-14T20:33:00.000Z

Claire, Thomas and I went up to his school this evening for his first Year 3 Parents' Consultation Evening. He seems to be doing very well indeed, and his teacher has entered his name on the 'Gifted and Talented' register for ... R.E.! It must run in the family (or not, as the case may be)! Well done, Thomas.

Ecological Responsibilities

2006-11-12T09:24:00.000Z

Steph said:

"Hi Marcus, I am enjoying reading your posts and the debates around the various issues. When you say 'ecological responsibilities' do you mean our individual responsibilities for not buying apples with more air miles than Richard Branson when there are gorgeous UK apples? Or driving when we could walk? Going to Mozzers [Morrisons Supermarket] instead of using the local shops selling local produce? Not boiling more water than we need? Using a water butt? Composting? OR do you mean the 'church' ensuring it's energy efficient, not serving food that 'unsound' at functions, recycling? Or all of the above?"

The answer is, of course, "All of the above." Not sure how we do it, though! Or how we persuade others to do it. One problem is that, for those on low wages, using local shops rather than the 'cheap' supermarkets is just not an option. (And those £4.00 jeans from Asda are a bargain compared to the £200.00 pair I was given (I had to make it clear I DID NOT pay that much myself) in Los Angeles.) How can we prevent ecological responsibility becoming just the preserve of the rich?

Advent Card

2006-11-10T16:12:00.000Z

I think we'll use this image on the Christmas cards we deliver to the area. Thanks Ben (http://benbell.typepad.com/benbell/2006/11/advent.html).

2006-11-09T19:55:00.000Z

Trinity Church's website is here. (I'm playing with the Html editing stuff!)

A Parable: The Cruise Liner

2006-11-09T19:40:00.000Z

In reponse to the 'Re-Imagining Church' day last Saturday, one of Trinity's members (Frank Lyden) has written this story:

The Cruise Liner

Once, a long time ago, there was a magnificent cruise liner. Everyone who saw it was impressed by how big, strong and modern it looked. People longed for the chance to board the ship, and were excited when those in charge announced that it was going on a long journey to a new and exciting place, and that anyone who wanted to come on board was welcome.

Thousands upon thousands came, and all were welcomed. There was room for everybody, although there were some difficulties with complaints from certain travellers about noisy neighbours, or people who behaved in ways that they felt were inappropriate. However with a little bit of re-arranging, and the designation of certain parts of the ship as “quiet” or “noisy”, everyone lived in relative comfort, and for the most part were at least civil with each other.

The Captain gathered everybody together and told them that they were all travellers on a long journey. He knew the way to go, had checked the co-ordinates and had set the course. It would take a long time, but so long as the ship did not waiver from that course, everyone would get to their final destination, which he had heard was beyond their wildest dreams.

For a long time the journey went well. The different groups of passengers generally kept apart, doing their own thing in their own way. However once a week they gathered together to have a banquet and a ball. On these occasions popular songs were played, everyone learnt the words and sang along. During the banquet the Captain would stand up and remind everyone of the course he had plotted, and that by sticking to this course they were getting closer every day to their destination.

However, as time went on disagreements began to arise. Some of the travellers from the lower deck tried to introduce some new songs, and even suggested that instead of the ship’s orchestra, they might use their accordion to accompany the singing. This was roundly condemned by the other travellers, who insisted that everyone knew the songs they had always sung, and they were a way of remembering the land they had come from. When the lower deckers realised that they could not win, they asked the Captain if they could take one of the lifeboats and set sail on their own. He agreed, thinking they were troublemakers. They left, setting their own course, but telling the Captain that they hoped to arrive at the same destination.

The journey went well for a while, until one day one of the crew posted as a look out reported that there was a large object ahead, right on the course they were heading on. Everyone gathered to discuss the problem. Several people suggested that the Captain should alter his course to bypass this obstacle, but he insisted that once a course had been set it could not be altered. A number of travellers decided to abandon the ship, taking life rafts, feeling that they could find a different way through the difficulties ahead, and still arrive at the final destination.

At the banquet that night the room was only half full, but the songs were sung, and the Captain read out his usual message, and confirmed that nothing would change.

The following day the obstacle was much closer. Many people, including some of the crew, came to the Captain to ask if there was maybe a different way of achieving their aim. They could see no way of continuing if they carried on in the same way. The Captain accused them of lacking faith in him and the magnificent ship they were travelling in. The travellers looked at the ship, and realised that though it had been just what they needed when they set out, now if they were to complete their journey something very different was necessary. They took some of the best and most useful parts of the ship, those they felt would help them on the journey, and built a new craft. It still had something about it that told you it was a boat, but it looked very different from the cruise liner. So they cast off and began to steer and row their own course, aiming for the final destination that the Captain had told them so much about.

At the banquet the captain was amazed to see just a few travellers left. He could not understand why the others were not there any more. After all, everyone had always enjoyed these banquets, and nothing had changed. So they bravely sang the usual songs, though it was more difficult with hardly any musicians or singers, and the Captain read out the course, and reminded them that once a course is set it must never be changed.

The next morning the obstacle was very close. The remaining travellers spoke to the Captain, and he confirmed his intention to plough straight on. He insisted that the ship had always sailed in this direction, and it had got them this far. He said that if people really believed in the ship they would not doubt the course it had sailed on since it was built. When he had said that a number of travellers decided they would rather take there chance swimming, and jumped overboard.

That night at the banquet the Captain was alone. He sung the songs, and read out the course, and reminded himself that it must never be altered.

The following morning the ship struck the iceberg and the Captain went down with his ship, still holding the wheel firmly on the course he had always followed.

The other travellers reached their destination safely.

Negotiables / Non-Negotiables in Church

2006-11-08T09:22:00.000Z

I (and 6 others from Trinity) attended a day conference this weekend titled ‘Re-Imagining Church’. Very stimulating indeed. We spent some time asking about negotiables / non-negotiables in church, and there were a variety of opinions and perspectives.

What about a church name? Membership? Evangelism? Prayer? Preaching? Baptism? Communion? A building? Sunday services? Ecological responsibility (that stopped us in our tracks!)? Equality? Scripture? All ages?

Thanks to Jonny Baker (http://jonnybaker.blogs.com/jonnybaker/) for this in a similar vein:

can we imagine...church beyond gathering?
church beyond once a week?
church as always on connectivity to christ and one another?
church where community is the content?
theology and resources of church being open source?
church valuing the wisdom of the crowd rather than the knowledge of the expert?
our church/spirituality being easily found by seekers because we tag it that way?
an ethos of low control and collaboration?
an economy of gift?
church as spaces for creative production and self publishing?
church as providers of resources for spiritual seekers and tourists?

Thanks also to David Fitch (http://www.reclaimingthemission.com/2006/11/warning-list-for-those-who-would-join.html) for this:

TEN THINGS ANYONE WHO JOINS IN A TWENTY FIRST CENTRUY MISSIONAL CHURCH PLANT SHOULD NOT EXPECT
1) Should not expect to regularly come to church for just one hour, get what you need for your own personal growth and development, and your kids’ needs, and then leave til next Sunday … 2) Should not expect that Jesus will fit in with every consumerist capitalist assumption, lifestyle, schedule or accoutrement you may have adopted before coming here. Expect to be freed from a lot of crap you will find out you never needed.
3) Should not expect to be anonymous, unknown or be able to disappear in this church Body. Expect to be known and loved, supported in a glorious journey.
4) Should not expect production style excellence all the time on Sunday worship gatherings. Expect organic, simple and authentic beauty.
5) Should not expect a raucous "light out" youth program that entertains the teenagers, puts on a show that gets the kids "pumped up," all without parental involvement …
6) Should not expect to always "feel good,"or ecstatic on Sunday mornings. Expect that there will ALSO be times of confession, lament, self-examination and just plain silence.
7) Should not expect a lot of sermons that promise you God will prosper you with "the life you've always wanted" if you’ll just believe Him … Expect sustenance for the journey.
8) Should not expect rapid growth whereby we grow this church from 10 to a thousand in three years. Expect slower organic inefficient growth that engages people’s lives where they are at and sees troubled people who would have nothing to do with the gospel marvelously saved.
9) Should not expect all the meetings to happen in a church building. Expect a lot of the gatherings will be in homes, or sites of mission.
10) Should not expect arguments over style of music, color of carpet, or even doctrinal issues … Expect mission to drive the conversation.
OH, AND BY THE WAY: Should not expect that community comes to you! I am sorry but true community in Christ will take some "effort"and a reshuffling of priorities for both you and your kids. .. assuming you are a follower of Christ (this message is not for strangers to the gospel) you must learn that the answer to all those things is to enter into the practices of "being the Body" in Christ, including sitting, eating, sharing and praying together.

Do you know any preachers like this? (It's a great joke!)

2006-11-07T22:31:00.000Z

Two little boys, aged 8 and 10, were excessively mischievous. They were always getting into trouble and their parents knew all about it. If any mischief occurs in their town, the two boys are probably involved. The boys' mother heard that a preacher in town had been successful in disciplining children, so she asked if he would speak with her boys. The preacher agreed, but he asked to see them individually. So the mother sent the 8 year old first, in the morning, with the older boy to see the preacher in the afternoon.

The preacher, a huge man with a booming voice, sat the younger boy down and asked him sternly, "Do you know where God is, son?" The boy's mouth dropped open, but he made no response, sitting there wide-eyed with his mouth hanging open. So the preacher repeated the question in an even sterner tone, "Where is God?!" Again, the boy made no attempt to answer. The preacher raised his voice even more and shook his finger in the boy's face and bellowed, "Where is God?!"

The boy screamed and bolted from the room, ran directly home and dove into his closet, slamming the door behind him.When his older brother found him in the closet, he asked, "What happened?" The younger brother, gasping for breath, replied, "We are in BIG trouble this time ... (I just LOVE reading the next line again and again) ... GOD is missing, and they think we did it !"

So what makes church church?

2006-11-02T17:08:00.000Z

I have already argued (below) that we in the established / inherited churches can learn much from the Emerging Church movement about how to be Faithful, Creative, Missional Communities. But I wonder what whether there are certain things about church that are non-negotiable – things that we must be careful not to lose or change no matter how much we contextualise or reach out in mission?

One of the books I read during my sabbatical (John E. Colwell, Promise and Presence: An Exploration of Sacramental Theology) particularly challenged me in this regard. The amazon.co.uk ‘editorial review’ describes John’s book like this:

“A ground-breaking, evangelical sacramentalist approach to the seven sacraments …

Following an introduction that briefly reviews the development of sacramental theology the book begins with an exploration of God’s Triune identity and the implications of this doctrine for the gracious and mediated nature of God’s relatedness with the world …

A central section follows in which a doctrine of the Church and a doctrine of Scripture are expounded in response to this understanding of the gracious and mediated nature of God’s relatedness. Both Church and Scripture are identified as conferring context, definition, and validity on all other sacramental events …

The final section reconsiders the seven Sacraments of the Catholic tradition in the light of an understanding of sacramentality developed in the first two sections of the book. The Sacraments are discussed from a Baptist perspective but with a committed ecumenical intent and an underlying awareness of the contemporary British and North American context within which the Church exists and Scripture is heard.”

I think I’m right in saying that John describes a sacrament as something (an event, ritual, etc.) through which God has promised to be present in a special way. In the second section of the book, he sets out how both the church and God’s Word are ‘sacramental’: certainly I don’t hear any EC groups denying the central place of Scripture. Perhaps more controversially, though, John’s third section deals with the seven ‘traditional’ sacraments: baptism, confirmation, Eucharist (Communion or the Lord’s Supper), penance (or cleansing), healing, ministry and marriage.

If God has promised to be present of at work in and/or through these things, then do they constitute a set of ‘non-negotiables’ for any and all churches? Or has anyone got a different list?

I’d love to know what folk out there think!!