How Do Churches Love Children?

Last week I heard someone who joined our church less than a year ago say, “I want my daughter to grow up in a church that loves her and that helps me love her.” Head nods all around.

As I drove home, though, the “how” of that statement started to pester me. How do churches love children?

[this is not a post about boundaries and appropriate adult/child relationships. I’m assuming those things]

[this is also not the post about how Christians in churches love one another in general]

I have a stake in this question because my daughter is being raised in a church, and I, too, want her to know the church’s love. I have no doubt the church loves her–and all its children–and I think I can identify a couple of ways that love is manifested.

There’s a space for children in worship. The front pew of our sanctuary is a squirrely bench of pink dresses and plastic dinosaurs. There’s a Children’s Time in which they’re invited to sit and simply listen (I had a seminary professor who put the fear of God into me about turning the Children’s Time into anything that elicited a laugh from the congregation).

The church employs no fewer than four people whose job is at least in part to teach or care for children (this is to say nothing of the preschool the church operates).

We run programs just for children: VBS. Camp. A Christmas pageant.

No doubt our church loves children.

Programatically at least. I wonder how many worshipers on Sunday morning who don’t have kids could name even two or three of the children making a ruckus there in the front pew. Should they?

Doesn’t the church’s love of children require it to know those children? Shouldn’t we be doing some things to introduce children to the congregation: their names? Their interests? Their favorites? Their parents?

Or am I overthinking this?

How do churches love children anyway?

[update: here’s a good way Theresa Cho has found to help her church love children]

[update 2: Here’s another great seasonal list of ways churches grow in their love of kids]

Tofu on the Facebook Pizza

I unfriended (Facebook) a family member in December over the poisonous speech of her friends in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. We’ve since re-friended (if that’s a thing), but the episode taught me something about social media and meaningful speech.

Here’s what happened:

Only hours after the shooting, the family member in question posted something to their Facebook wall that amounted to, “Don’t start talking about gun control. Guns don’t kill people . . . ” Now, no one learning the news from Connecticut was in any kind of emotional state to engage in rational conversation about it, yours truly included. I felt compelled to respond, though, so I hastily commented, “How can you defend guns right now? Seriously, how?”

The next several hours unleashed an increasingly abusive stream of comments directed at me. I was accused of insulting this family member. My Christian faith was questioned. I was told to “SHUT THE HELL UP!” All of this came from people I don’t know but who are part of my family member’s social network. As the thread of comments grew, I defended myself. Finally, though, I stopped, and I unfriended my family member. I wanted no part of this network of people.

If you insert yourself into controversial conversations on Facebook, people are going to attack you, probably with more vitriol than they would if you were in the same room. Everybody knows that. Something else has occurred to me as I’ve thought about this incident, though, and that is the notion of pizza. Facebook conversations are less like democratic exchanges of ideas and more like pizza parties.

When we share something on Facebook, whether we compose it ourselves or post it from another source, we’re offering a hot steamy pizza to our social network. Some of our friends will gobble it up, liking it and commenting, “Amen!” and “Thanks for sharing.” Others, though, won’t like it. And their comments effectively throw tofu on the pizza. And nobody likes tofu. Especially on pizza.

It’s as if I showed up to my family member’s pizza party, looked at what she was offering to her social network, and announced, “How can you eat that?!” and then tried to correct its flaws by adding healthier ingredients to it. That was a very unwelcome move to the vast majority of the network. It rendered people unable to assess the nutritional merit of the tofu I’d sprinkled on top of the pepperoni because they were so angry it was even there. I’d ruined their pizza.

I’m friends with my family member again. Only now, when she serves up one her contentious pizzas, I politely decline and move on. Her social network likes pizza that I think is unhealthy. My social network’s pizza tastes are different, and she wonders about them, “How can you eat that?!” But, for my part, I’m done trying to improve other peoples’ pizzas.

In Which A World-Renowned Theologian Says Exactly What I Was Thinking

Review of last week:

Posted this on Monday, asking, “Where are the adults in our young peoples’ lives who care about them for their own sake and not for some alterior, career-advancing motive?”

Went to the Emergent Theological Conversation on Wednesday to hear the likes of Tripp Fuller, Philip Clayton, and John Cobb talk about process theology. Clayton I found particularly compelling.Bought Kindle version of Clayton’s latest book, “The Predicament of Belief,” in which I discovered this quote while reading on Thursday:

One cannot assume, after all, that the mere fact of an agent’s taking an interest in the existence of other beings is morally admirable, even if it entails a certain amount of self-limitation on that agent’s part. One thinks of numerous mundane analogs: the farmer who shows concern for the well-being of his livestock only for the sake of maximizing his own financial gain; the would-be father who works long hours so he can start a family but who mainly wants children out of loneliness or for any of a host of social or cultural reasons; the teacher who pours her life into the minds of her students because she sees them as a way of establishing her career and exerting influence over the future of her profession. The motives involved in each of these cases are not obviously evil and do not involve any sort of deception; but neither are they altruistic.

Thought, “Hmmmm.”

Wondered if I could get Philip Clayton to be a volunteer leader of my youth group.