Reclaiming the Missing Link in Faith Formation
The story began with my father. A salvation Army Officer – he was a Corps Officer (Pastor) all his ministry (over 40 years), except for one year as a Community Welfare Officer.
I remember as I was growing up that Dad always had a youth group. The members of the youth groups were usually 12 to 16 years old unchurched kids from the towns – Bowral sticks out in my mind – and the youth groups did all the usual things that happened at a church youth group. But when Sunday came I never saw any of these kids at Church. I thought about this and tucked the memory away in my mind.
About the same time I used to see most of the kids in our Sunday School, even the kids of the members of the Church, drop out at about 13 years of age. I thought about this to and stored the memory.
About the same time, maybe a few years later, I saw the Salvation Army do great things for teenagers – well for the early seventies they were great. But they didn’t seem to make a great deal of difference – the 13 year olds who left, still left – the ones who stayed had a great time with a well balanced age appropriate program – again appropriate for the time, or so I thought.
I believe the Salvation Army’s thinking was that if they created great youth programs it would encourage more kids to stay in the church and also attract more non churched teenagers – but it didn’t. In spite of this we continued thinking it was mainly about the teenagers, and we resourced our youth work accordingly, but it made little impact on the numbers leaving.
In 2004 a colleague gave me a copy of the research of George Barna. It fascinated me, encouraged me, but more than anything sent me on a journey that continues today – a journey that has taken the memories from my childhood and allowed me to ask the questions and seek the answers that I did not know.
In 2006 I sat down one day and wrote an article. It was published (edited severely) in the Pipeline and Officer magazines. It remains the basis of what I teach each year at the training college. That’s where we start.
Hey – what’s the first memory you have of your life? Think about it and see how far you can go back (In a teaching session this becomes a discussion that gives each participant an opportunity to think and share their own story of their first memory and at what age). (One participant once said he could remember the day he was born – a vivid imagination – but some people have genuine memories of specific incidences from age 2). A Salvation Army Officer recently told me that he has no childhood memories younger than 10 years of age yet he considers that he had a ‘normal’ farm based childhood.
We are told, and it’s true for me, that most people’s first memories are events when they are around 4 and 5 years of age.
If a dramatic or traumatic event happens earlier in our life that age can be as young as 2, although, when traumatic events are experienced in early childhood, the memories can be suppressed and the age of first memories is sometimes much older.
Let’s say we are average and our first memory is in the 4 to 5 age range.
The question I have for you is this. What could you do, or what did you learn, before the time of your first memory?
Of course the list is huge. Walking, talking, arguing, reasoning, feeding, dressing etc. In fact by the age of 4 most of the basic skills for life are in place (in a group, particularly with parents who have young children, this list is easy to work out with little prompting).
How capable are we at 4 years old? The greatest lesson I learnt about 4 year olds was knowing Christopher (who is now a man) in Papua New Guinea. He lived across the road from us and is still a family friend. At 4 years of age he could speak 5 languages fluently. He could also discern, without hesitation, which of his relatives and friends he should speak which language to – ‘A GENIUS’ – no just an average 4 year old in a country where every person is multilingual.
Some of this came into perspective for me when I learnt about a training company contracted by ‘Time/Life,’ (the magazine and publishing group), in Brisbane. They taught young people sales skills to go out and flog off educational subscriptions door to door in Queensland country towns.
These young salespersons were taught that by the age of 4 we have 50% of our adult intelligence, by the age of 8 we have 80% of our adult intelligence and over the next 10 years we develop the final 20% of our intelligence (although I know some people who would argue we are all done in the intelligence stakes by 18).
Now let me clarify this – we are talking intelligence not knowledge.
As I have observed children in recent times I have no doubt about the accuracy of this statement. 4 year olds have 50% of their adult intelligence.
It seems to me that this may be the greatest issue the church needs to face in the 21st century. Could we argue that today our children need to have 50% of their Christian intelligence (possibly faith intelligence if that makes sense) by the age of 4, as it seems to me that a person’s spiritual intelligence at the age of 4 will be a reflection of their spiritual maturity later in life. Yet the church shows very little spiritual interest in kids up to 4 years of age – except to play games and sing songs – and then only in some churches.
So how could we do it better?
Psychologist tell us that 30 to 40 years ago, for the vast majority of people, our major life decisions had been made by the age of 11 ( thus dropping out of non priority activities at 13 makes sense).
What has happened in the past 20 years is that this age has dropped to 9 – kids are maturing younger, and now many 11 and 12 year olds leave our programs. (It’s interesting to note at this point that the church today is more concerned about why 18-25 year olds drop out – a comparatively small number compared to the 11 year olds we loose – yet our adult focus takes our thinking away from the more important things).
How has the ‘Army’ adjusted to this change? Unfortunately in some places it’s all been too hard and we have simply given up on children and family ministry at a time when it needs to be the core ministry of every church. About half of our Corps have no children’s work at all and no vision to start. Of course we are in the same position as the vast majority of churches/denominations in the Western world. This is not a Salvation Army Eastern Australian Territory problem – but it can be solved if Churches are willing to make a paradigm shift in the way we think and minister.
Statistics show (and I have confirmed this at many Corps/churches in The Salvation Army’s South Queensland Division) that for people attending churches today (most professing to be Christian) 70% committed their lives to Christ under the age of 10, but 96% went to Sunday School, Religious Education at school or had significant Christian teaching under the age of 10. Yet the Church today is only made up of a small percentage of those who were influenced as children in the church. Most dropped out. What they learned did not impact their lives in a way that made sense in their worldview.
Without doubt, from what I have seen and studied in the church during the past 25 years, including leadership conferences, church growth seminars, planting seminars, Youth & Children’s conferences, my conclusion is that the greatest thing the church needs to do now is to work with children and families – especially families.
How do we do it? That’s the next story.
The Next Story
Jesus Teachings Disappoints me
After working with children full time for 16 years of my Officership and studying the scriptures from a practitioners point of view, I’m disappointed about how little Jesus says about working with children. In fact when he does talk about kids, it’s always in the context of teaching adults life lessons. When you check out Jesus teaching, and in fact the teaching of the early church, we get told ZIP about why it’s important to work with children and I suspect that’s one of the main reasons we are not doing it – or not doing it well.
In essence the church hangs on the words of Jesus and what he said. This has been developed into the theology that governs how we usually think and act today. How often do we hear the preacher say ‘Jesus says…….’, and if Jesus didn’t say it then it’s probably not taught – or not taught well.
But could I suggest that in the case of children we ignore what Jesus didn’t say, and this may be the primary reason the church is in decline today.
So I ask the question why didn’t Jesus have heaps of radical suggestions for us when working with kids?
Did he like them – Yep – “let the children come to me ………. kingdom of heaven”, etc (that’s another story).
So why didn’t Jesus teach it? Why didn’t Jesus tell us how and why to work with children. Of course the answer is he didn’t have to. The parents of his day passed on their faith so passionately to their children, and taught them the scriptures of the Old Testament off by heart, that faith and kids was never an issue that Jesus needed to address.
As the children grew to adulthood, they were influenced by different theologies. Jesus had a problem when these people got off track and to these people Jesus expounded his teachings.
Today we are facing a faith crisis in our nation, where in the past the Churches have merely been disabled by theologies. Today kids have never heard the name of Jesus – unless they are speaking out of context.
But what I have recently learnt is that there was a similar situation in the 1890’s in England. We are not altogether entering un-chartered waters, although our worlds are vastly different to 110 years ago.
Sunday Schools have just celebrated their 200th birthdate. Dr Mark Griffiths (the authour of ‘One Generation from extinction’ – the book written from his PHD in Children’s ministry) said recently at the ‘Kidsreach’ Conference in Sydney that in the past 200 years the Sunday School movement has completed two cycles. The first cycle was during the 19th Century, and the second during the 20th century.
He talked about these cycles of incredible growth, the formation of strong families and then a three generation decline in Sunday schools and the church until he said the children were a ‘clean slate’ – spiritual beings ready to hear the gospel message.
The second wave came in the 1890’s when an English publisher, Robert Raikes, did an ‘experiment’ with Sunday Schools. Within 3 years more than 300,000 ‘new’ kids were in Sunday Schools in England. His graph included figures from the “Methodist New Connection” and this was the beginning of a new revival. Of course the early Army was marching forward at the same time and our children’s work was given high priority and was well resourced, including dedicated buildings for children’s work.
About this time William Booth was asked this question. ‘Can children grow up into Salvation without knowing the exact moment of conversion?’
William Booth answered, ‘Yes, it can be so, and in the future we trust this will be the usual way in which children will be brought into the kingdom.
When the parents are Godly, and the children are surrounded by holy influences from their birth, they will doubtless come to know and love and trust their saviour in the ordinary course of things’.
This was brought home to me so convincingly, when my own daughter, now an Officer, said to me one day, ‘Dad I thought I was always a Christian’. I had been waiting for her to make a public declaration of something that had come to her in the ordinary course of things.
It’s interesting that I have never heard anyone in The Salvation Army leadership talk about this teaching from Booth. We are often encouraged to think and act like Booth, but, it seems, we only are exposed to some of his genius. Could I suggest in the statement above he shows intelligence and understanding far beyond the thinking of the church today – not The Salvation Army – the Church?
It seems to me, for the past few generations, parents have failed to passionately pass on their faith to their children. In fact could I (or dare I) suggest that in The Salvation Army, parents, for a couple of generations, passed on their musical skills more effectively than their faith skills. For many years this sustained us as it was intertwined with our way of life. But in recent years, and particularly with changes in society and peoples needs, this has not been enough and many of our people, particularly young people, have not been able to equate the Army lifestyle of their parents with the world they live in.
So what went wrong?
To answer this I ask the question that if Sunday Schools are only 200 years old, how did the Church survive and grow, for the first 1800 years of it’s existence, before ‘us’ evangelicals were let loose. The only answer that I can come up with that makes any sense is that it was through families. Deuteronomy 6 teaching – parents/families/villages (it takes a village concept) teaching their children, and I suspect a lot of this fell into the mothers laps.
With the rise of the Sunday School movement a fundamental change began to take place. There is some contention about this in some of the material and writings available and the thoughts of Children’s ministry leaders including myself. Much of the academic writing suggests that parents abdicated their parental responsibility to the Church and were happy to hand them over to the Sunday School teachers to teach them issues of faith (note Booths quote ‘surrounded by holy influences and examples from their birth’). I am of the opinion that the Church took over the parents role and in fact began to teach less and less about the Old Testament principles and the families responsibilities to ‘engrain’ their faith into the lives of their young children.