Faith in Children

Ronni Lamont

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780857219510
• eBook ISBN: 9780857219527
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

In most churches, Christian education for children is run by enthusiastic volunteers from the worshipping community. But how much support and training do they receive? Do they get the opportunity to explore and apply principles of child development or current theories of faith development? And to what extent are they supported by their ministers and congregations with a clear focus on children's work?

Including empirical research and drawing on the author's extensive experience of working with children, Faith in Children offers a window into the process going on inside our children and enables those who work with them to understand what makes a particular child tick.

With insights into a range of teaching methods, learning styles and the unique spirituality of children, this book suggests how adults can truly learn from children as they learn from us.

There are tips for ministers and educators on how this precious teaching and nurturing resource can be sustained and used to work with children in a more effective manner. Through this increasing knowledge and understanding, adults can come closer to understanding children understanding God.

CHAPTER 1

Spirituality

God means good to me. And my family. The best thing is God. When I am lonely, I think of God and I feel better.

Marayyam, eight years old

What do I mean when I use the word “spirituality”? What do you mean when you use the word? Spirituality is a vague word, one that is commonly heard, but not often in the same sentence as “church, worship, congregation, Sunday school…” Today’s concept of spirituality is exceptionally slippery, and very subjective to the person using the word. With the rise in mindfulness, meditation, and other spiritual practices, many people now describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” and therein may lie the nub of the matter.

My computer’s thesaurus defines “spirituality” as, “Religion, theology, religious studies, mysticism, holiness.”

The aim of this chapter is to examine what the word spirituality means to me, and therefore to help you to examine what it might mean for you. We will then move on to looking at what it might mean within the confines of this book.

A good way into this discussion is through that common comment above, “I am spiritual but not religious.” Let’s look at a typical person espousing that view: Thirty years ago, she was religious. She now worships at the Society of Friends (Quakers) yet does not describe herself as a religious person. What does this mean? Many people would agree, describing themselves as spiritual but towards the agnostic/atheistic end of the “belief in God” spectrum.

Try this for yourself: Ask people what they think the word “spirituality” means. They will probably reply using words such as “love, peace, inner self, hope, tranquillity.” They may mention religious belief, as my thesaurus did, but if they live outside of organized religion it will come later in their personal list.

Now ask them what “religion” means. They’ll probably use words such as “church, funeral, marriages, baptism, Christmas, Easter, Christians, Muslims, and so on.” The two lists do not have many common words, but the tone is different; the list to do with “spirituality” feels more positive, more desirable in this day and age. “Religion” comes across as a more negative concept, more to do with “Thou shalt not” than “Thou shalt.” One is very personal, the second much more to do with society and our institutions. One is full of the desirables of a full and inclusive, holistically healthy life, the other of optional add-ons for those who require such things. Religion can sometimes cause as many problems as it gives answers. Spirituality is thought of as an opening up, a third dimension to life, and one that most people are very positive about. Religion; well, that depends on what this week’s headlines are as to how positively people respond to the word and all the baggage it brings with it. The necessary structures within religion are now thought of by many in the population as controlling and unhelpful, while spirituality is liberating and seen to be advantageous in one’s personal inner journey.

In the book The Spirit of the Child,¹ the relationship between spirituality and religion is modelled as a tree, where the roots are a person’s spirituality and the leaves are their religion. Thus, the spirituality is the deep down, unseen part of the person’s faith life, and the leaves, so conspicuous and clear, mark them out as religious. The metaphor could be taken to extremes – perhaps Anglicans are oak trees, Roman Catholics sycamores, Muslims… And the last comment to make before the metaphor is taken to ridiculous extremes is that while the leaves may indeed fall off a tree, it’s only dead when the roots die. So it is that people may well be spiritual without any trappings of religious belief or conviction. These people may only go to church or a place of worship to mark the important rites of passage for their family, or others, such as weddings or funerals. They may be one of the millions who regularly attend church at Christmas and Easter, but not usually in between. They may be one of the millions who went regularly as a child but stopped when something else was more important on a Sunday. Or they may be one of the many people who like to enter churches when they are empty, to think and commune with their inner being without any overt guidance as to how that process should be undertaken. I would encourage all who are reading this book to notice the spirituality that flows through all human beings, or at least has the potential to be there within each of us. And this applies to children especially.

This common potential spirituality was brought to our attention in particular through the work of Alister Hardy, who, as retired Professor of Zoology at Oxford University gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1965. In these lectures, Hardy, a committed Darwinist, stated that he believed that religious experience has evolved through the process of natural selection; that being religious in some way gave Homo sapiens an evolutionary edge. Religiosity was of survival value to the individual. He was saying that there is a form of awareness that is over and above our “normal” awareness of what is going on around us, which transcends that everyday awareness. This special awareness is potentially present in all human beings and has a positive function in our lives, enabling us to survive, and that the many religions that are present in our world are the natural outworkings of that transcendent awareness. The religions of the world vary according to the culture in which they arise, taking local cultural norms and refining the religion to reflect and reinforce those particular norms. He also believed that religious awareness is an expression of a psychological predisposition or a process that is present for all of us, and that there is a section of the brain that has evolved to undertake this awareness. The awareness is not “owned” by any one religion, but those religions show that it is indeed common, right across the globe, in all cultures. It is even seen in people who are alienated from religious culture, and this may be an important observation in our increasingly secular society. Thus religious awareness is thought to be potentially present in all of us.

There are various theories as to how this spiritual awareness became the religions that we now see around us in the world: Religion may come from ancient philosophies, with traditional philosophy underpinning the particular form of faith. Or it may be that it is an outworking of a common experience, a spiritual awareness that is common to humanity. Or it could be that religious experience is coming out of a culture, and entering a religion means that you have to become competent in the language of that particular religion. It could be a combination of these three theories, but the last one means that if anyone is to comprehend and grow in their chosen religion, it is imperative that they have the language to negotiate that faith. How could anyone be a Christian without hearing the word “sin” and understanding what that tiny but powerful little word means?² Yet we assume that when we say “sin”, everyone listening knows what that means. The same is true for all the language that is used within the context of the church and its workings. Religious language is a clear form of jargon (a specific set of words and concepts necessary to an area of understanding), and if we do not ensure that those who are joining our faith are not clearly helped to understand the vocabulary of our faith, they will not be able to access worship or any more than a very basic form of teaching. This is an important idea, and one that we will return to later.

So, across the globe, this awareness gave rise to religions. It is this awareness that many people define as “spirituality”. Lectures on spirituality at the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre at Oxford University (now at the University of Wales) were followed by work by David Hay at Nottingham University. Hay has since published his research investigating the common spiritual experiences of human beings in the UK in such books as Religious Experience Today (Mowbray, 1990).

At least 50 per cent of the population will acknowledge having had such an experience, many in childhood, many when the person was alone.³ The experiences are often spoken about as sensing a presence, of the person knowing that the presence was good and loving. In a recent conversation, I heard the story of how, after giving birth, a woman was left on her own, and she saw a beautiful blue-white light in the room. She knew that this was God and that great goodness was emanating from the light. To this day, she still puzzles over the “why?”

It is worth noting that people who are not able to access a good quality of life, who are oppressed and unable to articulate well, will be less likely to speak of a religious experience, and that there is a significant association between having a spiritually rich inner life with good health and personal happiness.⁴

There are suggestions in the research that spirituality is more evidently present in children than in adults. This may be due to the pattern of Western culture where there is an expectation that we keep our religious experiences to ourselves (and if you do speak of your spiritual life, it’s like taking a cork out of a bottle in my experience) and so our spirituality is an internal affair, little discussed and not related to the mainstream consciousness around us. As children grow up, they recognize that adults don’t speak of or share their spiritual lives, and so neither will the children. Sadly, this means that many adults don’t even have the language needed to share their spiritual life, should they wish so to do.⁵ One of our tasks as ministers is to share with children and adults the language with which they can articulate and explore their spiritual lives, be they inside or outside of a religious context.

Children and spirituality

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is nature’s Priest

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.⁶

Within the above lines, there is a profound realization that children have a glimpse of heaven within their souls that is lost as they mature, that they find thinking about spirituality far easier than adults, and that their ability to be in touch with themselves at this profound level is lost as they “mature”.

There is an apocryphal story about Coleridge: When he came across a woman with a newborn baby, he picked up the baby and sternly asked the child, “Tell me, tell me what it was like…”

I once read that the eyes of a newborn child are unfocused as the child’s soul hasn’t quite arrived yet, and that their look is direct from heaven.⁷ This relates to Augustine’s theory that we revisit in the prayer, “O God, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you,” referring to his (still orthodox) belief that all souls are present with God in heaven before they join their human shape, and then return to God in heaven when that human shape has expired.

So what happens to our children’s easy spirituality? There is no doubt that as they grow up they absorb far more about life from the modelling that they experience from those around them than from their words.⁸ I may tell my children to share their insights about God and the world, but if I don’t share my experiences and ideas with them as easily as they share theirs with mine, they are going to notice, very quickly, that this isn’t an area of conversation that adults easily enter. What goes on at home, even in an open home where such discussions are welcomed, is not mirrored in life, so the children will hold onto their insights, perhaps sharing them at home or at church, and then, eventually, probably not sharing them at all. This is one of the benefits of a church school; children hear belief in God and spiritual awareness as normal throughout the day, and so their spiritual flourishing can be facilitated. What happens when they go up to secondary school, which is far less likely to be a church school, is well acknowledged as their faith gets lost in the pressure of non-religious peers, and the onslaught of hormones and adolescence. If they don’t talk about their spirituality, they won’t grow in their use of more sophisticated language to help them to understand increasingly sophisticated spiritual/religious concepts, and so their reasoning stalls and stops.

It is clear that the way forward is to attentively listen to what children have to say, and so draw alongside the child, imagining as much of their inner life as we can, and then go there to help them. This is, of course, easier said than done. When my thinking is that of an adult, and theirs is that of a child (see chapter 2 on Cognitive Development for a clearer understanding of the difference) this can feel like running up a slope, but this is what we need to do. And, like running up that slope, it gets easier with practice. With practice, you will find once again the child that is within you and has always been – and that child will value your attention and love.

Children’s spiritual awareness is revealed in many ways.⁹ Firstly, they are very aware; they can “feel” a mood and are easily taken there by music or by looking at pictures. Light a candle and let a child hold it and watch the rapture on their faces as they look into the flame. Like many clergy, as a vicar I resisted Christingle services on grounds of “health and safety”, but I changed my attitude towards the service when an adult told me how much it meant to her as a child – it was one of her key moments in her growth in faith as a Christian. Children can focus in on the mood and dwell in the moment far better than most adults. This is partly because, unlike me, they’re not wondering what to cook for supper, or where that top came from that someone’s wearing, whether I turned on the burglar alarm as I left the house. If we can leave all our external fretting behind, we too can enter into the magic of the child’s concentration on a simple candle flame, a flock of birds, a newborn lamb, or even of a plane taking off. Children will be excited by many things that adults ignore simply because we’re so used to them, and if we can go there with them, our world will open up and become the sparkling place that children occupy in these moments. This period of a child’s life is not eternal – at the point where language and symbols begin to merge in the mind, th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Spirituality
• Chapter 2: Psychological theories of childhood: intellectual development
• Chapter 3: Personality development
• Chapter 4: Spiritual styles
• Chapter 5: Social development
• Chapter 6: Faith and how it grows
• Chapter 7: The story so far
• Chapter 8: Godly Play
• Chapter 9: Play
• Chapter 10: Children thinking about God
• Chapter 11: Home, school, and church: how do we work together for the benefit of the child?
• Chapter 12: The way forward: growing faith
• Chapter 13: A sharing of good practice
• Appendix 1: Time, space, story, ritual: a year of Godly Play
• Appendix 2: Creative Christmas
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index