A loving community in Christ?

The reality is that we like the idea of children and families, but not the reality, the noise, the mess and the chaos. We like new people, whether child or adult, to fit with our idea of what life ought to be like in the church. Especially – worship on a Sunday morning.

The funny thing about Christian worship is that the group of people who gather have almost nothing in common. They are thrust together into an intimate, messy, complicated, intergenerational community based solely on their geographical proximity and the belief in the transformative power of Christ. This makes this time of community, bizarre, uncomfortable, and at times difficult to navigate. Even more so than that, we are called to intentionally make this situation worse – called to make disciples. By so doing we invite new people into the community, whether by birth or by adoption, and each time we expand the community we have a new voice to accommodate, a new person for whom to find space.

Like so many across the Uniting Church at this time, I am mourning and remembering with love Rev Dr Michelle Cook who was a close and long-standing friend and confidant of mine. We both came from the cradle of Indooroopilly Uniting Church, a place of discipleship growth and challenge for many children and young people. Through membership in this loving Christian community Michelle came to a deeper understanding of God’s call on her life. Through her ministry she bore the fruit of that love and growth, as have I.

Later in my childhood, I was part of a church which was all too successful at Jesus’ command to make disciples. We were trying each week to fit 150 people into a church that comfortably fitted 100. The Sunday School finished as worship began and so all the 30-40 children had to pile into the front of the church on the floor. After we had shared what we had learned that week, we were left to squeeze in wherever we could, whether next to our parents, beside another adult, or on the floor in the front.

Was it noisy? Yes. Was it uncomfortable? Yes. Did it form families and young people in faith who now worship regularly in churches all over Queensland, Australia, and the world, yes it did!

Yet too often we hear cries wanting to return to the ancient system of temple courts which banished women and gentiles to the outer edges of the community and allowed only the chosen few to enter the holy places in our buildings. Today we call those courts things like ‘cry rooms’, ‘halls’ or ‘play areas’ however they perform a similar function, ensuring those who make us feel uncomfortable or don’t conform to our view of right behaviour are kept to the edges. This ignores the message of our saviour whose act of salvation tore back the curtain to the holiest places and welcomed all.

We also try to convince ourselves that our perception of the relatively limited cognitive ability of children is not able to nurture faith. I have marvelled at the perceptive ability of my ever-growing children as they describe to me the meaning of liturgical actions, from the singing of favourite songs (rarely children’s songs), the participation in the sacrament of Holy Communion with reverence and awe through to the music.

We assume that our adult minds are so much better able to understand profound theological truths and that if we simply entertain children out of sight, then once they can sit quietly and listen, we can integrate them back into the worshiping community. Try this theory on any teenager who you’ve tried to convince to stay in church after 12 years of being whisked out for the ‘boring bit’. We tell mythical stories of days gone by, clouded by the mists of time and memory rather than listening to the lived experience of parents and children with contemporary wisdom to share.

When we judge the parents or children who come into our midst because they disrupt our comfortable existence, we join the me-centric society we claim to despise. Worse still we join the powerful voices in our world telling parents they are inadequate, feeding their guilt, shame, and judgment.

If we want children and their families to feel embraced in our community, we need to worry less about the sincerity of the commitments we ask of baptismal parents and more about how we live out our own baptismal promises to them. One that may make us feel a whole lot more uncomfortable, but which might actually look like the body of Christ to which God calls us.

May God the Maker bless us.
May we be brave and loving and cheerful.
May God bless us with joy.

May Jesus the storyteller bless us.
May we be full of questions and justice.
May Jesus bless us with courage.

May the Holy Spirit bless us.
May we be wise and creative and full of wonder.
May God's Spirit bless us with hope.

May the saints and the angels dance in and out of our footsteps.
May the little ones invite us to share in their play.
May we journey homeward in love and laughter.
May we be surprised and safeguarded in God. Amen.

From Holy Ground - Liturgies and resources for an engaged spirituality (Neil Paynter and Helen Boothroyd)