Our church recently
took on a new challenge—to try to help families with young children
feel welcome. This sounds simple to someone at a church like the
moderately large evangelical church I grew up in, where we had a
packed Children’s Worship and a large well-staffed nursery, but
when there aren’t many children to start out with, it’s actually
extremely difficult. For one thing, there’s no nursery because
there’s maybe one or two babies there at a time, if that, so the
nursery “volunteers” would basically just be a mom sitting alone
with her baby, and at that point you might as well either stay home
or try to tough it out with the baby in the service.
Once upon a time,
when my family was new at another church and the Golden Boy was a
baby, the rector assured us that crying babies are just the church
breathing. And it’s true—no babies, no church. That is, you can
limp along for awhile without any babies, but probably not for more
than a generation or so. We could try to keep our church pristine and
unchanged, beautiful for weddings, impressive and historic for
visitors, but then we would be a museum and not a church, and the
local Historic Society (held in a beautiful old former church
building and often used for weddings) is already just a block or so
down the hill.
Hence the Prayground.
We recently put one up front, and it’s adorable—there are little
foam chairs and a table, IKEA finger puppets, foam blocks, felt food,
and board books. All the kids who have played there love it!
BUT
(yes, that’s a
really big but)
That’s when you
bump up into the other huge challenge of trying to help families with
little kids feel welcome without a critical mass of children already
present. It’s too quiet. And then your one little kid up there
throws a little felt tomato against the radiator cover and, because
there is literally no other noise happening at that moment, it sounds
like the starting gong for a sumo match, and you urgently try to get
them to play more quietly, and they gleefully defy you (because they
think it’s a game) and throw the foam block, too, and when you
intervene again they SHRIEEEEEEEK like a Nazgul, at which point you
shamefacedly haul your still-screeching monster over your shoulder
and out of the sanctuary.
You probably don’t
come back the next week, either, because it was exhausting and you
didn’t even get through the entire service, and you’re kind of
embarrassed about the whole thing.1
Which is why the
Prayground isn’t getting used nearly as much as we had all hoped it
would—too many parents I’ve talked to have decided that it’s not
worth it because their happy kids make too much noise in the most
awkward location at church—right under the pulpit. And I
understand. While lots of wonderful people will encouragingly tell
you that they don’t mind your kids’ noise, and that they’re
just glad you’re there, you know there are probably plenty of others who wouldn’t
say so to your face, but are definitely judging you for not meeting
whatever standard they remember themselves having totally mastered
back when they were parents disciplining their own children through
church.
Today, though, was a
little different. Today another little boy was there who wanted to
play. He and the Golden Boy had a great time with the shark finger
puppets and the blocks, talked quietly together about how old they
are and where they live, discussed having a play date, and were
generally imperfect yet delightful. Technically both of them are “too
old,” according to the Prayground description in the church
program, but they’re exactly the age that most needs wiggle room,
so they played together and made friends with each other. And having
a buddy you can count on is the thing that’s most likely to bring
you back to church again and again.
So I’ll keep
sitting in the front with my tiny Nazguls, because in the long
run, the thing that will be most helpful to families with young
children is all of us knowing that we’re not alone and we don’t
have to hide in the back—there are other kids here to play with,
other parents here who won’t judge because we all understand that
kids are destroyers of standards and paradigms, other little kids
filling the silence with joyful noise.
1This
is another danger point (if you’d like your congregation to last
for another generation, anyway): when you have little kids and it’s
too stressful to get to church on Sundays you just stop trying, then
you get out of the habit because yeah, it’s exhausting and you’re
really busy, and the kids grow up seeing church as maybe a nice thing but
not integral to their lives, and do you really think they’re going
to magically decide to show up every Sunday when they’re adults?
