Child Friendly Church

Years ago I heard a wonderful talk by the Episcopal Bishop of Rochester (can't remember his name) about prejudice in the Church. The rest of his talk was about what we do with children.

-send them away
-exclude them from most of Christian worship
-don't listen to them

and on and on. He was correct, of course.

This Christmas (2011), we had a great turn out of kids for the Christmas Eve mass because they were participating in a pageant. The level of excitement and interest was obvious. The question is, how could we allow this to continue.

Here are some suggestions:

1. Children attract children. Make our programs more visible.
2. Find creative ways to include children in the Sunday mass. We already have one who has been reading in both English and Spanish. Let's find some others. When do our kids get a chance to be servers? How can we make that possible? There are any number of other things that they can do, in fact, anything that adults do with the possible exception of administering the chalice.

3. There is always the issue of language. Most of our kids attend mass in Spanish, even though some of them have limited abilities in Spanish. What does that say about the use of English in the Spanish mass? That answer might have to wait for a while.

We have already changed the Sunday morning schedule to have Christian Education for all, adults and kids, at 11 am. That allows the children to attend either the 10 am in English or the 12 noon in Spanish. It's not much time, but it allows them to be fully part of what is going on.

What ideas do you have for including children more into the life of the Church?