Children, Church and Kingdom

Abstract

A church which is almost exclusively adult in its make-up and style may well be seen to be lacking in catholicity, and failing in its proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Perhaps a church may be bereft of children through no fault of its members, but more likely it will have been made clear to children and teenagers, perhaps in unspoken ways, that children are an inconvenience, a disturbance, destructive of concentration and peace of mind, their unseemly noises being not unlike the shouts of those infants in the Jerusalem Temple, whose praise to God the Pharisees sought to silence. Children, by their openness, by their spontaneity, by their freshness of thought, and by their emotions being near to the surface, can, if allowed to express themselves in church, be both a sign of hope and a threat to the ‘status quo’, a challenge to tram-like thinking and spiritual rigidity. ‘Let the children come to me, do not hinder them; for to such belongs the Kingdom of God’ (Mark 10.14).

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