The situation of children in the Church has changed enormously during the last half century. Fifty years ago, it was common for Sunday School to be held in the afternoon, or at some other time than when the main services were taking place. There were no concessions to children attending church services: they either put up with the adult tedium, or stayed away.
Since then it has become much more normal for children's church activities (not even always called Sunday School) to take place at the same time as the main Sunday morning service. Children are usually in church with the adults for at least part of the service, and families are encouraged to attend together: no more sending the children off, so that the parents can enjoy a quiet snooze after lunch! Most churches have introduced some kind of service, monthly or more frequently, which is aimed at the whole family. It has generally been called the Family Service; but this all too often came to be thought of as the "children's service", and many older people opted out on the grounds that they didn't feel catered for, or they got little out of it. For this reason it has become more common to call these services All Age Worship, emphasising the point that they are meant to include adults as well as children, with the whole age range from 0 to 90 worshipping together and sharing their lives just like any human family.
All these developments have been very positive, helping us to rediscover the kind of inclusive household atmosphere that was a feature of the early Church. It is sometimes (well-meaningly) said that children are important because they are the future of the Church. But this is wide of the mark. We don't think of children rightly, unless we see them just as much as important members of the present-day Church. They are fellow-pilgrims with us adults, fellow-Christians who have a contribution to make, and who can often teach and bless adults just as much as we do them. After all, Jesus often held children up as role models for his adult followers: "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." (Mt. 18.3) He was not advocating the kind of infantile, childish immaturity which has sometimes been thought of as a proper part of simple believing. Surely it is childlike qualities such as wonder, curiosity, playfulness, concentration, and unswerving trust, that Jesus had in mind. These would make any of us better Christians.
At St Nicholas, we have a relatively small work with children and young teens, and are constantly trying to make it as high quality as we can. We have recently been exploring several new ideas and initiatives. One is the concept of "intergenerational church", which goes far beyond trying to make our worship suitable for all ages together, to include all the church's activities. If we want to worship together because we are one family, then we naturally want to include all ages in as many of our other activities as we can, whether that be a social event, study, decision-making, or outreach. The expectation should be that everything we do includes every age group in the church, unless there are reasons why it's essential not to.
The second area is that of admitting children to Holy Communion before Confirmation. This is already practised in many parishes in this diocese and elsewhere in Britain and the world, and is another way of making the congregation fully inclusive. Why should any baptised person be excluded from the Lord's table, simply because they are too young to have been confirmed? If baptism is complete initiation into the Church, as we believe it is, there is no convincing theological reason for children not to receive. So we have embarked on the process of reflection and discussion, to decide if we are willing to implement the diocesan guidelines for preparing younger children, and allowing them to receive Communion.
Our hope is that these and other developments will help us to further enhance the place of children in our church. A recent UNICEF report on the well-being of children in rich countries placed the United Kingdom bottom of the 21 countries it considered. This is a shameful indictment not so much of our Government, as of a whole society in which child poverty, broken marriages and disrupted family life, undervaluing of education, competitive materialism and long working hours, have led to a situation in which the well-being of children is seriously undermined. As a church, we want to provide a place where children can feel safe and know that they matter, are valued for who they are, and have a contribution of their own to make to the community. We want to be a place where families can learn and model good practice for family living and the nurture of children, and where all the generations are working together to support each other in this project.
Published in the Marston Times, March 2007