While genuine conflicts do exist, and need working through with sensitivity, there is often a lack of welcome related to the presence of children: a child making minimal sounds — often related to what they see or hear in the service — is shushed; someone tuts at a child wriggling out of his or her seat to get a better look at the flowers and the altar where bread is being broken; initiatives to make worship more accessible to children are dismissed in PCC meetings without even being considered. Why is that?
Everyone brings unexamined assumptions with them to church: about what church is for, why children come, and whom church is for. Some assumptions may be based on adults’ childhood experiences. “There [can be] a sense of ‘I never had that freedom in church, so why should they?’” the Vicar of Lindley, in Huddersfield, Canon Rachel Firth, says.
“Extreme reactions either side, very pro or very against, usually have an emotional root,” one London-based church musician told me. Having originally been “very opposed” to introducing all-age worship in her church, she changed her mind — in part, having come to appreciate that the needs of all must be included in worship. “I can’t regard worship now as just something that I dip into and refresh from that has to suit me,” she said.
While acknowledging that not every part of every service would resonate with everyone, she said: “I have grown into loving these services. Perhaps a breakthrough was when it came over fully — or I understood better — that ‘all-age’ includes the grown and the old” as well as children.
The journey that she has gone on follows the unravelling of one of her own assumptions: that church is for adults, and that children are there as guests or observers.
“I can’t regard worship now as just something that I dip into and refresh from that has to suit me” https://t.co/UgJrU3MvVX
— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) March 13, 2020