I remember when I started going to church regularly I would frequently become overwhelmed with the sounds of crying, screaming, or mumbling of very young children in the church.  Sometimes, even the priest would stop the Liturgy until the parent had taken control of an especially loud child.

To contrast, I also remember during the week of Pascha, the Paschal Praise is repeated multiple times that week, and at the end of the Good Friday service, one final praise is chanted while the priests enter the sanctuary and the children who are chanters enter in with them.  The older chanters are situated outside in the chancel, and the Paschal Praise begins one final time in antiphony with the children beginning and the congregation and chancel chanters responding.  This happens 12 times in alternating fashion.

This makes us think about where else we hear the voices of young children, which is in reading the Scriptures.

A Problem

It has become a trend in Protestant churches to separate children from adults.  The rationale is manifold.  One may reason that it is good to take the children to their own service.  Maybe send them to babysitting to give the parents some peace while they try to worship or get an emotional high because the service is too long for the children and that can interfere with the parents’ experience.

Christ blessing the children, c. 1600

This trend has also started creeping into Orthodox churches as well.  And sadly, some may see this as a good management tool.  They may argue saying that the Liturgy is too long for children.  But the problem is not that the Liturgy is too long; the problem is that the children (and actually many of the adults including those advocating this) do not understand the Liturgy, and you cannot love nor enjoy what you do not understand.  It is impossible.  You must understand something about it in order to love it.

Some may respond, “Well, people have loved things they have not understood like watching stars for millennia.  They did not understand how stars worked yet they enjoyed watching them.”  Yet, they did understand that they gave off light and appeared at night, and the different constellations appeared during different times of the year.  So when people complain that the Liturgy is too long for children, this is not the problem.  Think about this: children often sit and watch movies that are as long as the Liturgy and enjoy them.  Why?  Because they can follow what is going on.  The problem is we have not taught our children how to follow the Liturgy.  We can’t solve a problem if we can’t even identify it, and if we think the problem is the Liturgy is too long, then we will never solve the true problem.  This is why we often see adults who are totally lost in following the Liturgy even if they have been regular attendees since childhood.

To remove children from the Liturgy because “they do not understand” is to ensure they will continue not understanding.  This is best summed up by a saying of St. Thomas Aquinas who said “A small error in the beginning of something is a great one at the end.”  The best thing to do is to teach children the structure, progression, and meaning of the Liturgy.  Suddenly, you will find a change in our children.

How Should We Think About Children in the Churches?  What Did The Early Church Do?

Children are marginalized today, and they were even more so during the time when Christianity began.  But some may ask how are they marginalized?  Here is an example: I see professionals who get offended when others tell them they should spend time with their families, and I truly often wonder why.  Why are they working if not to take care of a family?  What is more important: family or work?  I actually had this discussion with the high school youth at my church several months ago, and they entered a debate with one holding it was the family and the other arguing that it was the work.  This is one small example of how children are marginalized, and they are so marginalized that some may not even recognize that this example is, in fact, an example of marginalization.

The early church, in taking Christ’s teachings seriously that Christianity was for everyone (including children) incorporated children into its formal life from the very beginning including in the ministry of reading the Scriptures out loud to the congregation.  Christopher Page of Gresham University, the author of The Christian Singers and the West, in a Gresham Lecture in 2016 said, “It was also the sound of youthful voices that mattered to the Christian communities. The rulings of early Christian councils sometimes insist that readers should continue to read until the age of puberty but no further” (“Towards a Ministry of Singing,” Christopher Page, pg. 5 on the manuscript, 3 November 2016).  There are many reasons why this was the case including the purity and innocence of children, but also the sound of their voices must have reminded believers that they were also hearing the future of the church in those children’s voices.  The Reader in the early church then was a ministry of children in many parts of the Roman Empire.

Many of us are unaware that the value we have for children is a direct result of our Christian faith, specifically in its early centuries, influencing the West.  This is examined in detail in the book When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity by O.M. Bakke.

What This Means

If you hear the sound of children in the churches, then you are hearing the sound of the future church.  It is like a seed that develops over time.

If you hear the sound of babies crying, then from those same voices will come those who will teach the Church of God.

If you heard the sounds of babies screaming, then those same voices will be the ones chanting and leading others in the worship.

These are the sounds of the future Church: teachers, priests, bishops, apologists, writers.  You already hear these voices in the cries of the children in the churches on Sundays.  But it is difficult to see, because they are like seeds; their structure is still not definite, but all they will become is faintly present.

Remember that next time you are tempted to become upset when you hear too much crying in church.

Evidence

In all descriptions of early church worship, there were no children’s services and adults’ services.  There were no youth services.  All people regardless of age group attended the same service.  Children saw the reverence of parents and other adults from the earliest times of their lives.  They saw the martyrs their churches produced.  This produced seriousness and reverence in the young, and those young grew to become solid Christian adults.  We cannot expect this to continue if we segregate children from adults during the Liturgy.  We cannot get the same results without having the same conditions.

Conclusion

We cannot let the attitude of the secular world which has come full circle since the days of the later Roman Empire take over us and marginalize our children.  Look at the disastrous results it has had on our society.  Think of the Millennial Generation.  A large number of them are not able to consistently hold jobs or complete college or complete it with a viable degree.  Further, they are not receptive to Christianity for no other reasons than having been fed a ton of false ideas from the television and computer screens that raised them (the parents only cared about their children’s feelings not being hurt when they played sports so they successfully lobbied for the participation trophies which has led to the disastrous results we all see and are paying for today).

We need to take our children seriously because while they apparently seem small now, they are not.  They are the living breathing future of the Church which we see today as seeds, and these seeds will grow either to become a beautiful forest that gives shade and comfort, or it will become a mangled mess of vegetation.

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