Most people reading this blog will find the experience of leading Junior Church sessions on a Sunday morning extremely familiar. Many varieties, certainly, but all largely based around a story and a worshipful response, with activities to suit. When appointed to my post last year, this is exactly the mould in which I was ready to operate.
Pretty soon, however, I realised this wasn’t going to be the case because, for the first time ever, I had as many parents in Junior Church as children aged 4 to 6. ‘What’s going on?!’ I thought. ‘These people should be back in church where they belong!’ I simply couldn’t fathom it out.
After a few months, ‘they’ became individual names with real lives. I got to know people and, perhaps unsurprisingly, my myopic attitude cleared up. I was left questioning the model with which I had grown up: suddenly, splitting children from their parents at around age 4 and expecting child and parent to grow in faith independently didn’t seem such a great idea.
To be sure, this is (rightly) the way we do education more generally: but isn’t Junior Church more than just learning? If we are worshipping, praying and experiencing, are not these collective activities? Furthermore, for those new to Christianity, the gentle, unassuming way we encounter the Bible might be significantly more powerful than the sermon next door.
I was musing on this as I read the Church Growth report last January (click on Strands 1 and 2). I strongly recommend it to those who have not yet studied it, or churches that have not yet been alerted to its findings. One part stood out in particular. Children with two Christian parents have a 50% chance of sustaining a childhood faith into adulthood, children with a single Christian parent have a 25% chance of sustaining a faith into adulthood and children with no Christian parents have a negligible chance of sustaining a faith into adulthood.
We should, and do, look for miracles of faith in all places and at all times. Yet these figures underline something I sort of knew. In the vast majority of cases, the faith development of children is linked to that of their parents.
Sustaining any faith into adulthood is hugely difficult, and splitting families might not help. The worship of everyone is equally important, but we owe it to children to nurture a faith that can last a lifetime, not a primary school faith just for primary school times. If faith is to be more than a pre-secondary school blip, it needs to be nurtured within the family.
Later in life, young people will certainly need space to develop their faith independent of their family, but whole-family worship and learning is essential too. I was convinced by the people I met and the figures I read that I had been getting it wrong for years. Junior Church with worship and activities for the whole family has taken quite a bit of new thinking and it’s not always been easy. But we shouldn’t be prepared to change? If we don’t, we should be prepared to fail.
Jonathan Brooks is a Children’s Worker at St Michael Highgate.