Let the little children come to me

During my years as a Presbyterian Minister, I have learned an important truth about first-time fathers. It’s this: if Dad is a football fan, he will without fail buy his son or daughter a baby-sized team strip. Then as soon as the little one is up to it, he will start to take him or her along to games. If being a parent means anything, it means teaching your children from their earliest days to love what you love.

If there is one thing which has typified the collapse of confidence of Christian churches in Britain in the last century, it has been the strange assumption that Christian worship is not for children. An anonymous X account went viral a few weeks ago when he tweeted (now deleted) about being admonished after a service by a curate for his fidgeting toddler because the boy was distracting the adults. Not only is this sort of thing common, but across the whole spectrum of denominations, it has become completely normal for children to be hustled out of a side door before the service has gone too far; or perhaps steered in a different direction from their parents the moment they enter the building. Or even for entirely different events, with paint and glue and games, to be put on for the children at different times or on different days. For surely Christian worship is for adults; and children will find it far too boring.

Perhaps, in far too many cases, the reason for this is that it is boring. It’s not the children’s fault if they are not grabbed by the twaddle that emanates from the mouths of many of the ordained, a thin layer of spiritual jargon stretched across the content of a standard Guardian article. Nor if they fail to be excited by songs with lyrics, or tunes, or both of astonishingly mediocre content and poetry. But the solution is not to banish the children to a poorly-recreated child-centred play group in a different room or at a different time. The answer is to realise that the adults have themselves lost their grip on what Christian worship, and perhaps what Christianity, actually is.

If we don’t want to teach our children to love it, it’s probably because we don’t love it ourselves

For Christian worship is the most beautiful, arresting, challenging, exciting, dynamic and life-transforming activity that a human being can engage in. It is all about the most stupendous event in history, when God became man to do battle with all the evils of the world, triumphing over them in the most mind-boggling way. It confronts us with the darkness of our own souls, and provides the only means of rescue from it; it meets the reality of human suffering not with platitudes and shallow politics but with the power of God to defeat it forever, through his own decision to enter into it and lift it from us. 

Christian worship is an encounter with the living God, who by his Holy Spirit makes the Son of God as really present with us as he was for those who sat as his feet in Galilee, and through him adopts us to be his children and speak to him as our Father. In Christian worship our desire for meaning encounters true beauty; our desire for justice encounters the absolute righteousness of God; our need for mercy meets his true forgiveness; our craving for truth is met by the utter truthfulness of his word, spoken and preached to us; and our longing for joy finds its true home in the songs of God’s salvation which his people have sung for perhaps three thousand years and sometimes more. Where God the Holy Trinity is worshipped rightly, we meet a greater challenge than in the most extreme of extreme sports; we are trained and transformed with more rigour than in the most effective workout; we behold a beauty more intense than in the most profound art or the most gorgeous music.

The biblical story of salvation has more excitement than the best movie and more drama than the greatest of plays; indeed, nearly all the plotlines of both are mere riffs on the Christian original. To hear the creator of the universe address us as his children, to fill our lungs and throats with his praises, to be challenged and transformed by listening to his words of rebuke, command and blessing, to eat at the table of God himself … these are things with a million echoes, but no parallels, in this world. To gather with a Christian church for worship is an experience like no other. It confronts, it elevates, it destroys what is bad and rebuilds good in its place, in ways so profound that those who make it a regular part of their lives often find themselves transformed in ways they (and others) could never have imagined.

If we have thought that this is not for children, then it’s probably because we have not appreciated it ourselves. If we don’t want to teach our children to love it, it’s probably because we don’t love it ourselves. Sad to say, in many churches there has apparently been such a total collapse in the conviction that God is worth worshipping, his words worth hearing, his praises worth singing — in other words, that God is actually God — that the children really are probably better off elsewhere.

But this does not have to be the case. In our church, whilst there is a playroom with toys and books for parents to escape with children who are letting off a little too much steam, we encourage them to keep their offspring in the service with them, and the other adults to be happy that they are there. Of course, the glories of Jesus Christ and his gospel are far beyond children to grasp. Their minds are only capable of understanding the merest edges of it. The same is true of football; but children who learn to love football at an early age will in time have no trouble grasping the subtleties of the offside rule or what constitutes a legitimate tackle. Those who learn to love God will, when older, hungrily devour more detailed teaching about who he is and what he has done. The time will come when they will no longer fidget and whinge, whilst the songs and words and attitudes they have learned will remain. In the meantime, parents and preachers alike can do many things to help the children to engage with lots of what is going on, and to be patient with what is still beyond them. Singing, joining in liturgy, listening to the brilliant stories in so many Bible readings, watching what happens at Baptisms and the Lord’s Supper are all fundamentally interesting things to children, if we are ready to guide them through the drama of what is happening. Children, just like adults, must be trained in the worship of God; and that starts by including them in it.

Where churches frame their worship around the vast magnitude of what God has done in Jesus Christ, confident that God’s word, not a disintegrating secular society, is to be trusted, both children and adults will find that its dimensions exceed their grasp. But nevertheless they will also find that he really does, as the Apostle Paul said, bring them to see him face to face. And in so doing, to transform them from one degree of glory to another.

If churches fear that children will not be interested in their worship, they need to ask serious questions about what kind of worship they are engaged in. And meanwhile, if you want to experience the very best activity of the human body and soul which this world has to offer, come to church. To a real Christian church, focused on the salvation of sinners by the incarnation, life, death, resurrection and future return of Jesus Christ. And if you want the very best for your children too… bring them with you. “Let the little children come to me”, said Jesus during his time on earth, “and do not hinder them, for to such belong the kingdom of God”. He still says the same today.