Religious Education in the Family Part 21

The family cannot afford to take the att.i.tude of hostile criticism, for it is thus fighting its first and most natural ally, the one other inst.i.tution engaged in its own special work. If the forces for spiritual character be divided, how easily do the opposing forces enter in and occupy! The family needs the support of the wider public opinion of the church, insisting on the supremacy of righteousness. The family needs the co-operation of the church in its task of developing religious lives. The family needs the power of this larger social body controlling social conditions and making them contributory to character purposes.

The family needs the stimulus which a larger group can give to children and young people.

This does not mean that we must never criticize the church. It is not set off in a niche protected from the acid of secular tongues and minds.

Ministers of the gospel are unduly resentful of criticism, perhaps because, after they leave the seminary, no one has a fair opportunity to controvert their publicly stated opinions. But the church needs the cleansing powers of kindly, wise, creative criticism. Anyone can find fault, but he is wise who can show us a better way. This church is the family's ally; it is our business to aid her to greater effectiveness.

The new church for our own day awaits the services of the men of today.

The purpose of the family is the basis of alliance with the church. As in every other relation and purpose of the home, so here: the dominant factor is the conscious function of the home and family. If the home is really a religious inst.i.tution it will seek natural alliance with all other truly religious inst.i.tutions. Ideally, what is a church but a group of families a.s.sociated for religious purposes? Is not the church simply a number of families co-operating in the ideal purposes of each family, the development of the lives of religious persons and the control of social conditions for the sake of that purpose? Without entering into disputation as to the relationship of little children to the church, is there not just this relation to the human society called the church, that it is a grouping of families for the purpose of the divine family?

-- 2. THE FAMILY IDEAL IN THE CHURCH

Would there be any question as to the naturalness of the relation of our children to the church if the family ideal so controlled our thinking as to saturate theirs? Is not this the present need, that both family and church shall conceive the latter in family terms? By this is meant, not simply that we shall think of what is called "a family church," a church into which we succeed in projecting our families in a fair degree of integrity, but that we shall think of the organization and mission of the church in terms of family life and of the ideal of the divine family. Keeping in mind the general definition already given of a family as persons a.s.sociated for the development of spiritual persons, let us hold the church to that same ideal; the lives of persons a.s.sociated in the broadest fellowship that includes both G.o.d and man for the purposes of spiritual personality. The church then should be the expression of that family of which Jesus often spoke, the family that calls G.o.d Father and man brother.

Closer and more helpful relations between family and church follow where the principles of the family prevail in the latter. The family is an ideal democracy because it exists primarily for persons. It places the value of persons first of all. So with the true church; it will exist to grow lives to spiritual fulness, and to this end all buildings, adornments, exercises, teachings, and organizations will be but as tools, as means serving that purpose. As the family sees its house, table, and activities designed to personal ends, so will the church. In an inst.i.tution existing to grow lives, the great principle of democracy and of the family will prevail, viz., that to the least we owe the most.

Just as the home gives its best to the little child, so will the church place the child in the midst. Just as the home exists for the child and thus holds to itself all other lives, so will the church some day exist for the little ones and so hold and use all other lives.

The prime difficulty of relating the children in our families to the average church lies in the fact that they are children, while the church is an adult inst.i.tution. Its buildings are designed for adults--save in rare and happy exceptions;[46] its services are designed for adults; it has a more or less extraneous inst.i.tution called a school for the children. The church spends its money for adults; it compa.s.ses sea and land to make one proselyte and coerce him back in old age, and allows the many that already as children are its own to drift away. It often fails to see that if it is to grow lives it must grow them in the growing period. There still remain many churches that must be converted from the selfishness of adult ministry and entertainment to self-giving service for the development of spiritual lives and, especially, for the development of such lives through childhood and youth. They must hear again the Master's voice regarding "these little ones," regarding the significance of the child. And all must be loyal to his picture of his Kingdom as a family and must, therefore, do what all true families do, become child-centric. A church in which children occupy the same place that they hold in an ideal family will have no difficulty in finding a place for the children. It will be a natural and unnoticed transition from the family life in the home to the family life in the church.

-- 3. A PLACE FOR ALL IN THE CHURCH

The family may help directly toward the realization of this ideal by an insistence on the family conception and the family program in the church. Bring the children with you to the church and seek to find there a place for each as natural as the place he occupies in the home. If the church makes no such provision, if it has no place for children, in the name of our wider spiritual family relationships we must demand it. Let the voice of the family be heard insisting on suitable buildings and specially designed worship for child-life--suitable forms of service and activity. Let the thought that goes to furnish these in the home be carried over to provide them in the church.

Parents may help their children to find right relations with the church by their att.i.tude toward it as the larger family group. To think and act toward this inst.i.tution as our home, the wider home of the families, is to establish similar habits of thought in children. Such a concept is not always easy to maintain; the church includes many of different habits of thought from ourselves, divergent tastes and habits of general life. Here one must exercise the family principle of responsibility toward the weaker and immature. This family, the church, just like our own family, exists, not to minister to our tastes, but that we may all minister to others.

The princ.i.p.al service which the family may render to the church is, then, to foster an interpretation and view of the latter which will relate it more closely to the home and will make it evidently natural for child-life to move out into this wider social organization for religious culture and service. Surely this should be the att.i.tude toward membership in the church, whether that membership begins theoretically in infancy or in maturer years; the child is trained to see the church as his normal society, the group into which he naturally moves and in which he finds his opportunity for fellowship and service. The family may well hold that relationship steadily before its members. In childhood the child is in the church in the fellowship of those who learn. The Sunday school is the spiritual family in groups discovering the way of the religious life and the art of its service. The fellowship grows closer and the sense of unity deepens as the child's relationship pa.s.ses over from the pa.s.sive to the active, from the involuntary to the voluntary--just as it does in the home--and develops, as the child comes into social consciousness, into a recognition of himself as belonging to a social organization for specific purposes.

-- 4. CHILD UNITY WITH THE CHURCH

At some time every child of church-attending parents will want to know whether he "belongs to the church." One must be very careful here, regardless of the ecclesiastical practice, to show the child that he is essentially one with this body, this religious family. He may be too young to subscribe his name to its roll, but he belongs at least to the full measure of unity appreciable by his mind. He must not be permitted to think of himself as an outsider. Indeed, no matter what our theology may hold, every religious parent believes that his children belong to G.o.d. Do they not also belong to the church in at least the sense that the church is responsible for their spiritual welfare?

The sense of unity must be developed. Writing the child's name on the "Cradle Roll" of the church school may help. a.s.suming, as he develops, that he is a part of this spiritual family, naturally expecting that he will have an increasing share in its life, will help more. Parents who dedicate their children to G.o.d pa.s.s on to them the stimulus of that dedication. A church service of dedication is likely to impress them with a feeling of unity with the church; seeing other children so dedicated they know that a similar occasion occurred in their own early lives.

The forms of relationship must develop with the nature of the child. The church needs not only a graded curriculum of instruction but a graded series of relationships by which children, step by step, come into closer conscious social unity, each step determined by their developing needs and capacities.

It is easy to say that the responsibility lies with the church to provide these methods of attachment. But the church we have been sketching is a congeries of families, after all, and it will do just what these families, particularly the parents in them, stimulate it to do.

-- 5. INCIDENTAL DIFFICULTIES

But what of those instances in which parents are convinced that the church does not furnish a normal and healthy atmosphere for the child's spiritual life? There are churches where the Sunday school is simply a training school in insubordination, confusion, and irreverence, or where religion is so taught as to cultivate superst.i.tion and to lead eventually either to a painful intellectual reconstruction or to a barren denial of all faith. There are churches of one type so devoted to the entertainment of adults, to the ministry to the pride of the flesh and the l.u.s.t of things, that a child is likely to be trained to pious pride and greed, or of another type, in which religion is a matter of verbiage, tradition, and unethical subterfuge.

Parents must be true to their responsibilities. The family is the child's first religious inst.i.tution. Fathers and mothers are not only the first and most potent quickeners and guides in the religious life, but they are primarily responsible for the selection of all other stimuli to that life. Under the drag of our own indifference we must not withhold from the child the good he would get even from the church we do not particularly enjoy; neither dare we, for fear of criticism or ostracism, force the child under influences which, in the name of religion, would chill and prevent his spiritual development, would twist, dwarf, or distort it. Responsibility to the spiritual purpose of the family is far higher than any responsibility to a church. The churches are ordered for the souls of men.

What shall we do in the family when the sermon is always tediously dull?

Don't try to force children to go to sleep in church; they will never get over the habit. Insist that there shall be a service suitable for them parallel to the adult service of worship.[47] Next, try to overcome the present popular obsession regarding the sermon. The church is more than an oratory station. The sermon is only one incident. Many criticisms of the sermon indicate that the critic measures the preacher by ability to entertain, that he attends church to be entertained. If that is essentially your att.i.tude, you cannot complain if your children are dissatisfied unless they too are entertained according to their childish appet.i.tes. When the sermon is poor, put it where it belongs proportionately and enlarge on the many good features of church fellowship and service.

In a word, let the church be to the family that larger home where families live together their life of fellowship and service in the spirit and purpose of religion and where there is a natural place for everyone.

I. References for Study

H.W. Hulbert, _The Church and Her Children_, chaps. i-v. Revell, $1.00.

H.F. Cope, _Efficiency in the Sunday School_, chaps. xiv-xvi.

Doran, $1.00.

George Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chap. xiv.

Appleton, $1.50.

II. Further Reading

A. Hoben, _The Minister and the Boy_. The University of Chicago Press, $1.00.

E.C. Foster, _The Boy and the Church_. Sunday School Times Co., $0.75.

G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, Part II. Revell, $1.35.

III. Topics for Discussion

1. What are the special common interests of church and family?

2. What are the fundamental relationships of the two?

3. What conception of the church ought to be fostered in the children's minds?

4. When is criticism of the church unwise?

5. What changes might be made in church life for the sake of the children?

6. What changes would bring the church and the home closer together?

7. What should be the children's conception of unity with the church?

8. Should children attend, in family groups, the church service of worship?

9. Does the plan of a short service for children meet the need?

FOOTNOTES:

[46] See a pamphlet on _Church School Buildings_ (free) published by the Religious Education a.s.sociation; also H.F. Evans, _The Sunday-School Building and Its Equipment_.

[47] See the author's suggestion for the Sunday school in _Efficiency in the Sunday School_, chap. xv.