“Children’s Ministries” – What if We Started From Scratch?
By Cynthia Coe
Suppose you had never heard the term “Sunday School.” Suppose “Sunday School” had remained a highly successful method of teaching literacy skills to children working in British factories on Sunday (their day off) – but had never taken hold in the United States and had eventually become obsolete, even in the UK. What would we then think of as “children’s ministries”?
If you heard the term “children ministries” for the very first time, with no preconceptions, you might think this concept meant actually ministering to children with particular needs. You might look at what needs exist among children. You might look at children in need in your own community, in communities beyond your own, and even children in need in other countries or on other continents. You might decide to focus your time and resources on children most in need or children you could feasibly help with resources on hand. You might think about how far your dollars would go to make the most difference in the world.
Looking at “children’s ministries” in this way, you might not come up with a program meeting in a room of a suburban parish building for one hour on Sunday, offering a couple of songs, a Bible story, and a craft. You might end up thinking about children in your local foster care system. You might think about kids living with their moms in your local homeless shelter. You might even think about children who tag along with parents visiting your food pantry to pick up something for dinner.
If you really got to thinking about “children’s ministries” as part of work of the global Body of Christ, you might think about those 143 million children in orphanages in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Americas. If you looked for children most in need in our world, you might look at children living without the fundamental love and support of a family as one of your top priorities. Or maybe you would want children in Sub-Saharan Africa to live to adulthood, rather than dying of malaria at the rate of one every minute. This kind of “children’s ministry” doesn’t look too much like a Sunday morning session on learning the liturgical colors, does it?
In developing what we now know as “Sunday School,” Robert Raikes looked around his community of Gloucester, saw a pressing need for education of poor children living in the slums of England, and organized a ministry to address this need. (He was criticized for possibly endangering home-based religious education.) This ministry of the Anglican Church was undoubtedly one of the most successful ministries in Christianity, working itself out of a job and replaced by state funded education for all children in England and much of the Americas and Europe.
But that was the 18th century. This is the 21st century. If we, like Robert Raikes, approached “children’s ministries” by looking around our communities, addressing real and pressing needs we saw around us, and focused the Church’s time and resources on these needs, what could we as the Body of Christ accomplish in our own time?
Cindy Coe 