A children’s worker, a parent and a teacher walk into a bar…

The parents

Yomi Ayodele

Chinelo Onunekwu

The teacher

Melanie Best

The children’s worker

Alex Taylor

… and asking the questions

Jamie Cutteridge

Jamie Cutteridge: In your different contexts, what’s the biggest struggle you face or you see other people face in forming faith in children?

Chinelo Onunekwu: Personally I think it’s captured by the answer a young person gave me once when I asked if their friends knew they were Christians: “Most people who aren’t atheists or other religions say they’re Christians but they don’t live like Christians. So if all of us are supposed to be Christians, I don’t want to be the one who stands out by seeming ‘holier than thou’ while trying to live out my faith.” I think that is a synopsis of what we’re living in, even as adults – we say we’re Christians but what does that look like? If we say “we’re a Christian home” and I’m saying to my son “these are the guidelines you have”, but everybody else who says they’re Christians allows those things to happen, it becomes a bit of a struggle – we lose the need for our faith to be distinctive.

Yomi Ayodele: When my daughter was five years old, I was praying with her. She said: “Dad, I’m scared.” I told her not to be scared because Jesus was with her. “But I don’t see him,” she said. I had no idea how to break it down to a child that Jesus was there and was going to watch over her. So one big challenge is trying to communicate to a child things you’re still trying to understand yourself. We’re expected to know everything, but it can be really powerful to take yourself away from that mould and be real with your child, saying: “I don’t understand it myself but this is what I believe”. But it’s difficult because they expect you to know and sometimes you just don’t know!

CO: What I’ve found is that they don’t expect us to know everything, but they expect us to say that we do! I think you gain more respect by saying: “I don’t know, can we talk this through together.” My son has given his life to Christ but he enjoys coming up with these kind of things that make me think, “what have we done wrong?” Once he said to me: “We don’t see God but we believe he exists. Somebody who isn’t a Christian believes in aliens. Is God an alien? How do we prove that God isn’t an alien because by every definition he is?” I said: “You have a point but the difference is that you have a relationship with God, you don’t have a relationship with an alien.” He looked at me and smiled. In those instances, I think trying to behave like we know everything is actually a massive trap that stops them feeling free to examine their faith.

Melanie Best: I’m quite lucky because my head teacher is a Christian and then flows through the school in quite a big way. All the parents and children know he’s a Christian so that really enables any other teachers at the school to be able to profess that as well. But it’s not something that I go into school to teach – I’m there to answer the questions or help them to talk about it. The first school I was at there were a lot of Christian teachers but I don’t think there was that spiritual development at that school at all. At our school, just because of the way our head teacher is, we’re able to develop the spirituality of children more.

Alex Taylor: There is a statutory requirement to think about spiritual development isn’t there? How does that happen?

MB: I would say generally in a lot of schools it’s possibly ignored – it’s more that people just teach faith or faiths but I guess we teach the development of a child’s spirituality and morals through PHSE. There’s always an openness at our school to be able to come and talk about things if they want to.

AT: In children’s work it’s mostly practical struggles – if you are on a rota at church, you might only be there once every two weeks or once a month for maybe 40 minutes and that’s just not long enough to start those deep faith conversations and enabling children to be comfortable with you as their leader. As a teacher, you’re with them longer, as a parent you’re with them for the rest of the time but with a children’s worker, you might only see them on a Sunday morning.

But also some parents do have that mind set of: “Here’s a church, I’ll give you my child and you will give me back a perfect Christian, knowing everything.” In those 40 minutes you might play some games, tell a Bible story, say some prayers, have some questions and chat about it a little bit but it’s just not enough to be the main faith formation station.

JC: Where should we put the onus on who’s responsible for forming children’s faith?

YA: Naturally as human beings we are always looking to abdicate responsibility. But scripture says: “Teach a child the way he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” As a parent, it’s my responsibility. If I go to a church, the expectation is that they help a little bit. In the same way as it’s my responsibility to watch my child’s development – it’s not entirely up to the teacher, they have a responsibility but ultimately it’s for me to sit down with my child and see how they are doing and how I can help. Part of that responsibility is that I take them to a good church where the hope is that they will impart some of the things that I’m doing at home.

CO: At the beginning of last term, a mum of a teenager who comes to the youth group I help at said: “I’ve heard a lot about what you guys are doing, that’s really good. My child has been going to church for years and doesn’t know the Lord’s Prayer so I hope you guys will give homework.” I thought: “Seriously, for years your child hasn’t learnt the Lord’s Prayer and you haven’t thought to teach her yourself?!”

Another mum said that she was really angry because she thinks her son was trying to annoy her by saying that he’s an atheist. I said: “Why do you think he’s trying to annoy you? He might not believe in God, have you thought about that?” She said: “How can he not believe in God?” This is a parent who brings her child to church, believing that because he comes to church, automatically, in half an hour we’ve made this child a Christian!

AT: I think there is a partnership with church – both within the formal children’s work but also with the informal nature of the community. I’m a single man, I’m child free, but my role in church, as well as being a children’s worker, is to be part of the community and support people, including families. I think we need to use that community more. My faith will be different from yours and so I might have helpful insights for a child or a young person. They might say: “I’d love to discuss this” and you can say: “Well, you could talk to so-and-so about that…”

MB: It’s really important that children speak to people from different backgrounds and experiences. They might not find the answer they’re looking for from a parent or their youth leader – they might find it from someone who has experience of that thing that they’re going through. It might be another child, it might be the oldest person in the congregation…

AT: Some of the key people in my faith formation were my parents’ friends. It can be a little bit embarrassing talking about faith with your parents. It used to drive me up the wall when my parents would have family quiet time at home, but because my parents’ friends were often around they were different and their faith made an impact on me.

CO: It’s also important for us to be honest about our testimonies as well. Some parents try to portray that they were always a perfect Christian. But being able to say that you made mistakes allows a certain kind of freedom for them to know that we’re not perfect, we all make mistakes and that’s part of life.

JC: What role does school play?

MB: Developing spirituality of children is difficult – it’s hard because we’re constrained by the government so we have specific things that we have to teach and we have to teach them in a certain way. I can develop my relationship with the children within the classroom, lunchtimes and break times. We’re encouraged to get to know the children and to spend time with them, so if I’m out at play time, I’m out there to be talking to the children.

We’re encouraged to talk about what we do at the weekends. I do feel like I have some responsibility to develop the children’s spirituality at school but it can only be if I know that they’ve got something that they want to develop. So if they’ve come to me and said: “Can I speak to you about this?” then I can help them to develop that. In most primary schools, we don’t have groups like Christian unions like they have at secondary school where they can develop that.

Children are looking to you – you’re the person that they’re going to copy so I just have to be careful with everything I say and do. My class all know that I’m a Christian; they know I go to church. I hope that maybe some things I say or talk about, or the way I talk to them and the way I am will sow some seeds for them.

CO: For children, the more important thing is how you are as well as what you say, so you actually are doing a lot more than you probably think you are. Groups are often people talking at children. But you, I would imagine, are more impactful with the way you relate to them. They talk to you – they wouldn’t talk to you if they didn’t feel comfortable.

JC: What are some of the things that you have seen have a positive impact on the spiritual lives of children?

MB: Being open with them: actually just being able to sit and talk to them and letting them be able to talk to you and being able to listen – “I will listen to you, I will give you the time.” I think that’s sometimes just what they need. Maybe it’s something they can’t talk about at church or they can’t talk about at home, they want someone who will listen.

YA: I think, especially with teenagers, knowing that you want to learn with them as opposed to teach them something or just forcing things down their throat is powerful. It’s also that transparency – the fact that I say I’m a Christian is not the same as being perfect. There’s a tendency to come across as if you always do things right because you’re trying to help them to do things right.

AT: It’s powerful when the church community values the children that are there: being able to play football and have nobody going: “Put that ball down. Don’t do that here.” Suddenly church becomes somewhere where you want to go. But also I think you see great successes when children are included in services, where they feel valued, where they feel like they are not shoved in a corner and told to shut up but where they can engage with the singing and with the prayer times, when they’re catered for but not spoken down to. My faith as a 6-year-old, a 9-year-old or a 15-year-old should be valued and catered for in the same way that a 40-year-old or a 70-year-old’s faith is.

JC: How can churches, schools and parents work better together?

MB: Our church and some other local churches come into school. They do ‘It’s your move’ with the year six children going up to secondary school and all our children find that so useful. Some of our parents who are Christians run the local youth group which is open to everybody – it’s not a faith based youth group – and they work closely with the school. If there’s a problem at the youth group they come and tell us about it.

CO: Our church is a good community but there’s room for improvement. One of the things I’ve noticed at lots of churches is the emphasis on ‘main’ church and not children. The children pick up on that and then the parents subconsciously don’t think it’s important to do anything with the children. Even though there’s just a short period of time that children spend in churches, churches need to understand that they’ve got to work with the parents and be seen to actively do stuff for the children which then places responsibility on the parents. Like at school, if you do so much work, the parents understand they’ve got to do something at home to maintain that standard. Churches need to be more active when it comes to children’s work – making the children a part of the main church. The oldest people in the church have so much experience to share but sometimes they don’t see the children and the children are scared of older people and don’t know how to relate to them. Church should be a family and in a lot of places you don’t see that.

YA: That was a problem we had in my old church. Children couldn’t relate to the main church – they didn’t even understand the language! With the younger children, it’s important for the church to develop that relationship with parents. Every once in a while give the children something to go back home with so that it keeps that continuity with the parents and then it’s not just the leaders’ responsibility to teach them in church – they come back home with something and they can ask questions about it.

AT: There’s an onus on church leadership to make sure that happens intentionally. Church leaders should get to know the children themselves. If the children meet a church leader and they’re interested in them, that’s amazing for a 7-year-old child when the minister comes and chats to them (not at them) about their life or something they’re interested in. Other adults will see that the leadership of the church is interested in children’s lives and will mirror that

CO: We visited a church in Cardiff and the minister noticed we were new. Most leaders of churches talk to the parents, but he talked to my children and he talked to them about things they do and music and all of that. When I asked my 14-year-old what he thought of the church he said he found the service boring but that he wouldn’t mind visiting again because he really liked the minister. When I asked why he said: “Because he talked to me.”

JC: What would you want to say to those other invested parties here: what do parents want to say to teachers and so on…?

CO: For teachers I would say, they watch you more than they listen. It’s a massive pressure when you think you’ve got to be perfect all the time but it’s just the way children are. As adults we go to this default thing of: “do what I say and not what I do”, but children do what you do more than what you say. The teachers I remember are the ones who were kind, I can’t remember what they taught me! Teachers, you are doing an amazing job. You would be amazed how many children go home and talk about the impact you have on them.

MB: I would say to parents: “Be with your children.” Not just in the same room as them, because I know parents have been at work all day and are tired when they come home, they want to catch up and do things, but you haven’t got them for that long. Spend time with them; nurture them because you are the ones who have them in the evenings and at the weekend. You’ve got two hours with them before they go to bed – spend quality time with them.

YA: In a lot of ways, some of the struggles we have as parents raising our children can be solved if we are part of a community, –you have someone there who’s been through that journey and they can give you tips. The answer is just next door sometimes – be able to talk to other parents.

AT: I would encourage parents to get to know the children’s workers at church – see if you can get any pointers because some children’s workers have done lots of training and have lots of experience. The more that churches and parents work together, the better faith development will be. What better faith opportunities are there for building faith in families? There’s a lot more that a church can do for a family than I think families expect and that churches actually do.