The cute husband and I are organizing a social justice/art fusion event at River Heights Vineyard on June 4th (yes, that was a plug), and we’d like to the theme of the evening to be children. We’ll talk about the child sponsorship through World Vision and Source Ministries’ B448 campaign, which serves homeless youth in the cities. In planning this event, the issue of whether kids would be welcome at the event has come up, which has brought up some thoughts on what happens with kids at church.
Our church and the Vineyard in general has been focusing on children ever since Wes Stafford made everybody cry at the national conference last year. To blatantly steal some stats from Mr. Stafford’s talk, something like 85% of Christians accept Jesus before they turn 18, and something like 11% of church resources are targeted at children. I’ve worked in church nurseries since I was roughly 11 years old, and I have noticed the following. 1) children’s programs at church are constantly short of volunteers. 2) working in the children’s program is commonly misconstrued (by leaders and volunteers) as baby-sitting. 3) it is considered absolutely essential that all the children be rounded up in a separate room with a sound barrier before “church” can happen.
As you might have picked up by my tone at this point, I do not like this attitude towards kids. In my oh-so-humble opinion kids are people, and when people come to our church we should at least try to include them in what we’re doing. No one needs to say (although I’m about to anyway) that the rate at which people leave the church as soon as they’re old enough to have the option is shocking. This alone should tell us that we’re doing something wrong with our kids. As we become increasingly aware that including people unlike ourselves in church activities is very difficult, can be uncomfortable for the regulars, and requires a certain amount of flexibility and creativity, I would like these same concepts to be opened up to how we treat our children in church.
Including kids in “real” or “big” church faces the following obstacles. 1) Kids can be noisy, and therefore distracting to grown-ups. 2) Kids have limited vocabularies and attention spans 3) Adults can be very judgmental of parents with children who exhibit factors 1 and 2. These are real issues, and would require no small amount of patience and creativity to overcome. There would need to be buy-in from the congregation at large, because there will some extra noise and discomfort while we figure out how to do this so it works. Which is exactly what is going to happen if we try to include anyone who isn’t just like us in what we do.
I would love to come up with something creative and awesome to do for our arts event that would include kids in some way that would be more edifying for everyone involved. I probably will not be able to do that before June 4th, but I’m glad that I’m at least thinking through how that might look. Because I think in the future, at least for stuff I plan, I might not want to consider not including a whole segment of our church an option anymore.
*Disclaimer: These thoughts are not directed at any one person or even any one organization. It is a problem I consider somewhat universal in the churches of the USA