'HOT POTATO': Is Sunday School Theological Child Abuse? [with a Response]
Wednesday, 6 April 2011
| Paul Tyson [Response by Beth Barnett]
I was a guest at a Greek Orthodox church recently, and I was fascinated by the prominent role children played in the ritual and symbolism of this very long and serious liturgy. The children were not treated in any sweet or condescending way, they were not put out the back because the service was too grown up for them, and their active and serious role in congregational worship was taken for granted. Further, looking around, it was evident that babies, children, youths, singles, parents and the elderly were all integrally present in this liturgy. (OK, most of them were Greek, but, ethnicity aside, this community was obviously both diverse and integral.) This was a gathering of a worshipping people with a rich and doxologically centred communal life.
I was struck by how different this worshipping community was to my experiences in a Baptist church. The church in which we were members had kids club (Sunday school), children’s talks, youth groups, and a large array of age, interest and gender specific sub groups, and we would even put on services and do outreaches that had a specific demographic target. Yet, when children participated in the service it was either passively as recipients of an entertaining children’s talk, drama or puppet show, or by children doing some sort of ‘item’ that was looked on with suitable delight by its adult audience, due to how cute and sweet our children were. And children were always pushed out the back to kids club during the sermon. Children were not integral to our collective worship and were excluded from the ministry of the pulpit.
I am a theologian and I have four daughters under the age of ten. So I appreciate that I cannot avoid being something of a nightmare to any typical ‘children’s ministry’ leader in your average Baptist church. Fun and buzzy American children’s programs get up my nose, and I am articulate and outspoken enough to ask uncomfortable questions about why we do this sort of thing at all. This is entirely unwelcome. My pastor said to me “your problem, Paul, is that you think too much.” This was the only justification I was ever given as to why nothing ever came of my concerns about children’s ministry.
Personal histories aside, I think (oh dear, sorry about that) there are serious theological concerns that standard Evangelical children’s ministry raises. Two types of concerns are immediately obvious – ecclesiological and doctrinal – but there is also the matter of why theological concern itself is just not that important to us as we relentlessly turn the children’s ministry wheel.
What place children have in our churches is shaped by our ecclesiology – our beliefs about what church is. That is, ‘children’s ministry’ which is not explicitly justified by some theology of church remains tacitly justified by the common ecclesiological beliefs assumed within any given congregation. In the modern technocratic age, we tend to view everything through the lens of what we can concretely see and control. If we assume church is like this too – which we typically do – then ‘church’, for our children, is some sort of program which is designed to Christianly educate, socialize and entertain the children of church attending adults on Sundays. Further, church for children conveniently happens at the same time – but in a different location and with specially tailored activities and programs – that church services happen for adults. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, we don’t want bored and naughty children disrupting our services. Secondly, we assume that age appropriate programs for children are better for their Christian development than them being in church with the adults.
Here are the basic theology 101 problems with this understanding of the church, and hence with the children’s ministry that goes with it. This understanding of church is atomistic and programmatic whereas the New Testament understanding of church is corporate and organic. That is, the church is not centrally what we can see and control, and is not centrally a collection of individuals with different needs that must be programmatically met, but it is a family where Christ is the head of each and of all. Theologically the essence of church is outside of what we can see and control, and it is not equivalent with what we do. Practically, we have lost sight of the core theological reality of what church is.
Doctrinally, Sunday School is a nightmare. Its lessons are typically about being good, nice and obedient children on the one hand, and about gory stories of killing the enemies of God on the other hand. The doctrine of salvation is a sickly simplistic penal substitution formulation, and all the depth and profundity of Biblical narratives are flattened out so that children can get the ‘right’ moral or doctrinal answer out of each lesson that is delivered. It’s cross word theology, and the answers are at the back of the book.
Now I am a professional theologian and I have four young daughters. In my experience your average child is far more theologically astute than your average adult. Children have not yet lost their taste for profundity, they are open to wonder and they have a thirst for satisfying meaning that most adults are simply too busy or uninterested to match. Belief – deep and open to God – is also often quite natural for children. This being the case, I cannot see why today’s kids should have any different response to what I had as a child in Sunday school – serious boredom.
But I fear things are worse than that. Perhaps, even, cross word dogmatics is actually what the adults teaching Sunday school, and adults in the church generally, believe, and Sunday school is a formation exercise in bashing deep child-like theological belief out of our children. If this theological (de)formation is successful, and if the child manages to graduate from Sunday school to youth group and then to adult church (unsurprisingly, this doesn’t happen that often) they will then fit in to the theologically two dimensional ecclesiological normality practiced in the daily operations of our churches. Suspecting this is the case, I have come to believe that Sunday school is typically a place of theological child abuse, no matter how genuinely sweet and sincere many of the late middle aged women who do all the hard yards at Sunday school certainly are.
Every evening we have family devotions at home. We read some scripture together and we often read an accessible short commentary on it, and then we talk about what we have heard before praying. In the conversations that flow out of this shared family time around God’s Word, my children (and my wife) regularly ask the most profound theological questions and make the most insightful observations. I do my best to go with them and to never fob them off with shallow or simplistic ‘correct’ answers. So, blessedly, I know they know the difference between the profound and the banal in theology. But I still can’t bear to see them being force fed simplistic and banal theological drivel at Sunday school. Fortunately, when they do go along they seem quite happy colouring in and cutting out, and, blessedly, they don’t seem to pay much attention to getting their cross words correct.
But here is the bigger problem. One does not have to be a professional theologian to see that the atomistic programmatic way we do church bears almost no relationship to what the New Testament means by ‘church’. Why are children – and the elderly, and every demographic – not integral to the serious and real life of worship and teaching in our churches? One does not have to be a professional theologian to notice that the ‘simplified’ dogmatics typically delivered at Sunday school often sail very close to theological banality which no child could seriously believe with their inner heart. And yet, a lot of what we get from the pulpit is just as theologically banal. Why is it that solid theology is so peripheral to how we do church and to what we teach to both our children and our adults at church?
There is, alas, a quite obvious answer to this question. We are living through what John Drane calls the McDonaldization of the church. Philip Johnson describes Drane’s diagnosis of our situation like this:
"The McDonaldization of the Church springs out of a sociological thesis developed by George Ritzer (McDonaldization of Society). The image of McDonaldization refers to the epitome of modernity: the fast-food process and assembly line. Drane takes up Ritzer's image and reworks the metaphor for the church. In Drane's view the McDonaldization process refers to a predictable theology, predictable church service, with slick simplistic formulae for evangelism and apologetics."
In other words, we in the church function organizationally in very much the same way as ‘successful’ corporations in the larger world around us. In one way this makes our churches comfortable and known places were our modern consumeristic comfort zones are all in place. On the other hand, the loss of deep connection with one another and the fragmentation and business of our modern lives – not to mention the absence of any sure transcendent orientation (God beyond and above my needs and desires) – means that if we stop turning the handle for an instant, the triviality and meaninglessness of our lives comes crashing in on us. And so we believe we cannot stop to ask any fundamental questions or look closely at who we really are. In short, we in the church are captive to the world.
So, can we imagine a different type of church where children are integral to the real and serious life of the church and all its ministries? Can we let go of the safe and predictable business of running programs, and the infantile security of cross word dogmatics as adults? Will the Scriptures, serious theology, and the power of the Spirit of God rather than the works of Man get a place in our churches again? These are pretty important questions.
Dr Paul Tyson lectures in Theology and Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University in Brisbane.
Response to Paul Tyson: ‘Is Sunday School theological child abuse?’ by Beth Barnett
Paul Tyson expresses a number of serious ecclesiological concerns for which he finds focus and fuel in the practice of children’s ministry. I am encouraged to find any serious theologian who has enough depth in their lens to consider the theological experience and contribution of children with the same respect as any other human being. Justice deserves applause.
Tyson poses the question in his characteristically provocative style, accusing the Sunday school movement of ‘theological child abuse’.
Abuse, especially child abuse, is both an emotive and serious term. In respect for those who have suffered in such a way, we ought use this phrase carefully. Flippant use of such a term undermines the sense of authenticity accorded to those who courageously rightly name their experience of abuse.
But it is not on these grounds alone that I wish to challenge Tyson’s claim. Following his own ecclesiological argument, the charge of theological abuse should not be brought against just one segmented age stratum of the church alone. Tyson (and I with him) champion the integration of all ages (and all possible demographic divisions) in the body of Christ. We all belong, sola gratia, sola, fide, solo Christo. If there is disempowerment, condescension, trivialisation and reductionism anywhere in the church, it is everywhere. Tyson hints at this as he investigates what becomes of faith as we grow. We must look first to the theology permeating the whole church.
Perhaps unintentionally, Tyson is hoist by his own petard, as he denigrates the ministry of the ‘sweet and sincere late middle aged women’ who do indeed do the ‘hard yards’ as well as the ‘fun and buzzy American’ programs. Could it be that the Kingdom of God is present among the so-called weak, despised and foolish of this world, sneaking in through ways that are not at all the intention of the official church system, which in many cases is thoroughly conditioned by the discourses of power and status as defined by the ‘gods that fail’ (Vinoth Rachandra’s fantastic phrase)?
In many groups which seek to nurture children theologically and spiritually, open ended questioning, multisensory experience, discovery, inductive and abductive (imaginative) learning methodologies, and collaborative, co-operative contexts are common place. The agency of the young person in their own growth and formation is respected and expected. Mutuality of contribution, listening and concern is foundational.
While I concede that this is not ubiquitous, and that there is still much ground to be gained, particularly in matching the competencies (especially in literacy) exercised in the church-based children’s context with those of the school-based children’s context (see my Cape Town 2010 presentation: Proposal paper for 3rd Lausanne World Congress on World Evangelization) there is less danger of theological abuse in our children’s ministries than in our adult congregations. The paradigms of power, dialectic of decision making, presumptions of speaking for others and claims over other’s lives in the sermon as monologue are, if not abusive, at least prone to underestimating the intelligence of the listener, rarely provide opportunity for multi-sensory information acquisition, make gross unilateral assumptions about the listener, and are somewhat limited to persuasion, enticement, two- dimensional rhetorical rationalism or bald instruction. We often treat our adults more like children than our children.
Here I have described the worst of the genre, with sincere apologies to my many fine preacher friends. There are several sermons I have heard in my life that have made a profound difference in the practice of my faith – so I do not wish to underestimate the existential power a sermon has had in anyone’s experience. My point here is to highlight that soliloquy itself resides in the cultural margins alongside marketing spiels, political speeches, academic lectures and street corner ranters – which particularly Australians filter with suspicion or submit to with gullible prejudice.
My many fine preacher friends frequently bemoan the distance between the intention of their words preached and the practice of the congregation lived. It seems that the form is not positive on either side.
Here I hope to suggest more positively, agreeing with Tyson on the profundity of faith and insight of children, that despite the whispers of theological abuse, our children and their faith communities offer a significant contribution to the maladies of the wider church. Flat doctrine, rote learning, top down instruction, and dissociative rationalism are not good for anyone. Many children’s ministry practitioners have a broad palette for engaging intelligently and integrationally with ideas, information, existence and external factors. Children themselves can model inquiry, investigation, analysis, evaluation, as well as appropriation and implementation of constructs, skills and materials.
With Tyson, I see hope in the church courageously reforming as an expression of the kingdom in which justice calls us all to share in full participation, contributing and reciprocating, serving and being served. As a declaration of the gracious welcome of God, we would do well to begin with our own children. If we cannot stand to share with them, how will we love our enemy, or welcome the stranger? Agreeing with Paul Tyson’s conclusion, let what we do be shaped by who we are.
Beth Barnett is the Baptist Union of Victoria Children and Families Facilitator, and prepares resources for Scripture Union on opening the Bible with children and all age worship.