The church & boys
Ruth Bromley highlights an event in the new year, that will encourage those involved in children’s ministry to consider how well their activities engage with boys.
I
t was the end of the summer and I had agreed to take an open children’s church on the first Sunday in September on the theme of prayer. There would be children from nursery to P7 and it needed to be interactive and inclusive of everyone. So, I planned and prepared and all that was left was to gather the resources. Then I read Nick Harding’s book, The Church and Boys, as part of my summer reading in work. It dawned on me as I thought about the morning I’d planned that it was skewed towards girls, and if I’m honest, probably much of the activity that we do in children’s ministry is too. I knew I needed to redo the planning in light of what I had read. Nick says in the opening page of the first chapter, “Boys are different from girls. Boys are part of God’s great creation, just as girls are, and God is a God of diversity, but there are a huge number of issues facing boys that make them different and may be affecting the
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Herald November 2019
way they become men.” Nick had my attention from this opening page; he doesn’t hold back as he lays out the way life is for the boys that we interact with in our ministry. “Testosterone in boys, which becomes more evident as they get older, slows down brain development whereas oestrogen in girls speeds it up. How then can our churches expect 10-year-old boys to behave as sensibly as 10-year-old girls? Often the church looks for both an intellectual level of understanding and an emotional response, which is difficult for boys of any age… boys like practical activities. They are more likely to take
…the more we admonish boys for behaving like boys, the more we tell them, ‘This place is not for you.’
things apart, think about how things work, and enjoy factual and evidencebased ideas.” The more I read this book the more I began to think about the children’s ministry, not just in my own congregation, but across the whole denomination. Many of our children’s leaders (as well as many of our primary school teachers) are female and so a lot of our children’s ministry is slanted in that direction. And that’s not a criticism; it’s simply a fact of female leaders doing what comes naturally. But maybe there is a better way. Either that is female leaders thinking more about the boys in our midst and how they are different, or it is encouraging more men into children’s ministry and allowing them to live out their faith as men for the boys to see. And here’s the challenge: “If boys do not have a significant male role model, they may struggle to thrive, and those who have no male in their lives at home or at school until they reach secondary school
