Welcoming Children Into The
Body
It goes without saying that the children of
believing parents are the life blood of a congregation. They are the next
generation of members, ministers, deacons, elders, moms, maidens, brides and
grooms. One measure of the health of a congregation is whether there are
many children present, whether the riches of life in the covenant of grace
are being passed onto the next generation. A congregation where all the
saints are blue-headed and above the age of 60 is a dying congregation. But
a congregation where little people (literally little, less than three
feet tall) are bumping up against the legs and walkers of grandmas and
honorary aunties is most likely a viable congregation.
Sadly, many contemporary evangelical churches
have adopted the prevailing ethos of the surrounding secular, consumerist
culture which holds that children are a barrier and a hindrance to the "good
life," that families should limit their size to one and certainly no more
than two children, so that the kids can have the best of everything, right
down to their designer socks, and their opportunities for "success" be
maximized. It is irresponsible, we are told, to bring lots of children into
this world, especially if you cannot afford a college education for
them. Families who do have more than two children have "gotten the message"
at these sorts of churches with the odd stares, off-hand comments, and
worn-out jokes that usually come with a barb attached somewhere within.
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At
Covenant Reformed, we reject the anti-child, Planned Parenthood mentality
which regards children as an intolerable burden, just as we reject the
consumerism which supports it, not because we are obscurantist
reactionaries, but because our first love is for Christ and his Word.
Children are uniformly described by the Scriptures as a blessing from the
Lord and are to be received with gladness. The initial word from Creator to
our race was a blessing: "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth
and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the
air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth" (Genesis 1:28).
This is a blessing which has never been rescinded, not even by the Fall. And
it is a blessing which has been increased with each new outpouring of grace,
with each new administration of the one covenant of grace. For as the Lord
declared to Abraham, the father of the faithful, he would have an
innumerable offspring and through his offspring, the Seed, all the nations
of the world would be blessed--not exactly what Margret Sanger would have
had in mind (but then, she was in league with the other side).
Our congregation, therefore, welcomes large
families and their children into our midst. We welcome children into our
worship services. We welcome God's runny nosed little blessings, and we pray
the Lord might continue to bless our families with a righteous inheritance
across the generations!
Children
In The Service
Family
integrated corporate worship is one of the basic principles of our
congregation. We believe that as members of the covenant
body, children are to be included in the worship of God’s people, including
the reading and preaching of the Word of God. There is ample scriptural
evidence to back up this belief. Consider for instance that when Moses gave
his farewell sermon to the people of Israel--a vast congregation--all the
people were gathered together: men, women, leaders, officers, proselytes,
wives, servants, and the children (literally "little ones"--Deut.
29:10-13). Likewise when Moses instructed God's people to come before the
Lord every seventh year to hear the Word of God read, the children were to
be present as well as adults (Deut. 31:12-13). Given that Deuteronomy places
a high emphasis upon trans-generational faithfulness through the instruction
of our children in the Word of the Lord (Deut. 6:7; 11:19), it comes as no
surprise that children were expected to be participants in corporate worship
right alongside the rest of the adult congregation of Israel. To have
excluded them would have been to treat the "little ones" as Canaanites.
Additional passages to consider are these: Joshua 8:35; Exodus 10:2;
12:12-28; Ezra 8:1; Jer. 10:25; 1 Tim. 1:5; 2 Tim. 3:15 and Eph. 6:1.
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Historically, it was the standard practice of the Church for centuries to
include children in corporate worship. Children’s church, Sunday school and
youth programs are fairly recent creations of the modern evangelical church, designed
originally to lure the un-churched into the congregation. These evangelistic
techniques arose alongside of social Darwinism and its
philosophy-of-education spinoff: age-segregation. They are destructive to
Christian families and the long term health of congregations because they
substitute a humanistic alternative for God's plan for the family. We however are striving to recapture the blessings
which come from the full and biblical inclusion of our little ones in the
worship of God’s people, blessings which were once taken for granted.
Family-Integrated Worship Takes Practice
As we
seek to train our children to sit and participate in the Lord’s Service, we
should be considerate of the rest of the congregation. Please remember that
no one wants your children in worship more than we do. With that said, we
also do not want crying children to interrupt worship on the Lord’s Day.
Brief cries and whimpers are acceptable, but sustained outbursts should be
dealt with. We provide a cry room so that parents may remove upset children
from the service temporarily. Once they have calmed down, they are welcome
back into the service. Discipline should also be administered discretely
away from the sanctuary and the congregation. A separate cry room is
maintained downstairs from our sanctuary in addition to a private room adjacent to the narthex
for nursing mothers.
It takes
time and patience to train little ones to sit through the service. We know
and understand this and are available to assist families with young
children. Training our little ones to worship with God's people on the
Lord's Day begins at home with learning to worship the Lord during family
devotions. Feel free to speak to our pastor or to one of the elders if you
would like our help.
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Children
At The Table
Jesus said, "Let the little
children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of
heaven" (Matt. 19:14). In obedience to our Lord's command, our congregation practices
covenant
communion, admitting all baptized Christians who are members in good
standing of a Bible
believing church to the Lord's Table, without distinction
due to age or mental ability. Covenant communion refers to what we
understand to be the singular criterion for access to the Table: Membership
within the New Covenant (see Hebrews 8:6f). With respect to children, the practice is
known more popularly as paedocommunion: the giving of the Lord's Supper
to baptized children, apart from a coming-of-age ritual such as
confirmation or profession of faith. But the implications of covenant
communion go beyond our children. Covenant communion is inclusive of both
the mentally handicapped and the elderly suffering from dementia. Because
the Spirit gives faith to whom He will, and because faith is a gift, not
something we generate from within ourselves (Eph. 2:8), the benefits of the
Lord's Table are received solely on the basis of God's gracious provision
for the weak and the beggarly: Christ Jesus our Lord, not upon the condition
of someone's mental horsepower.
Believing parent: Why
should your children be at the Lord's Table? Our friends at
Paedocommunion.com
write:
"Paedocommunion was the
universal practice of the Church until the late medieval period (c.
1200). It is attested at least as far back as Cyprian (c. 250), and
is witnessed throughout the centuries following (e.g. in Augustine,
Leo the Great, etc.).
Nonetheless, the
practice dropped off in the Western Church. This was due to a
combination of factors (such as superstition regarding the
sacramental elements, and the view of the bishop as the conveyer
of the Holy Spirit, so that confirmation could not be conducted
by a mere priest at baptism, but had to be accomplished by the
bishop).
Biblically,
paedocommunion is supported by the status of children within the
covenant. Even as God counted Abraham's offspring as His own,
and therefore required that they be circumcised (Gen. 17), so
too Jesus assumes a priestly role in relation to the children of
new covenant believers, and calls them the heirs of the kingdom
(Matt. 19:13-14).
What is perhaps
most surprising is that many (indeed most) who hold to infant
baptism nonetheless reject paedocommunion. They suggest a
cleavage between the two sacraments. Biblically speaking,
however, the two sacraments are tied together very closely.
Baptism incorporates one into Christ and His Church (1 Cor.
12:13). Meanwhile, the Lord's Supper is precisely the meal of
the Church. The Church is the one body together precisely
because it partakes of the one bread together (1 Cor. 10:16-17).
Consequently, just
as the children of the old covenant were admitted to the
sacramental communal meals of the OT (such as Passover), so too
the children of the new covenant belong at the table of the
Lord. This is the position of a growing number of Presbyterian
and Reformed scholars and pastors, who are recognizing the
profound biblical foundation that underlay the historic practice
of paedocommunion". |
Equipping Fathers To Equip Families
In a family integrated
church, the work of the Pastor and the Elders is not to disciple each
and every member of the congregation, but to equip fathers in
particular to disciple the members of their households, to be the
primary instructors of their wives and little ones. Moses, in what
is the Bible's preeminent book on education, made the point
generations ago that the primary responsibility for instructing
children in God's Word rests not with Levites or priests, but with
parents:
These words which I command you
today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your
children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk
by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. (Deut. 6:6-7)
And Dad in particular:
When your son asks you in
time to come, saying, 'What is the meaning of the testimonies, the statutes,
and the judgments which the LORD our God has commanded you?' Then you
shall say to your son: 'We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, and the LORD
brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand . . . (Deut. 6:20-21)
The Apostle Paul, when confronted with
the issue of how prophetic instruction was to be disseminated in the
New Testament church, took a similar course of action:
Let your women keep silent in the
churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they are to be
submissive, as the law also says. And if they want to learn
something, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is
shameful for women to speak in church.
(I Corinthians 14:34-35)
Of course, the Apostle Paul when he
writes such things (cf. I Timothy 2:11f) is usually damned by
Christ-hating liberals as a bad-tempered misogynist, but at least
they know what he is saying. The difficulty is with erstwhile
evangelicals, who, though they claim to receive all of the Bible as
the inerrant Word of God, find the Apostle Paul to be something of
an embarrassment on occasion, prone to those sorts of unsociable
gaffs which needlessly infuriate nice, polite egalitarians. But the
Apostle in this instance is less interested in silencing women than
he is in provoking their husbands to do their duty, study the Word,
and exercise a husband's Christ-like office of prophet, priest, and
king in their own homes (Ephesians 5:25).
Why would most women in contemporary
churches cringe at the thought of asking their husbands to explain
the sermon, the Sunday School lesson, or some other point of
doctrine? Because the man is a low watt bulb when it comes to the
Word of God, but he can tell you all about Monday Night Football,
his golf game, or what Rush said this afternoon.
The job of the officers in Christ's
Church, therefore, is to get men off the benches, unplugged from the
rants of talk radio, and back into the lineup of discipling their
families in the things that really matter. This is just part of the
work of a family-integrated church. Are you up for it?
Last update:
26 February 2009
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