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There’s a Friend for little children
In 2009, the Year of the Child, Julia McGuinness asks how the Church of England is seeking to encourage spirituality among the very young
 Nurturing spirituality: the challenge to churches is not to patronise children’s expressions of prayer, praise and worship, or relating to the Bible, say diocesan advisers |
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EVER SINCE Charles Wesley wrote children’s hymns 200 years ago, the Church has been struggling to get its children’s ministry right, says Irene Smale, the Children’s Adviser for Chichester diocese. This year brings a chance to refocus on the task: it is the 30th anniversary of the first UN International Year of the Child. The Church of England is using the occasion as an opportunity to celebrate children’s contribution to church life, reaffirm their priority on the agenda, and review and renew its children’s work as a whole. Some dioceses are taking up the challenge by organising a number of events, from cathedral celebrations to children’s consultations. In July, Chichester diocese will host the conference “Changing Childhood”, in collaboration with the University of Chichester and the Children’s Society. Mrs Smale, who is organising the conference, says that things have changed during her 36 years in children’s work. “I started out in a scruffy church hall, with no heating, and wooden benches. There was very little decent teaching material around. Nowadays, there is a wide range of bright publications — though you need to be discerning about the underlying theology and not take everything at face value.” Effective children’s work is about more than colourful resources. Its context is changing as the nature of childhood in society shifts. The Children’s Society’s report A Good Childhood, published in February, notes the impact of the UK’s growing individualism and declining values on today’s children. The Society is currently developing plans to present its findings to parishes, and help them assess how to engage children more effectively in their churches and communities. It hopes to have the scheme ready for July’s General Synod debate on childhood. The decline in children’s church attendance (down by four per cent in 2007) reflects the bigger picture of the rise of the secular Sunday. “Sunday is not a good day for children and church,” Mrs Smale says. “We are competing with all the other activities on offer, from football to drama.”Even for children who do attend church, continuity can be a problem: with a higher proportion of broken families, some may be away with their other parent on any given Sunday. Where both parents work during the week, they may be reluctant to be separated from their children again when the Sunday school goes out of the service. |
 | THE Revd Ruth Pyke, Priest-in-Charge at All Saints’, Caddington, is a children’s adviser in St Albans diocese and is on the Year of the Child steering group. She says that one effective church response has been to pioneer activities outside Sunday. She runs a Toddler Church and a Messy Church for older children midweek. Both events seek to be accessible to all families, and include worship as well as fun and games. “At Toddler Church we have a pared-down form of service. We ring the bell, light candles, have action songs, a Bible story, and interactive prayer. Amid all this, I find parents are beginning to come and share their concerns with me,” Ms Pyke says. Supporting parents in nurturing faith at home is becoming an increasingly important dimension of the Church’s care for children, as fewer young parents come from a Christian background or have any experience of church. |
| Breaking the Sunday mould raises some concerns, Ms Pyke says. “Church members ask me why families are not coming on a Sunday. I say ‘Because they come on a Thursday,’ but they find it hard to see that church can happen on a different day.”
For Helen Woodroffe, the diocesan children’s work adviser to parishes and cathedral education officer in St Edmundsbury & Ipswich, meeting children where they are — rather than where we would like them to be — means going into schools to build relationships.
The diocese has trained about 80 people in reflective storytelling. In primary schools, they go in to provide an hour’s storytelling, plus artwork, and a discussion linked to a theme suggested by the school.
The Church of England’s National Children’s Adviser, the Revd Mary Hawes, says that when children are in church on Sunday they are often treated as “Christians in waiting rather than disciples in training. We still tend to see them as needing to be taught and kept out of the way until they have learnt how to behave.”
Children may feel left out at a very basic level. Louis, aged nine, says he wants to change the church seating: “If it was like a cinema, with all the seats sloping up, then
I could always see what was going on.” Joe, aged seven, says: “Most of the time people read from the grown-ups’ Bible, and I don’t understand it. And I thinkwhen the children have toread, they don’t always understand what they are reading. If it was a children’s Bible, then everyone could understand.”
The chief executive ofthe Children’s Society Bob Reitemeier, says thatin the Society’s surveys “Children have told us consistently that they would like more inclusive activities in church, with things made child-friendly, interesting, and lively. It is also hard for them to feel part of a church culture where a crying child provokes a negative reaction.”
THE PICTURE is not all negative, however. When 14-year-old Catherine reached the crunch age of 11, what kept her coming — “apart from my parents dragging me to church” — was that “it was a nice family atmosphere. I was happy to be there.”
Catherine has recently joined her church’s all-age worship-planning team. She says she appreciates being part of the church’s ministry: “I don’t think there should be any age limit, as long as you have faith. Just because you are smaller or younger doesn’t mean you are not as faithful.”
Ms Hawes says there are many aspects of church in which children can participate. “My six-year-old goddaughter loves flower-arranging, and she is included on the church flower rota. If children are able to offer something to church life, then they will feel they belong.”
It is vital to take children’s nurture seriously. Ms Hawes says: “Craft activities can be a way of getting alongside children and giving them our time and attention, but we always need to think beyond what material we can use to keep them occupied on a Sunday morning to the theology underpinning our practice.”
Ten-year-old Hannah enjoys craft activities: “We have Creation Station once a month. We make really interesting things that I would never do otherwise. It suits most children.”
But, when she was 11, Catherine needed something more. “Sunday school felt a bit babyish. We just made things and did lots of colouring. After a while it gets boring. You don’t see the point, and it’s not explaining things.”
Catherine started staying in the service with her parents: “I had questions, but I was afraid to ask them, because they seemed a bit alien. They were things like, ‘Where is Christ and how do you find him?’ I listened to the sermons. I didn’t understand them all, but some questions were answered. I really wanted to have talks where we could interrupt with questions, and get some help in understanding things.”
Such a request can often push adults beyond their comfort zone. Ms Pyke says: “Adults get more uncomfortable about things than children. But if a child picks up that you do not take them seriously, or are embarrassed by their commitment to Jesus, it will go with them into adult life.”
FOSTERING a church culture of lifelong learning and exploring faith may help. Ms Woodroffe says that “adults often want to provide the right answer. But children need more opportunities to share their thoughts, ask questions, and learn to think for themselves. This can be frightening for those of us still struggling with our own doubts and questions.”
Taking children’s nurture seriously also means a commitment to resourcing the work. Mrs Smale says: “We want to offer our children excellence, but church budgets often allocate more to adults. When children’s work is well-resourced, its leaders feel valued, and not just as though they are babysitters.”
Raising the children’s-work profile needs to start at theological college, Ms Hawes says. More training provision is needed in the area of children’s spirituality and how their faith is nurtured. When ordained leadership becomes more child-aware, resourcing children’s work may become a higher parish priority.
Expecting its leaders to undertake training, and enabling them to do so is vital. Ms Hawes laments a situation where “clergy have two to three years’ training before going into a parish; yet we hand over our children’s nurture to volunteers simply because they are good at craft and have been CRB-checked.”
The Bible Reading Fellowship’s Core Skills for Children’s Work Course, developed by the Consultative Group on Ministry among Children, is increasingly used around the dioceses. Ms Hawes says that the six-module course, which includes leadership skills, pastoral awareness, and child development, provides an effective grounding for nurturing children in church. “Ideas for crafts and issues around keeping control are really secondary issues.”
She also says that more child-centred models of working — such as Messy Church, helping non-churched families engage with church as a family activity; and Godly Play, opening up Bible stories to children and allowing them to encounter meanings in their own way — have done much to raise the bar of children’s work.
The Child-Friendly Church Award Scheme, pioneered by Liverpool diocese, is another way in which churches can evaluate children’s experience of church and see where change is needed.
Some parishes are also taking on specialist children’s workers. A dedicated worker has the time that volunteers and clergy may lack to go into schools and build relationships with children. Full-time workers may also be able to focus, resource, and motivate a volunteer team, although their presence could send out the message that they are the only adults with something to offer children in church.
Ms Hawes says that “children’s nurture is primarily the responsibility of the family and the whole church — not simply contracted out to a hired professional.”
THERE SEEMS to be a general consensus among children’s advisers that inter-generational worship rather than having separate activities forms an essential part of uniting the church body. In practice, creating such worship is a tall order.
Louis says: “All-age services are boring. I don’t like having to sit around for an hour.” But for Anna, aged 12: “All-age services seem to be designed for tiddlers. I think they should have a quiz that doesn’t just have easy questions. There should be some more difficult ones for older children.”
But excellent materials, exciting activities, and well-equipped leaders can only go so far.
Dr Rebecca Nye, a consultant for Godly Play, says that what is ultimately needed is a deeper attunement to children’s spirituality. “We run around in circles trying to address practical things, but we don’t think hard enough about the underlying issues. We need to develop a grounded, pastoral theology of childhood and what it means.”
When Dr Nye conducted research into children’s spirituality, it was eye-opening, she says. “I was staggered by the richness and complexity of ordinary children’s lives. Children’s spirituality has both a powerful and erratic nature. One minute they are having profound, sacred experiences, and the next they are thinking about custard.”
One such example would be the child who said: “When I’m out playing I sometimes hear my name being called. I look round, but Mum and Dad haven’t said anything. I think it’s God speaking in the back of my head. It’s always the same voice, but sometimes it has a different tone.”
Dr Nye says that children tend not to link such experiences with organised religion. “When we asked whether they could talk about such things in church, RE, or school worship, they thought it hilarious. They could not imagine talking in this way to the man from church who came in to take assembly with jokes and puppets.”
Long-term vision, rather than short-term targets, is key, she says. “We can be too focused on the immediate product: would Jesus have given hand-outs? What we do with children may surface when they’re out in the park later, or in their thoughts in a year’s time.”
Ms Woodroffe says that there are three things that children on school trips to St Edmundsbury Cathedral regularly say they appreciate: “They like lighting candles. They like the quiet and the chance to think and be. And they like the fact that adults listen to them. We need to bring our children into the midst, as Jesus did, and allow them to have a voice.”
For Dr Nye, the most encouraging aspect of running Godly Play training is how adults’ thinking about children is being challenged and changed. “Being seen as a child-friendly church is not always the same as being a child-spirituality-friendly church. We need to ensure that children can say things without feeling they will be put on the spot in a ‘show-and-tell’. Otherwise they will learn that it is not safe to open up in church.
“Nurturing children’s faith is not just about what adults do to them. Everyone has something to bring to the process. Children can draw adult’s faith into a greater sense of mystery and wonder.”
Catherine agrees: “Never underestimate the power of children. We can be just as incredible as adults.”
For “Changing Childhood” conference details, visit www.yesonthenet.org.uk/events/yearOfTheChild. For the Child-Friendly Church Award Scheme visit www.liverpool.anglican.org and follow “Supporting Parishes” to “Children and Young People”.
www.yearofthechild2009.org.uk
www.coreskillsforchurches.com
www.messychurch.org.uk
www.godlyplay.org.uk |
