Children's ministry: A job for the whole church

|PIC1|2009 sees the 30th anniversary of the UN International Year of the Child and churches and Christian charities have joined forces to help churches make the most of the occasion by launching a new campaign, ‘Will you make a difference?’.

The campaign has been wholeheartedly endorsed by the Bishop of Southampton, the Rt Rev Paul Butler, who shares in this interview his hopes and expectations for children’s ministry in the coming years.


CT: Children today are growing up in a very secular Britain. How do you see the church expanding and deepening its ministry with children in the face of such a great challenge?

PB: I think our continued role in schools - not just church schools but getting involved in all schools - is going to be very important in that. I was in a school this morning, a church school in this instance, talking to the children, leading collective worship, talking to the school council, and I think the whole thrust of the church finding ways of serving children through activities, play, holiday schemes and so forth is vital.

That is going to be more important, dare I say it, than traditional Sunday school. There is still a very important place for that but if we are concerned about all children and the building of relationships by Christians with children through church-based activities, then this is going to be crucial.

CT: Are the doors open to the church in schools, particularly in non-faith schools?

PB: They are. A very high percentage of schools welcome engagement by local clergy and church members, not always necessarily in overt Christian activities but Christians going along and assisting in reading, being governors, helping at lunch time.

One of my clergy is a keen gardener and he runs the gardening club at school. They all know he is the local vicar but he leads the local gardening club because he wants them to learn about gardening.

CT: Some feel children are the forgotten members of the body of Christ?

PB: I think they are and are not taken as seriously as they should be. Sometimes children are the way that God actually speaks to the church as a whole. We can put to one side the things they say or ignore them but we do so at our peril.

CT: What do you think the church can learn from children?

PB: The starting point for me is taking seriously that Jesus took a child and stood her /him in the midst of his disciples and said unless you are like a child you will never enter the Kingdom.

What was it about being a child that Jesus was getting at in the Gospels? One of the things was humility. But also children have a capacity to wonder and imagine that sometimes we squash as we get older. They have a capacity to trust that we lose.

I have contributed a chapter to a new book coming out next year called ‘Through the Eyes of a Child’ and I actually spent time with groups of children in different settings looking at the parable of the sheep and the goats and as the children read and engaged with the story they came out with insights that would sometimes make adults sit up and think ‘oh that’s an interesting thought’, and sometimes the children don’t understand the depth of what they are saying but they see something that communicates to the adults.

|PIC1|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’?

|PIC1|CT: One recent charity report found that one in four children of faith have experienced bullying at school for their faith.

PB: Yes, it’s one of the questions I regularly ask when I visit schools: what do people think? And people respect or ignore them but some experience quite severe teasing and mocking.

CT: Are the school leaders aware of that kind of bullying?

PB: I think some of them are aware. But it can be very subtle and therefore not so obvious to teachers.

CT: Is that something the church could help highlight to schools?

PB: Yes, I think so.

CT: Next year marks the 30th anniversary of the UN International Year of the Child and what’s interesting about the ‘Will You make a difference?’ campaign is the breadth of organisations and churches taking part. Does that make you optimistic about the prospects for children’s ministry?

PB: It does. The fact that you’ve got all the main denominations, the Church of England, Methodist, Baptist, URC, plus a lot of organisations like Urban Saints, Scripture Union, Bible Reading Fellowship, the Brigades and so on. I have been working with children since I was a teenager and I don’t remember ever having quite such a breadth of organisations and denominations committed to working together on something like this.

CT: What do you think is breaking down the barriers?

PB: A real awareness that children aren’t necessarily hearing the Good News of Jesus in the way that we long for them to do so and an awareness that in the country there are some really big questions around about what do we really want for our children and for childhood as a nation. We are saying as Christians that we have got things to contribute to this national debate. It is very exciting that so many have come together on this.

CT: What do you expect to see on the ground level inside the churches as they get involved in the ‘Will you make a difference?’ campaign?

PB: My main longing is that every single church recognises that it can be involved in some work with children in its area; because so many churches have little or no contact with children in their area. In their own way, every individual member of the church can be involved through prayer, friendship, being a good neighbour, as well as the more formal channels of helping with clubs and schools and Sunday schools and getting involved with activities and holiday camps and so on.

My prayer is that that the number of people who get involved will rise up significantly throughout the year and that children themselves will respond really positively to the Good News of Jesus Christ and recognise that they are part and parcel of the church and God’s work in the world.


For more information about the 'Will you make a difference?' campaign, visit www.wymad.org.uk