Since being joined to the church, I have always struggled with the notion of children being ‘sent out’ of the service. I hear the rhetoric of church as ‘family’ and so often see this translated as ‘the men’ going off to do their thing, ‘the women’ going off to do their thing, and ‘the children’ going off to do their thing. Lots of groups ‘doing their thing’; but not much family. It’s all a bit like a ‘get your own lunch today’ day that we sometimes have at our place … and, as convenient as it sometimes is, and as it means that I usually get to eat what I want to eat (when I want to eat it), I don’t like it one bit!

Having a toddler of my own has not changed my mind about kids in church one bit. Sure, it’s not always the most convenient way to pray while someone is pulling off your glasses and hitting you in the head with a Bible, but I want to publically worship with my daughter and with the other kids, not have them shoved out to the back hall while ‘we’ do the real ‘church stuff’. Not only are these young people missing out on worshipping with – and learning from – us adults, but we are missing out on worshipping with – and learning from – our kids.

Of course, we’re all familiar with the old arguments that kids learn differently, that their attention spans are less – and these are important considerations that I don’t want to undermine – but what I (and too often they) really hear is ‘they’re a distraction’, and ‘we can’t be bothered thinking of a way of doing church that is relevant to non-adults, or at least to non-adults different from ‘us’.

So it is that I was excited to come across the following words from FW Boreham, cited by Geoff Pound (and reprinted here with his permission):

I am told that, away beyond the Never-Never ranges [remote areas of Australian outback] there is a church from which the children are excluded before the sermon begins.

I wish my informant had not told me of its existence. I am not often troubled with nightmare, my supper being quite a frugal affair.

But just occasionally I find myself a victim of the terror by night. And when I am mercifully awakened, and asked why I am gasping so horribly and perspiring so freely. I have to confess that I was dreaming that I had somehow become the minister of that childless congregation.

As is usual after nightmare, I look round with a sense of inexpressible thankfulness on discovering that it was only a horrid dream. An appointment to such a charge would be to me a most fearsome and terrifying prospect. I could not trust myself.

In a way, I envy the man who can hold his own under such circumstances. His transcendent powers enable him to preserve his sturdy humanness of character, his charming simplicity of diction, his graphic picturesqueness of phrase, and his exquisite winsomeness of behaviour without the extraneous assistance which the children render to some of us.

But I could not do it. I should go all to pieces. And so, when I dream that I have entered a pulpit from which I can survey no roguish young faces and mischievous wide-open eyes, I fancy I am ruined and undone. I watch with consternation as the little people file out during the hymn before the sermon, and I know that the sermon is doomed. The children in the congregation are my salvation. – FW Boreham, ‘Pity My Simplicity!’ Mushrooms on the Moor (London: Charles H Kelly, 1915), 151-152.

If the NT is anything of a reliable witness, it is clear that kids loved being with Jesus. What does this tell us about Jesus? What ought this tell us about the way that the church (the body of which he is head) ought to be?

On Good Friday this year, I took my daughter to a service at the Baptist Church in St Andrews. Many things struck me at that service. Here’s three of them: (i) The worship leader made an enormous effort to help ‘all’ those at the service to worship God in a way that was meaningful to them; (ii) The welcome of children was a fantastic and practical reflection of the stained-glassed window above the communion table that represented Jesus welcoming children; and (iii) Sitting on a pew surrounded by the wriggles and voices of children and their praise, I worshipped God with them.

Three further notes:

1. I am not necessarily advocating the cessation of Sunday Schools.

2. Perhaps the argument that children are better served by the Christian family via some more age-appropriate teaching time (during the sermon, for example) is the most practical (and convenient) compromise, but is it really the best option? I don’t know. Perhaps it is. If so, how can churches better communicate to young people that this service to them is an act of love and an affirmation of their value to the community, and to God? Perhaps this is the real issue behind this post.

3. My wife is convinced that my theological idealisms do not translate into the ‘real world’. She may be right! She usually is!