Issue No 154
Magazine for the Irfon and Wye Valley Churches July and August 2013
Children’s Work - a Joint Responsibility by Liz Kirlew, Bishop’s Officer for Children
When and where did our children go? This is a question which many churches are asking; the answers of course are not straightforward nor are they the same for each church. We have to look at the way we live today. The working week for many families looks very different to the way it was forty years ago. The majority of adults would have at least Saturday afternoon and Sunday off work, women were more likely to work part time if at all and Sunday working was in the main carried out by healthcare and emergency service staff and those involved in the hospitality industry. Sport and other social events tended to take place on Saturday rather than Sunday. Take into account that now we have families where both parents work, sometimes both doing full time hours, Sunday trading now being the norm and sporting events and other social gatherings being a regular feature of Sundays. It may be the only day the family has to spend time together or in fact visit and care for other older family members. Transport has always been patchy on Sundays but as many families now own cars our whole population has become more mobile. Things may be even further complicated by complex family situations where a
child is not living with both parents and weekends are spent elsewhere. It has been shown that the children of the ‘Baby Boom’ years those born between 1946 and 1964 are less likely to have been introduced to religion as children, being born into a generation which felt it was better to leave the children to make up their own minds rather than indoctrinate them, and so is less likely that their children, the ones we are now missing will attend church or church related activity. For those children who did go to church I suspect, little had changed since their grandparents’ days and children were still expected to be ‘seen and not heard’. In the past the church’s ‘solution’ to children seems to have been to separate them out from the ‘proper’ congregation. The children had Sunday school or junior church, teenagers had their own group and the grownups had church. Occasionally they would come together and the children would be allowed to sing or read and would be rather patronised by the congregation. This arrangement also meant that children could be sent to Sunday school without their parents going to church. Families stopped worshiping together; the pattern of Sunday was changing. The problem, of course does not lie with the children, they can only go to places they are taken or allowed to go to. Children are very spiritual beings and are eager to learn but we need to remember that learning about religion is not the same as having faith, having a relationship with God. This needs to be nurtured in the home and school as well as church. A survey, reported in the Church Times last year recorded that children wanted to be part of a church which worshiped together. (continued on pg 5)
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