Welcoming Children

A Practical Theology of Childhood

Joyce Ann Mercer

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780827242616
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book develops a theology of childhood both from a theoretical basis in biblical theology (especially the gospel of Mark) and practical experience in children and youth ministry. Mercer builds on classical theologians such as Augustine, Calvin, Barth, and Rahner as well as modern feminist theologians such as Brock and Russell. She gains insights from pastoral theologians such as Capps and Couture and from contemporary cultural criticism. Mercer challenges approaches to educational and liturgical practices with children in congregations that segregate children from the rest of the church and its key practices of service, mission, worship, care, and learning. She reframes ministries with children as processes through which the church as a "community of practice" forms children into an alternative identity that resists surrounding consumerist culture and walks in the ways of Jesus. This book offers strategies for educational practices with children in congregations as it seeks to address the question, "What might educational practices that welcome children and contribute to their flourishing look like in the context of a faith community where children's learning happens in collaboration with experienced practitioners of faith?" Outlining a feminist practical theology of childhood, it explores five basic theological claims: (1) children as gifts and parenting as a religious practice of stewardship; (2) welcoming those who welcome and care for children; (3) children as already fully human; (4) children as part of the purposes of God; and (5) acknowledging and transforming the sufferings of children.

A Way of Doing Theology of Childhood

A Scene from a Restaurant

A few years ago, in a family-oriented pizza restaurant in California, my then two-year-old daughter Sarah began to fuss and cry in a high-pitched voice. It was late in the day, and I knew that her crying probably came from hunger. So I immediately went to the salad bar to try to find something that would quiet her until our meal arrived. I reached for a few crackers while she kicked and screamed in my arms. A man stood up at a nearby table, walked over to us, and remarked loudly as his finger pointed only inches from Sarah’s face, “For Christ’s sake, can’t you shut that kid up? Why don’t you take her out of here? I don’t pay to eat out only to have to listen to that screaming.”

I was shocked! The shock came not so much by what he said. I am in complete agreement that it is far nicer to dine in a restaurant without the sounds of a screaming child punctuating the air. I was shocked by the aggression in his voice and his gestures. Perhaps even more astounding was the fact that no one else in the restaurant appeared to see anything inappropriate in this man’s words or actions. For me the irony of a supposedly “family-oriented” establishment in which no one blinked an eye at overt hostility toward a child and her parent was surpassed only by this man’s choice of epithets: “For Christ’s sake!”

“For Christ’s sake, shut that child up”? The very idea of associating Christ with the silencing of children appears preposterous to anyone even vaguely familiar with New Testament stories about Jesus’ interactions with children. Of course, the man in the restaurant was hardly engaging in theological reflection with his use of religious language! But this experience caused me to think about the way in which children constantly receive ambivalent messages from the society and from the church about their worth and their welcome. The family-oriented appearance of the restaurant seemed to say to children, “you are welcome here.” But the aggressive behavior of the man toward a crying child, and the passive acceptance of bystanders witnessing his actions, communicated something very different.

The Church’s Ambivalence to Children

In a similar way the church often manifests its ambivalence toward children in a set of “double messages” that seem to welcome them, but only if they do not act like the children that they are. For example, congregations generally view themselves as “child-friendly” places. Most church members speak of the desirability of having plenty of children in the church. At the same time, however, many congregations demonstrate that they in fact do not want children to be present in worship, the central gathering of the church’s life. They express this ban of children through their “adults-only” styles of worship and through the disapproving words and glances they give to noisy or disruptive children. In the church, no one stands up and shouts, “For Christ’s sake, shut that child up!” like the man did in the restaurant. But for all practical purposes, the message to children is, “For Christ’s sake, or at least for the sake of we adults who consider ourselves followers of Christ, either be quiet or leave!”

Of course, for anyone who has ever been seated with or near a young child during worship, the situation appears more complex. When children are present in worship, particularly younger children, their needs for attention often clash with adult needs. Adults seek quiet, reflective space to meditate on faith that engages adult critical thinking capacities. These also are legitimate needs, and if the adults accompanying children in worship (most often but not always women) are constantly called upon to sacrifice their needs to attend to children, then having children physically present in worship hardly becomes a liberatory act for anyone. That is, in part, the reason adults in local congregations continue to struggle with questions about how to live well and hospitably with the children in their midst.

The Search for a Theology of and a Church for Children

This book is part of my search for a child-affirming Christian theology and for a church that genuinely welcomes children amid a culture and church tradition that at best embraces them ambivalently. I use the notion of a search metaphorically here, for it is not as though I expect to find a fully formed, adequate theology of childhood waiting under a rock somewhere out there. The image that comes to mind is more like that of a child’s three-dimensional wooden puzzle that is missing some parts. Putting it together involves sorting through the available pieces to see what sort of figure might emerge as they are put together in some meaningful way. But it also involves imaginative envisioning of what the finished figure might look like even in the absence of certain readily available parts. With such a vision in mind, one can then construct some new pieces (sometimes out of surprising materials!) to complete the puzzle. As I speak of a search for a theology and for a church that welcomes children, then, I envision a constructive, imaginative theological activity that takes place in critical relationship to available resources and perspectives that can contribute to the construction of emancipatory practices with children in church and society. Such a view sees theology as a highly imaginative activity out of which real emancipatory practices can come, at the same time that these practices themselves fund the imagination that generates theological insight. It is a “both/and” process.

A central question within my search for a welcoming theology of childhood concerns practices of education with children. Such practices should invite and welcome children’s participation together with adults in communities shaped around the stories, symbols, and practices of Christian faith. Such practices must be observed amidst a culture bent on shaping persons and communities around the stories, symbols, and practices of consumption. How can communities of faith invite and educate children into a Christian alternative way of life to the dominant consumerist life into which the wider culture continually schools them? The search for a theology and church that welcomes children is a search set within a contemporary North American social context in which the very nature and meaning of childhood are undergoing rapid transformation in relation to the forces of globalized consumer culture.

As children and childhood take on new shapes, social practices with children, including religious ones (such as practices of worship and liturgy, education and care with children), also undergo transformation. The search for a child-affirming theology and a church in which children are genuinely welcome necessarily concerns itself with children as they are formed within contemporary culture and also with those cultural and social forces at work to reshape childhood in our time.

No Return to Nostalgia

Such an understanding of the task at hand for theological work differs considerably from that of scholars who see their task in terms of the recovery of a supposedly more natural and authentic childhood identified with its dominant construction in an earlier time. Amidst the changes wrought by postmodern cultural forms and a national social fabric tenuously held together by fickle market forces, it becomes tempting to revert to nostalgia for some bygone era when life seemed simpler and childhood appeared less problematic. Indeed many voices, most of them situated within a conservative theological and political perspective, take precisely that tact in contemporary conversations about childhood. They critique the current contexts in which childhood takes form by yearning for an earlier time in which various elements within the culture appeared to “match” the view of children and childhood of that era. Many of these critiques speak of the need for a “return to innocence,” or of the “disappearance” or “fall” of childhood.¹ These writers can sound like magicians of nostalgia with the solutions they pose, longing to magically revert to earlier constructions of childhood and critiquing whatever in the current social context does not match those constructions. They tend to assume innocence as a natural and given characterization of childhood and fail to recognize the historicity of this view of children.

In my search for a child-affirming theology and church that genuinely welcomes children, I, too, critique the contemporary social context in which children are situated. But my agenda is not to turn back the clock to an earlier age of supposedly natural innocence characterizing childhood. This is our time and not some other. We cannot go back, even if doing so were desirable. (We should recall that the past of nostalgic memory was not equally good for all groups of people within the larger society.) Instead, I come to such a critique from the perspective that every society, culture, and historical period constructs and embodies its own peculiar understanding of childhood. Amidst competing perspectives of what a child is, certain understandings rise up when they find support from dominant social, political, economic, and religious trends that reinforce them. These dominant constructions of childhood, while not to be confused with the lives of children themselves, have formative, shaping power on children’s real lives as they set forth what a particular society means by the idea of childhood. They come to appear natural, taken as normative of childhood for all times and places rather than valued in a relative sense for the historically situated constructions that they are. But not all of these dominant constructions support the thriving of children, as they may reflect other interests and agendas bearing certain antipathies to children’s well-being.

Current North American constructions of childhood need to be critiqued, then. Such critique does not seek to get back to some supposedly more originary and natural view of children. Rather, such critique seeks to name and resist the points at which the regnant constructions of childhood serve the needs and agendas of other interests and power arrangements at the expense of children’s flourishing. While I share in common with the “nostalgicians” the view that contemporary culture contains much that is hostile to and fundamentally unwelcoming of children, I disagree with their proposed solution of recreating an earlier vision of childhood formed from nostalgic imaginings of a bygone era. Contemporary constructions of childhood need to be understood and critiqued with a view to put forward a more adequate vision of childhood for this time in which we live and to enable resistance to those aspects of contemporary constructions of childhood that thwart the thriving of children.

An Alternative to Children as Consumers

In a consumerist society, the wider culture lifts up a dominant vision of children, namely, children as consumers. Christian theology can offer an alternative vision of the meaning of childhood. This vision will provide alternative practices that compose a way of life for children and for the adults who accompany them. Together they must seek to walk in the way of Jesus, a way opposed to the hostile and inhospitable visions so prevalent in North America today.

Christian theology also can be co-opted and engaged to endorse and affirm the vision of human life held out and blessed by globalized late capitalist society. In this case no tension exists between the market’s vision of childhood and that found in the church. I contend that such uses of Christian theology lack legitimacy when held up to norms within scripture and tradition. These norms identify the good news in Jesus Christ in terms of human flourishing and freedom from oppression, as freedom for captives and sight for the blind (Lk. 4:18). These norms consistently uphold as an ethical mandate the need to “care for orphans and widows” (Jas. 1:27; see also Isa. 9:17, 10:2; Acts 6:1).

In this book, I offer one particular lens on Christian theology’s alternative vision of childhood. This lens comes from the vantage point of feminist practical theology and takes as its critical principle the liberation, thriving, and well-being of all children. This critical principle includes their liberation from oppressive manipulations of the market. In what follows, I will describe what I mean with this language as I also frame a way to proceed with constructing a theology that genuinely welcomes children for this time (the beginning of the twenty-first century) and in this place (North America and in particular the United States).

While I intend to focus on issues concerning children and childhood, the issues impacting children may well have broader implications. Perhaps children in a given society operate like the proverbial canaries in the coal mines in relation to wider cultural critique. What places childhood and children at risk, fails to welcome them, and cannot support their thriving may also be what threatens the rest of humanity as well, if only we heed the warnings. At the same time, perhaps the thriving and well-being of children also can signal what is most hopeful, most generous, and most gracious about the society they inhabit, pointing the way to transformation for us all.

Starting Small: An Approach to Doing a
Theology of Childhood

Most Christian theologies start big. That is, they begin with the largest of matters, such as the nature of God as the creator of the universe, and work their way down an invisible hierarchy to smaller concerns such as men, women, and only much later children and other creatures. They create vast, multi-voluminous systems of theological thought in which one of the primary concerns is coherence between one part of the system, say, the doctrine of salvation, and another part, such as the doctrine of the nature of God. Problematically, children often get “lost in the system” of systematic theologies, as a relatively small area of concern within the entire and vast universe of theological thought.

I am not writing a systematic theology of childhood. Nor am I engaging in the kind of theological reflection that places children at the center and then attempts to relate every facet of theological thought to the lives of children (although that would be an interesting project). Instead, in my construction of a feminist practical theology of childhood I will start small. I will focus on a particular situation and problem, the welcome and flourishing of children in North American mainline² congregations, who simultaneously participate in the church’s education in Christian practices and in the culture’s education in consumer practices. Concentrating on this situation and set of questions means I will not consider every theological doctrine in relation to children. I will pay particular attention to theological ideas—such as the call of Jesus to welcome children—that have some potential to contribute to the construction of emancipatory theology and practices with children. This work, then, represents an admittedly partial perspective, a specific topic and voice within the whole conversation, and not the whole of Christian theology itself.

“Starting small” also means starting with the lives and stories of some of the particular children who inform my thinking and action and with whom this theology is ultimately concerned. How does one gain access to the lives and stories of particular children? As a mother, of course, the lives and stories of my own children comprise an important source of children’s experience informing this theology. Another key context from which I have access to the lives and stories of children comes from participation and research in local congregations. Between 2001 and 2003, I directed a research project to study practices with children in congregations. This research is known as the Children in Congregations Project. Its ethnographic studies in congregations allowed me to come to know and interact with many children in the context of their faith communities. While this book is not a report on that research, the Children in Congregations Project constitutes another important source of connection with the lives and stories of particular children. I will refer to this study and offer some of the stories of its children from time to time.

Yet another point of access and connection with children’s lives informing this theology comes through my local Christian education resource center. In addition to offering a library for church curricula and educational materials used by churches, the center hosts a periodic gathering for a small group of pastors and educators. We share ideas and resources, engage in problem solving together, and offer mutual support for our work with children in various church-related contexts. Through this sharing I “meet” a number of children in the churches.

From time to time, in my role as a professor of practical theology and Christian education in a seminary, I visit these congregational and other church-related c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One - Starting Small: A Way of Doing Theology of Childhood
• Chapter Two - Whoever Welcomes One Such Child: Children in the Gospel of Mark
• Chapter Three - A Problem of Ambivalence: Children as Consumers in America
• Chapter Four - What Child Is This?: Religious Ambivalence toward Children
• Chapter Five - Educating Children in Congregations
• Chapter Six - Practicing Liturgy as a Practice of Justice with Children
• Chapter Seven - Toward a Feminist Practical Theology of Childhood
• Notes
• Index