What if everything goes wrong with your children’s work? What if you’re running groups and fewer and fewer children are coming along? What if the only volunteers you have come along because you’ve bribed them with cake? What if your church resembles the set of Cocoon? (I’m nothing if not up to date with my cultural references.)
This is not an uncommon experience. Many churches have no children under the age of 11 in them, and if yours is heading that way, there could be many factors at play. Some of them will be beyond your influence, but some of them you’ll be able to do something about. Whatever the state of your children’s work, it’s good to take a step back and review what you do, but it’s particularly important if your work isn’t helping children to meet with God.
First of all, don’t beat yourself up about it. Whatever the reason children aren’t coming along, it’s unlikely to be solely down to you or your personality. Yes, we can get things wrong, and these things can be part of the reason for people not coming to church or church-related events. But they won’t be the only reason.
The children and families we’re aiming to work with will have a variety of external factors which mean they won’t come. The most common is that your group clashes with something else that families deem more important – sports practice or an after-school club for example. Our one-off events might also clash with something, perhaps a town carnival, scout group event or school function. Check what’s going on and see if children aren’t with you because they’re attending something else.
Children’s personal circumstances might also be the cause of the drop in attendance. If a child has to spend time with an absent parent on a Sunday morning, they will stop coming to church. Perhaps a family has had to move away for work or because of their housing situation. Stay tuned in to what’s happening in your community and you’ll pick up these issues.
Despite these external factors, we need to look at our ministry honestly and decide whether what we’re doing now is right for the people in our parish. It might be that 20 years ago, when a particular ministry started, it was just the thing for our neighbourhood. But, in the intervening years, the neighbourhood has changed, but our ministry has not. And now it’s not meeting the needs of any of the families in the area.
This can be a painful experience – we might have started a certain ministry ourselves and invested a great deal of our time, effort and heart into it. To admit that a beloved group or club is no longer working can cause us to think that we ourselves are no longer working. But that’s not true. What we need to do is listen to God as he speaks to us through our church community, the wider local community and what is going on elsewhere in the Diocese or country.
It’s not a failure to stop one ministry in favour of something new or different. After all, it’s not our personal ministry, we are partnering with God. And if God wants to turn things on its head, then we should get ready for something exciting! Looking critically at what we do and following God’s lead on what we should be doing might mean that the ministry of our church rises like a phoenix and soars away.