When we talk about children in the church, we
usually mean babies and toddlers — the youngest ones who cannot seem to sit
still. That’s a big challenge for parents and for the rest of the parish. But
what happens when those kids get a little older? We don’t talk a lot about what
to do when your ten-year old declares that he just doesn’t see the point of
church or when your eleven-year old says she just doesn’t want to go anymore.
They’d rather just stay home and pray. God can hear us from here, right? What
do you say to that?
I have friends who ask me this question, and they
always assume that this isn’t a problem I would have, because I write about the
faith so obviously my kids must love church! The truth is that every parent —
priests, counselors, podcasters and teachers and everyone else — goes through
this with their kids. It’s a very normal issue. Even kids who really like
church and are excited about Jesus will sometimes question whether it’s really
necessary to go this week. Adults go through it too — sometimes we’re tired, or
just lazy, and we ask ourselves why we drag ourselves to church every Sunday.
It’s a good question, and I want to approach it in
a few different ways: I want to look at practical things we can do to make
going to church regularly a little less painful, and then we’ll think about the
philosophical answers to the questions the kids are asking. Why do we go
church? What are we accomplishing by going that we could not accomplish right
here in the comfort of our own homes? Finally, I want to think about this in a
larger sense — who are we as parents, and how is it that a child is taught to
love God and seek after Him?
Practical
Ideas
First, the practical angle. There are certain things
that can make these arguments less frequent and easier to win:
— Get a job. If you child has a job in the church, like serving
at the altar, or ringing the bells, or being an usher or greeter, or singing
with the choir, they’ll be more likely to want to go to church. Also, when they
ask you why you have to go to church today, you can say: Father is expecting
you behind the altar, or we need to hear your voice. When your children know
that they’re valued, active members of the parish, they understand that their
presence is helpful and would be missed.
— Find some friends. When a child has friends in the parish, going to
church means seeing their friends, and people generally like to see their
friends. Take them to youth group events. Call that family with the nice kids
and invite them over to dinner. Invite church kids to birthday parties. And if
your church doesn’t have much of a youth group to encourage fellowship and
friendship, get to work. Put one together. The more your children see that the
church is a loving community, the less difficult it should be to get them there.
— Know what’s happening. If your church doesn’t have pew books, and this goes a
hundredfold for those of you whose liturgies happen in languages your children
don’t understand, go to an Orthodox bookstore online or in person, or go to
Amazon or wherever you like, and buy copies of an appropriate liturgy book for
your kid. It really helps if they can follow along. Now, different
jurisdictions do things differently, so if you’re in a Russian church, find a
Russian book, or in a Greek parish find a Greek book. I’m all for being
Pan-Orthodox, but be aware that different jurisdictions include and omit
different things, and translations vary. Talk with your priest, look around,
and try to find something that closely follows what you’re actually doing in
church. You might also consider an age-appropriate book about the liturgy,
something that explains what is happening. Understanding helps. The liturgy
becomes more meaningful and relevant to our lives when we know what it is that
we’re doing.
— Be consistent. If you wake up on Sunday mornings and then decide
whether the family is going to church or not, you will probably see more
resistance than those households who consistently attend church every Sunday.
Kids are smart. They know what’s negotiable. If you attend church except when
you’re especially tired or when last night went late or when there’s a good
soccer game, then your kids know that if they give a good enough reason (or if
they cause enough friction) you’ll bend and let everyone off the hook. On the
other hand, if they know that only category 2+ hurricanes, acts of God, and
profound illness will keep you home, they don’t argue as much. Oh, they’ll
still argue sometimes, but the argument will be less frequent and easier to
win.
What if they assert their God-given free will to not
attend church? What do I say? Try this oldie but goodie: “How you’ll manage
your relationship with God and the Church over your lifetime is yours, but
while you’re living in this household, we all go to church.” That’s a very reasonable
response. I have told my children many times that God entrusted me with the
sacred and important job of stewarding them to adulthood, and I take it very
seriously, and I’m going to do my best. That means that I have chosen to raise
them in a church-going family. Their relationship with God is theirs, but the
way that the family as a whole relates to God is something for which I will
answer on judgement day, so I have to guide everyone as best I can until they
come of age and (God willing) leave my home to set up their own.
Philosophical Arguments
Now, I’d like to spend some time thinking about
philosophical responses to why we go to church. Kids will often say the same
things many adults who stopped attending church say: God doesn’t need me to go to church.
I can worship Him anywhere! I’ll just worship Him right here on this couch or
while I hike on a nice mountaintop. I don’t need to worship in a church.
Let’s set aside the obvious problem that when we
routinely skip church, we probably aren’t spending hours worshipping God in our
own unique and solitary way. Odds are, we are watching Netflix or napping or
chatting with a friend. We’re not actively worshipping all morning.
Philosophically, even if you are actively worshipping
God on your couch, it would still be preferable if you could come to the
liturgy with the rest of the parish.
While it’s true that we can pray anywhere and God can
always hear us, there is something special about going to church. We’re not a
passive audience who simply witnesses a priest worshipping; we are actively
doing the work of liturgy. Sometimes we translate liturgy as “the work of the people” but I
am told that it could be more accurately translated, “the offering of the
people for the whole world.” Whether it’s work or an offering, the people are
coming together to do something active that is useful to the whole world.
Every member of the church is equally important.
Children are as important as adults; lay people are as important as priests. We
all have different roles to fill and different jobs to do, but every member of
the Church is very important, and is called to join together in this work of liturgy.
This work cannot be done alone. A priest cannot go to
the church and simply do the liturgy without another person, because the
Eucharist truly is “Communion” — it’s people coming together with one another,
with the angels and Saints, and God. Communion cannot happen alone; it requires
more than one to come together in love.
When the deacon says, “for peace on earth let us pray
to the Lord”, he is not actually praying for peace on earth. He is leading the
people, calling them to pray for peace on earth. If you don’t show up and
actually pray for peace (saying, “Lord, have mercy” but also we would hope,
actually meaning it as a prayer for peace), then the prayer isn’t offered. The
people have to be there to offer the prayers — and it’s important that as many
people as possible join together in offering up prayers, because prayer is effective and important.
When the people gather and sing the hymns and
responses of the Church, we join the angels who worship God in song. The angels
are performing the liturgy too (we call it the angelic liturgy), and we join them in it. If we
are not there, we cannot join the angels in liturgy. Prayer at home is
different — it is not always accompanied by an invitation to sing with the
choir of angels, but every divine liturgy is always an opportunity to enter
into this remarkable communion.
When we go to liturgy we are doing the important work
of BEING the church.
We are gathering together to witness a miracle — a
miracle that is promised to us whenever we gather in this way. In the
Eucharist, Christ comes literally into the chalice; Christ comes to us, and we
are invited to take Him into ourselves, the we may live in Him and He may live
in us. Christ only comes to the chalice if someone joins Father at church;
there must be a second person there. And Christ can only come into us through
Holy Communion if we are there too — if we stay home, we are not offering
ourselves up for transformation and we are not receiving the Body and Blood of
Christ. Receiving Holy Communion changes us.
Notably, it wasn’t our idea to gather for liturgy.
This is how God arranged things, this is how Christ established Communion at
the Last Supper: knowing who we are and how we work, He showed us that in order
to receive Him, we have to come together as a body. That’s how we are designed,
and how communion works.
I sometimes tell the story about how I was frustrated
when I first entered the Church that every time I thought I’d gotten a handle
on all of the saints and the books and the ideas, someone would bring up
another one I hadn’t heard of. I was so annoyed that I couldn’t know all of it.
My priest laughed and said that God designs it this way on purpose: God gives
us each a piece of the puzzle because He wants us to gather together to solve
it. He is working toward our unity. He calls us to come together on purpose. We
have to join together with each other in love as we work to join together with
Him in love.
Community is very important. It has been said that
‘One Christian is no Christian’ because it’s only through community, through
communion, that we can grow in love and become more like Christ. And that
doesn’t just mean that you should hang out with your friends, get a like-minded
group together and stay close. Christ calls on us to love our enemies, to sit
and break bread with people who are different from us, who make us uncomfortable.
The very fact that other people might annoy us, or that going to church means
getting out of bed and out of our comfort zone, is actually an integral part of
why it’s so important to go to church: we are being called out of ourselves,
out of our natural self-centeredness. The only way we can serve Jesus is by
serving other people. We can’t wash His feet or feed Him, but when we do this
for the least of His sheep, we do it for Him. If we want to find Jesus, we need
to look for Him inside other people and find Him there, and serve Him there.
We are saved in community, like it or not.
Strangely enough, faith is not a solitary, individual
thing. Yes, I have my faith and you have your own; we each have our own
relationship with God perhaps, but ultimately, we are called to worship
together in love. Christ did not tell us to pray, “My Father, Who art in
heaven” but to pray to “Our Father”, together. Further, Christ tells us that
where two or more of us are gathered in His Name, He’ll be there. He’ll be
present with us — when we gather in holy community, in His Name.
So there really is a difference between being in
church and at home; we cannot pray the same way or worship the same way on our
couches or on a hiking trail, no matter how breathtaking the mountains are and
how inspired we feel. Pray at home and hike as you can, but know that it’s
important that you come to church too. One does not replace the other.
Coming together as a community is important in a
simpler way as well: we need support and love, and we cannot do that on our
own. We need each other.
We could illustrate that with a story that you’ve
probably heard before. It can be told in different ways and I don’t know where
its true origin lies or who told it first, but it’s a great story and my
sister-in-law recently reminded me of it.
A member of a twelve-step program (or perhaps of a
church, or of a support group — insert any sweet community who relies on one
another), who had been attending meetings regularly, stopped going. After a few
weeks, his sponsor decided to visit him. It was a chilly evening and the
sponsor found the sponsee at home alone, sitting before a blazing fire.
Guessing the reason
for his sponsor’s visit, the sponsee welcomed him, led him to a big chair near
the fireplace and waited. His sponsor made himself comfortable but said
nothing. In the grave silence, he contemplated the play of the flames around
the burning logs. After some minutes, the sponsor took the fire tongs,
carefully picked up a brightly burning ember and placed it to one side of the
hearth all alone.
Then he sat back in
his chair, still silent. The sponsee watched all this in quiet fascination. As
the one lone ember’s flame diminished, there was a momentary glow and then it’s
fire was no more seen, it was cold and “dead as a doornail.”
Not a word had been
spoken since the initial greeting. Just before the sponsor was ready to leave,
he picked up the cold, dead ember and placed it back in the middle of the fire.
Immediately it began to glow once more with the light and warmth of the burning
coals around it.
As the sponsor
reached the door to leave, the sponsee said, “Thank you so much for your visit
and especially for the fiery sermon. I’ll see you at the meeting in the
morning.” — Author Unknown.
We need each other to
keep our sparks lit — just like on Pascha when we come outside before midnight.
Father brings us the Light of Christ from the altar, and we pass it to one
another. We receive that spark in community, one hand to the next, and then we
head outside and we face the elements. Some years it’s mild and warm, and other
years it’s stormy and cold. Sometimes in life, those winds just blow out our
flames, and if we don’t have one another, we cannot relight them. The spark of
faith and the spark of hope — these are flames that can be hard to keep lit,
and in community, we can help one another keep going.
The Limits of Argument (aka The Hard
Part)
As parents who want to raise up children who love God
and who love the liturgy, our most powerful weapon is not argument.
We can talk for hours about reasons we should go to
church, but it’s important to remember that you can’t argue someone to heaven. Deeper
understanding of what the liturgy means is wonderful, but it’s intellectual.
Real faith happens in the heart.
St. Maximos the Confessor said, “Just as the thought
of fire does not warm the body, so faith without love does not actualize the
light of spiritual knowledge in the soul.”
The thought of fire does not warm my body — it’s true.
Knowledge about faith isn’t going to transform our souls unless it’s ignited by
a real love for God. What we want for our children is not knowledge about the
liturgy, but a love for the liturgy and for Christ. Our real goal is that they
love God with all their hearts. We cannot achieve that with argument.
The saints tell us to speak less and to pray more; we
should pray for God to kindle love in their hearts, so that they hunger for God
each in their own way and pursue Him throughout their lifetimes.
What’s more, research tells us that when children grow
up seeing parents who love Christ, whose participation in the life of the
Church is fulfilling and fruitful, they tend to follow that example. And when
they see parents who don’t really care about liturgy but who just show up at
church because that’s the obligation, they take note, and they report that they
saw churches that were “shallow” and “insincere”. As always, raising saints
turns out to be the hardest job in town, because in order to raise a saint,
we’re going to have to become saints.
So I think this may be the place to start: let’s get
on our knees and ask God to ignite a great yearning love in our own hearts, and
in the hearts of our children. Let’s ask God to grant us the gift of loving
Him, of yearning to move closer to Him, so that we can all begin to yearn for
liturgy and for the transformative grace of Holy Communion, together.
And then we’ll be patient, and give Him time to work.
Remember that our end game is not to have the kids stop complaining by next
Sunday; it’s to know that they’ll be reaching out to Christ through the years
and into eternity.
We’ll get there.
Source: https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/raisingsaints/kids-dont-like-church/
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