Little Issues

We took a momentous decision last week: to suspend Junior Church, the children's activities that operate in parallel with the main 10am Sunday morning mass. This is because on several occasions those activities have comprised one child on his own. Our other core of regulars has found it less and less easy to attend for different reasons. So we'll sort out some more appealing material for children to use at the back of church, and I'm putting together a children's communion booklet for younger worshippers to use. 

This doesn't mean there aren't children in church: there were over twenty at the Family Service on Sunday, and Toddler Praise, Church Club at school and Messy Church are doing fine. But they aren't around on ordinary Sunday mornings. 

Once upon a time, children had their own church activities. 'Sunday School' was on a Sunday afternoon, and parents would drop their children off and leave them there. It was specifically tailored to them. Then from the middle of the 1960s (at least in Swanvale Halt), with the renewed emphasis on the Parish Eucharist as the central act of Christian worship which everyone should take part in, children's activities were moved to Sunday mornings, held in parallel with the adult worship, and with children encouraged to take part on occasion. Gradually, these events became less a worship experience for children and more an adjunct to the adult service intended to keep the children occupied and taught so that families could come to the main service and not feel that the youngsters would be alienated or left out.

The problem for churches of a more traditional type comes when they designate a particular service as family-friendly. We did this in 1986 when the non-eucharistic Family Service was started. All very well in 1986 - but in 2014, with society making it far more difficult for anyone but the most committed young families to come to church at all, if you're parents with smallish children and you're choosing which Sunday in a month to attend worship, you'll pick the service which is organised around the children rather than the ones which aren't, even if there are other things provided for the children to do at the same time. I often get asked by baptism couples and other contacts whether we have a Sunday School - and even after being told we did, they still chose to come to the Family Service. My training parish, Lamford, had a different experience. There the first Sunday in the month was also a 'Family Mass', but it was also the service designated for baptisms (lots of them) which meant it was often so chaotic that church families chose not to come then either, and distributed themselves around the rest of the month. With a bigger congregation to start with, that made Sunday School more feasible on the other weeks (especially after a particularly unpopular teacher died and attendance shot up - a somewhat brutal example of 'sudden change' galvanising enthusiasm). Finally, specifically child-orientated worship at other times, such as Messy Church, provides another option which families prefer to attend.

There's no point fighting this, and instead we will put our time and energy into doing other things to help young worshippers and parents engage with God. I detect a certain degree of relief from the Junior Church leaders ...