And they are very straight with you. They don’t mess about with the questions. They just ask you very straight. ‘What do you do?’ ‘Why do you do that?!’
CT: One of the points that the ‘Will you make a difference?’ campaign highlights is that the church has not been so good at keeping up links with children in the community. In terms of where the church is right now with children’s ministry, what do you think we could be doing slightly better? What can we do to improve what we are already doing?
PB: One of the things I long for is that every church member captures a vision that they can take some responsibility for being the person who relates to a child. That could be because they live next door to the family.
How are they relating to those children? Are they relating to them in such a way that their love for Jesus shines through for that child? Because they may be the only connection that that child has with a Christian if they don’t belong to the institutional church.
Christians who are childminders, how are they engaging with the children in such a way that Christ’s light and life shines through them? That doesn’t mean that they are continually telling Bible stories but it’s the way they live and the way they treat them.
I have a real vision that every church member can be involved and that is what I long to see recaptured. It is fantastic when churches connect the children they do have contact with, with other generations. So you get older people who will pray for a particular child who comes to the midweek club, for example.
I sometimes hear people say they are too old to work with children now. One of the churches in Walthamstow in East London where I used to live started an evening club for kids and one of the best volunteers was in his eighties and he loved cycling so the kids would bring their bikes along and he taught them how to look after their bikes. And they loved him. They probably thought he was a doddery old man at first but when they actually met him and they started learning how to adjust their brakes and put the chain back on when it fell off, here was somewhere they could share a passion for – their bikes.
CT: You believe it is important that churches don’t just stop at getting a decision from children but they have to aim for making lifelong disciples.
PB: Yes. The key thing is that we come alongside children and share the Good News of Jesus with the children not just for this brief moment of childhood but we want them to be lifelong followers of Jesus. So it is about how we are helping nurture faith in them, a love for the Bible, learning what prayer is about, why meeting other Christians can be valuable, learning how I behave at school and care for the world I live in. It all connects with being a follower of Jesus.
We haven’t made those kinds of cross connections. There is this church bit but being a disciple of Jesus is everything. It affects every part of life and we need to help children grasp and understand that.
CT: Do you think children need more help to ‘be’ a Christian in, for example, school, where they might be the only Christian?
PB: Yes. Who sits down and helps the child to think through how they go about telling the other children about Jesus? A lot of that is certainly: how do we help Christian parents help their children? Because the primary responsibility for caring for and raising children lies with the parents.
A lot of what we need to think about clearly is how do we as the church family enable Christian parents to raise their children as Christians? How do we help them read the Bible with them? How do we help them pray with them and talk about ‘it’s been really hard at school, people have teased me, people have laughed at me’?
