Kids

Much concern has been expressed lately about the serious haemorrhage of young people from the Church of England over the past decade – and rightly so – for if the Church of God is actually the Family of God it professes to be, its population of predominantly grandparents has turned it into the merest caricature of what a complete family is meant to be.  No parish congregation can call itself a family without the young and no parish church is following Jesus if it prevents the young from coming to Jesus.  OK, nobody is standing by the west door telling the kids to keep out, but if they do manage to bite the bullet and venture into this alien building, is there much to engage them or whet their appetites for more?
 
Many reasons have been put forward to account for this catastrophe.  Space forbids us to deal with more than just a few.  One is a superficial problem – the strangeness of the language of worship to the average youngster.  Go to any League football match and you will discover little knots of 12/14 year olds busily using a bewildering variety of technical terms to analyse what players are doing on the pitch and sometimes comparing it to their own performances on the school playing field.  All this is happening because someone – probably an older family member – has introduced them to the game at a young age and they have become hooked.
 
We have to face the unpalatable fact that most church services are merely a performance by a single person, generally the vicar, or by the altar party, headed by the vicar.  In Evangelical churches the majority merely sit and listen, whereas in Catholic churches the majority just sit and watch.  The Evangelicals seriously need to heighten their use of the visual and the Catholics seriously need to do a lot more listening to the Word.  But in both cases, they need to involve the young.  Evangelicals have tried to do this by getting them to read a lesson or an epistle, but this is rarely a success as they are not confident in public speaking and often too quiet to be heard, even if they don’t stumble over the longer words or the nastier Hebrew names!
 
Catholics tend to fare better here.  The servers have a manageable job to do, as does the crucifer, but because their contribution is visual rather than verbal, it is open to all, rather than to just the intelligent or the articulate.  The frequent mistake here is that the same youngsters do their job week in, week out, whereas the aim should be to involve more youngsters and let them all have a crack at the whip.  This gives children a chance to do more listening, thinking and praying on their Sundays off.
 
A further problem arises with the liturgy.  Catholic ceremonial does not allow for helping the unfamiliar with such unholy things as page numbers and neither wing of the Church seems to allow for the need to pause periodically to explain to the uninitiated what we are saying and doing and why we do it.  This can all be done perfectly well without spoiling the unity and the movement of the service, but it is actually as much part of the teaching function as is the sermon.  And talking of sermons, why are so many forgetting the wonderful teaching methods of Jesus, where he uses the Parables, those familiar images and experiences of the world around Him to make His profoundest statements about the gracious character of God and how He operates in individual lives?
 
One final point needs to be made about church schools.  In the North, a large number of parishes enjoy this luxury, although it is far less frequent in the South.  They offer the simplest and most direct method of engaging with both the young and their parents and those parishes which use them creatively and imaginatively see far better results in recruiting and holding children and their parents within the church family.  There is a current obsession in some clergy circles with home-schooling their children.  Quite apart from the damaging psychological and social effects of cooping up children with their parents 24 hours a day, clergy families doing this are sending a sorry message to their parishes.  They may not realise it, but they are saying quite unmistakeably that they do not consider their parochial school a fit place for their children to attend, that its Christian members of staff do not deserve their support, that is is not worth their precious time to meet and talk with other parents at the school gates and that their own children must not be soiled by having other local children as their classmates.  Is there anything more stupid and more likely to cause ministerial suicide than this?
 
All this is not to substitute going to church for the Gospel.  At the end of the day we might get a surprisingly big attendance of children at our main service and yet miss out on seeing them accept Jesus as their Saviour and King and learn to live the Christian life in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Children, as much as adults, need to have a personal relationship with the Master if they are to have His help and security through time and into eternity.  That must indeed remain the aim of all our activity.  Yet it remains a sad fact that in this present godless society, they are hardly ever likely to hear this message except in church.