Children

For detailed information about Children's Ministries, download the Children's Ministries brochure (PDF).

Our children are the church of today. The ways we choose to welcome them determine whether they will grow up with a sense of God's presence in their lives.

Gertrud Mueller Nelson said, "Children are living in the Kingdom of God today. Will we follow them in, or will we chase them out?"

At St. Thomas, we understand that our children have real, undiluted experiences of the divine. We do our best to listen to their stories and offer our children a lens--the Gospel of Christ--through which they can learn to make sense of their relationship with God.

Philosophy of Formation

"Christian education is not the communication of correct views about what the various works and words of Jesus might mean; rather it is the stocking of the imagination with the icons of those works and words themselves. It is most successfully accomplished, therefore, not by catechisms that purport to produce understanding, but by stories that hang the icons, understood or not, on the walls of the mind." - Robert Farrar Capon, The Parables of Grace

Experience + Reflection = Learning

A four-year-old girl lost her father in a car accident. At the funeral, her family was very concerned about her; they expected her to cry at the loss of her dad, but she acted perfectly normal, as if she didn’t miss him at all.

A week later, her mother observed the little girl playing in the sandbox with her favorite doll. She covered the doll with sand, unearthed the doll, and then buried it and exhumed it again and again and again. She wasn’t crying, but she was grieving deeply. She was learning by reflecting on her experience through serious play.

Sacramental Play

Baptism is just like this, but we use water instead of sand. We bring people to the water one by one and pretend to drown them in it. Then we bring them up alive again from the water. Why? Because the people we bring to the water have experienced God’s unconditional saving love, which mere words cannot begin to describe. Now they—and we as their community—need to reflect on that experience of our old selves dying as God calls us into new life.

Communion is the same kind of story. We pretend to make sacrifices on this altar, like the priests of Ancient Israel did with actual knives and animals and blood. We sing Jesus’ words: “My flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.” Graphic words! In another way of looking at the story, we sacrifice ourselves on the altar. After the pretend sacrifice, we have a pretend meal … not enough food to fill us up, but we do actually consume it. We offer ourselves to God as a sacrifice, and God gives us ourselves … or gives us Jesus … it depends on how you choose to play the game today.

Serious Play

But it would be a mistake to say we’re “just pretending” to drown our friends, or “just pretending” to share a meal. For children, pretending is the most serious thing in the world, because it is how they reflect on their experiences and learn new things.

Basic Assumptions

• Story and Play are the two basic elements of children’s learning.
• Children are capable of meaningful religious experience: not only do they sense God’s presence and respond to it … they have deep relationships with God.
• Young children already have a spiritual life of depth that adults may not understand or honor. They are already wrestling with complex existential issues, including:
  – a. Aloneness/loneliness
  – b. Freedom/free will
  – c. Death
  – d. Purpose/meaning
• Young children can discover and use the language of religious narrative and symbol that will allow them to express themselves spiritually and “make meaning.”
• Children should be active participants in the ministry of the church.
   

Outlining a Philosophy

• Our children don’t need more teachers in the academic sense. They need a different kind of teacher: a model of the Christian faith.
• Our teachers are guides; they do not have to have all the answers.
• Every member of the community is responsible for teaching our children, whether or not they spend time in Sunday school.
• An attentive teacher will learn from the children as well.
• We should treat our children seriously and with deep respect. They are subjects, not objects.
• It’s up to us to create a safe place for children to:
  – a. Be themselves
  – b. Learn how Christians live in community
  – c. Come closer to the mystery of God’s presence
  – d. Learn the language of the Christian people
• Part of creating a safe place is creating a safe space where children feel welcome.
• The most important “answers” we can seek to give our children are answers that already lie inside them. These answers will be most important to them if they can discover them on their own.
• As we teach, we must keep in mind that religion is more like an art form than a science. God’s love does not depend on our knowledge, but seeking knowledge is a blessed path, and we should support it.

Sources/Further Reading

• Jerome Berryman, The Complete Guide to Godly Play, Volume 1
• Eibner/Walker, God, Kids, & Us: The Growing Edge of Ministry with Children and the People Who Care for Them
• James Fowler, Stages of Faith
• Gertrud Mueller Nelson, To Dance with God
• Gretchen Wolff Pritchard, Offering the Gospel to Children