EVERY church desires to welcome children, to incorporate and nurture them, and to see them grow in faith. But many churches feel that they’ve neither the resources nor the volunteers to administer that. Children’s ministry generally is a chicken or egg situation: it’s not possible to construct a children’s ministry with no children coming to church, but plainly they are going to never come unless there’s already one in place. How do smaller, poorer, or more rural churches welcome the youngsters who may or may not turn up?
When I wrote the Gladstone the Gargoyle books, I had just such a church as that in mind: a village church with a tiny congregation, from which the last child had just moved away. As I developed the series, I realised that I used to be putting the church experiences of my very own childhood into words, while imagining a way forward within the village setting where we lived and ministered on the time.
Children’s ministry doesn’t necessarily begin by setting aside a special space for youngsters. Instead, a church of any size can function in such a way that there’s at all times a welcome for youngsters, whether the youngsters are there or not. Over the years, spent mainly in rural settings, I even have found 4 areas of focus useful. (They all begin with S. I can’t help it — I’m a cradle Anglican.) The excellent news is that every one churches, to some extent, already cover these areas; it’s only a case of noticing them, and bringing some which will have fallen into the background to the fore.
FIRST, we invite children right into a church stuffed with stories. Everything we do is a story — from the form of the service and the reading of the Gospel, to the explanation we’re all there in the primary place — and kids love stories. Make sure that the Bible is read with expression and interest. A temporary introduction and a word or phrase to listen out for are sometimes all that is required to incorporate children, and to guide them through a trickier passage. Short explanations of what we’re about to say, and why, can’t only show children the story-shape of the service, but can satisfy the unspoken questions of the adults. Every time we are saying a creed, we tell the gospel story; a eucharistic prayer incorporates an account of the Last Supper. All it takes to note it’s a switch from a prayer voice right into a storytelling voice: an invite to pay special attention.
Second, we sing together. Visiting adults may find church unusual due to that, but children won’t: we share the habit with schools and nurseries. There is nothing like a tune for getting stuck in your head. I would struggle to recite the creed without missing anything, but I could sing it to you — to the setting I knew as a baby. We don’t have to sing children’s songs, and even modern songs, to be welcoming to children. Metrical hymns, especially those with refrains, are musically easier to follow than newer songs with unpredictable melodies and bridges. Whatever the popular musical type of the church, though, don’t be afraid of wealthy lyrics that contain scripture and theology. Children usually are not the one ones to realize familiarity before understanding — sometimes long before: even now, a line from a hymn will pop unbidden into my head and contain just the proper phrase to suit the moment, suggesting itself as a prayer or an encouragement.
CHURCH invites children to affix a rhythm of seasons: fast and feast, expectation and arrival, preparation and celebration. Not every church follows the minutiae of the church 12 months, but even celebrating the predominant festivals makes the gospel into an annual journey. This is where churches and schools can find a crucial link: children still study Christian festivals as a part of their RE syllabus, and schools often welcome input from the local church.
Communicating the seasons individually just isn’t similar to offering the chance to live them one after the opposite. Children experience seasons deeply; each makes up an extended proportion of their lives than of ours, and each celebration is more eagerly anticipated. We can invite them to share the way in which that the sensations, sights, food — even the weather — of every season turns our minds towards a certain a part of the Christian story. Every change in season is a chance, not necessarily to placed on special events for outreach, but simply to ask children and their parents into what the church is already celebrating and experiencing together. Festivals usually are not about finding a latest strategy to do it each time, but about doing the identical thing time and again, until the sight of a daffodil is synonymous with thoughts of an empty tomb.
MY GLADSTONE books centre around a gargoyle because all this stuff come together within the stones of a conventional church constructing, built to inform the story of centuries of Christian life and worship. Old buildings are so often seen as a hindrance that we miss what a present it could be to have an area designed for worship, with items and decoration that excite curiosity, invite questions, and depict stories. In a more recent space, it’s price considering methods to echo that sense of every thing having its purpose and its place in pointing us towards God.
Moving through each season across three books, Gladstone the Gargoyle speaks in snippets of scripture and song, having learned all his language within the church; but, most significantly, he is a component of the church himself — literally a living stone. He invites the youngsters within the books to search out their very own places among the many other living stones of their community, seeing them as such a vital a part of the church that it will disintegrate without them. If we, as an entire church family, can share that belief in regards to the vital importance of youngsters in church, then they are going to at all times feel welcome.
Amy Scott Robinson is a author, performance storyteller, and ventriloquist. Her books include The Gladstone Tales, published by Kevin Mayhew
