EVERY church wants to welcome children, to include and nurture them, and to see them grow in faith. But many churches feel that they have neither the resources nor the volunteers to manage that. Children’s ministry can be a chicken or egg situation: it’s impossible to build a children’s ministry with no children coming to church, but it seems that they will never come unless there is already one in place. How do smaller, poorer, or more rural churches welcome the children 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 was putting the church experiences of my own childhood into words, while imagining a way forward in the village setting where we lived and ministered at the time.
Children’s ministry does not necessarily begin by setting aside a special space for children. Instead, a church of any size can function in such a way that there is always a welcome for children, whether the children are there or not. Over the years, spent mainly in rural settings, I have found four areas of focus useful. (They all begin with S. I can’t help it — I’m a cradle Anglican.) The good news is that all churches, to some extent, already cover these areas; it is just a case of noticing them, and bringing some that may have fallen into the background to the fore.
FIRST, we invite children into a church full of stories. Everything we do is a story — from the shape of the service and the reading of the Gospel, to the reason we are all there in the first place — and children love stories. Make sure that the Bible is read with expression and interest. A brief introduction and a word or phrase to listen out for are often all that is needed to include children, and to guide them through a trickier passage. Short explanations of what we are about to say, and why, can not only show children the story-shape of the service, but can satisfy the unspoken questions of the adults. Every time we say a creed, we tell the gospel story; a eucharistic prayer contains an account of the Last Supper. All it takes to notice it is a switch from a prayer voice into a storytelling voice: an invitation to pay special attention.
Second, we sing together. Visiting adults may find church unusual because of 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 might struggle to recite the creed without missing anything, but I could sing it to you — to the setting I knew as a child. We don’t need to sing children’s songs, or even modern songs, to be welcoming to children. Metrical hymns, especially the ones with refrains, are musically easier to follow than newer songs with unpredictable melodies and bridges. Whatever the preferred musical style of the church, though, don’t be afraid of rich lyrics that contain scripture and theology. Children are not the only ones to gain familiarity before understanding — sometimes long before: even now, a line from a hymn will pop unbidden into my head and contain just the right phrase to fit the moment, suggesting itself as a prayer or an encouragement.
CHURCH invites children to join a rhythm of seasons: fast and feast, expectation and arrival, preparation and celebration. Not every church follows the minutiae of the church year, but even celebrating the main festivals makes the gospel into an annual journey. This is where churches and schools can find an important link: children still study Christian festivals as part of their RE syllabus, and schools often welcome input from the local church.
Communicating the seasons individually is not the same as offering the opportunity to live them one after the other. Children experience seasons deeply; each one makes up a longer proportion of their lives than of ours, and every celebration is more eagerly anticipated. We can invite them to share the way that the sensations, sights, food — even the weather — of each season turns our minds towards a certain part of the Christian story. Every change in season is an opportunity, not necessarily to put on special events for outreach, but simply to invite children and their parents into what the church is already celebrating and experiencing together. Festivals are not about finding a new way to do it every time, but about doing the same thing over and over, until the sight of a daffodil is synonymous with thoughts of an empty tomb.
MY GLADSTONE books centre around a gargoyle because all these things come together in the stones of a traditional church building, built to tell the story of centuries of Christian life and worship. Old buildings are so often seen as a hindrance that we miss what a gift it can be to have a space designed for worship, with items and decoration that excite curiosity, invite questions, and depict stories. In a newer space, it’s worth considering how to echo that sense of everything 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 in the church; but, most importantly, he is part of the church himself — literally a living stone. He invites the children in the books to find their own places among the other living stones of their community, seeing them as such an essential part of the church that it would fall apart without them. If we, as a whole church family, can share that belief about the vital importance of children in church, then they will always feel welcome.
Amy Scott Robinson is a writer, performance storyteller, and ventriloquist. Her books include The Gladstone Tales, published by Kevin Mayhew
